armoured warfare

The trade-off between survivability and mobility on the battlefield has been a feature of warfare since the beginning of recorded history: indeed, one can imagine primitive man pondering the merits of a heavy garment over fleetness of foot before conducting a raid on his neighbours. From the Celtic warriors dressed only in warpaint to the hoplites who could only bear to don their panoply immediately before battle, the answers were as varied as the cultures in question. The military advent of the horse merely added a new dimension to the age-old question, with horsemen facing the immensity of the great plains favouring speed and endurance, while others gravitated towards the greater protection of ever more elaborate armour, thus defining the two main types of cavalry. The protection versus mobility argument transferred itself to sea with the advent of the ironclad, adding a third dimension of hitting power, an equation famously miscalculated by Fisher with his ‘battlecruisers’. But what we mean by ‘armoured warfare’ today is combat among tanks, self-propelled (SP) guns, MICVs, APCs, and armoured cars, in an environment in which air power plays a crucial role.

As a dream, the concept can be dated back at least to Leonardo da Vinci, who doodled a round, wheeled, armoured vehicle with cannon firing out of ports. Although armour and steam power were joined successfully in warships and less so in armoured trains (the latter's rails being fatally vulnerable, as Churchill was to discover in South Africa), the weight to strength ratios of engines and steel plate for cross-country applications did not intersect until the early 20th century. Despite attempts to portray its subsequent development as a revolution in warfare piloted by far-seeing visionaries like Fuller, Liddell Hart, and Guderian, armoured warfare went through a long and painful gestation, dependent at every stage on incremental improvements in engineering and electronic technology and, above all, in the understanding necessary to evolve the necessary doctrine. The latter process was conditioned especially by the human and material catastrophe of WW I and an urgent desire not to repeat it.

Armoured cars rattling about and frightening horses and camels in Italian and British imperial ventures before WW I were little more than an extension of traditional cavalry applications. Serious business began at Flers-Courcelette on the Somme in September 1916, when a handful of tracked British ‘tanks’ (their cover name to preserve security) were committed and achieved some local success before breaking or bogging down. Only 32 actually reached the start line; their crews were inexperienced and tactics undeveloped. Although Haig was to be criticized for premature use of a new weapon, it was not unreasonable to derive practical operational experience before, as was the case, ordering tanks on a large scale, and the costly stalemate on the Somme that summer demanded radical solutions. Early tanks were intended to crush a path through the wire and suppress or destroy machine gun nests and troops in trenches. What was lost by their ‘premature’ use was the element of surprise and a reduction in their subsequent ability to strike terror into the heart of an unprepared but otherwise resolute enemy.

Tanks were used the following spring as part of the Arras/Vimy Ridge battle, their attack wrecked by a ponderous approach march. At Cambrai in November they were altogether more successful when used en masse with a devastating short artillery barrage. By 1918 there were not merely heavy tanks like the relatively reliable British Mk V and the cumbersome German A7V, but light tanks like the French two-man Renault FT-17 and the British Whippet. That April saw the first tank versus tank action, when 2Lt Frank Mitchell's Mk IV stopped an A7V, and British tanks were used successfully at Hamel in July and on a larger scale at Amiens in August. The war ended before Fuller's scheme for a large-scale fast-moving tank attack—Plan 1919—could be fully developed, and in any event it is unlikely that the fast tanks it demanded could have been developed in time.

Not surprisingly, the inter-war years were dominated by a ‘never again’ mentality. Advocates of armoured warfare in Britain and France found themselves contending with what Liddell Hart portrayed as hidebound military officialdom, but the political and economic climate of the 1920s militated against radical reform, and the issue is far more complex than the simple opposition of conservatives to radicals. As J. P. Harris has pointed out, there was no unified ‘theory of armoured warfare’ at the time, but rather a number of ideas (some brilliantly if futuristically sketched out in Fuller's Lectures on FSR III) which were often unsupported by technology, funding, or strategic requirements. The relationship of armoured to unarmoured forces remained a matter of debate, not least in armies like the French and German, where complete mechanization would never be possible, and the proportion of tank to other units even within armoured formations exercised theorists and practical soldiers alike. In Germany, the development of what became known by the shorthand blitzkrieg sprang from a desire to use interior lines to check numerically superior enemies, a process which put a premium on rapid manoeuvre, giving the development of armoured warfare in Germany a strategic mainspring missing elsewhere. Yet even there the process was not simple, and Hitler's accession to power in 1933 accelerated developments which had been proceeding without the single-minded determination which post-war critics of British and French performance were eager to detect.

Given the legacy of WW I and the lack of a perceived need to mount offensive operations (which in the French case would have meshed uncomfortably with the logic of the Maginot Line) it is not surprising that in Britain and France there was an emphasis (and even there it was not an exclusive concentration) on slow but sure armoured vehicles supporting and protecting the infantry and advancing at a pace that permitted the artillery to keep up. It was this type of tank that Guderian specifically rejected in his 1938 book Achtung Panzer! as being ‘a weapon adjusted to the foot soldier's scale of time and space values’, a phrase which lies at the very core of the development of armoured warfare doctrine. He also advocated the concentration of tanks in panzer divisions and the application of these divisions to the decisive point. Useful lessons were learnt in the Spanish civil war and in the Polish campaign of 1939. Although an intrinsic superiority in their engineering culture may explain the Germans' ability to produce ‘open-ended’ armoured vehicle designs in the run up to WW II, basic platforms like the Panzer Mk III and IV that lent themselves to endless modification and improvement, in the campaign which led to the fall of France and Belgium in 1940 German tanks were neither numerically nor (markedly) technically superior. Emphasis on radio communications did give them an important edge, especially over the French, but it was in tactical doctrine—and, more fundamentally, in the mindset that both informed and sprang from it—that German competence was decisive.

Armoured warfare was the clearest expression of that competence and found its fullest expression on the eastern front. There, in numbers and across distances that make the western European theatres look like sideshows by comparison, two peoples and their respective totalitarian systems clawed for supremacy and by the end had evolved all the components of modern armoured doctrine, complete with close air support, SP guns, powerful main battle tanks, APCs, and even MICVs. The Russian army's development of armoured warfare, which reflected its doctrinal commitment to the offensive, had been badly disrupted by the purges of the 1930s, and in 1941-2 the Germans enjoyed a clear lead. They lost it thereafter, in part because of twice squandering armour in attritional fighting at Stalingrad and Kursk and by a series of other flawed decisions, by no means all of them Hitler's. But the war on the eastern front, for too long marginalized by western historians, was at least as much won by the Russians as lost by the Germans. In their development of the operational level of war the Russians honed the ability to achieve decisive force ratios where it mattered by massing, usually covertly, on the vital axis, and minting operational victory from tactical success. Charles Dick is right to point out, in his chapter of Harris and Toase (eds.), Armoured Warfare, that ‘Soviet armoured forces developed a capacity for the conduct of manoeuvre warfare which … was as great as that of the Wehrmacht at any stage in the war.’

After the war NATO—heavily influenced by German generals in person and in print—was encouraged to emphasize German tactical achievements in the face of a worsening force ratio, and did so at the price of neglecting the Russian army's real achievement in the field of armoured warfare. It was probably the US nuclear umbrella that ensured that the long-planned armoured battle in Europe's central region never took place, and after the fall of the Warsaw Pact many commentators belittled its military potential. However, the degree to which western armies would have been able to compensate for inferior numbers by superior ability must remain doubtful.

For the IDF, faced with defending a state which lacked defensible frontiers and strategic depth, armoured warfare was attractive. Its devastating attack at the opening of the Six-Day War of 1967 had much in common with German blitzkrieg and Soviet doctrine, and success led to an overemphasis on the role of the tank which was to cause difficulties in the War of Atonement in 1973. The war suggested not, as several commentators immediately opined, that the day of the tank was over, but that armoured warfare was the business of combined arms teams.

With the end of the Cold War, reductions in defence expenditure, and the widespread shrinkage of armies, armoured warfare on the scale of WW II seems unlikely to recur. Nevertheless, armies which seek to remain in the first rank strive to retain a capability to fight it. In future, however, it is likely to be influenced by the wish—at least in the West—to minimize casualties, and to capitalize on a less dense battlefield by emphasizing manoeuvre rather than attrition. The oft-heralded demise of the tank, notably in the face of the armed helicopter, has yet to occur, and recent evidence suggests that the troop protection accorded by equipment designed for armoured warfare gives it a particular merit in areas like the former Yugoslavia, emphasizing, yet again, the relationship between survivability and mobility.

Bibliography

• Harris, J. P., and Toase, F. N. (eds.), Armoured Warfare (London, 1990)

— Richard Holmes