← Dan Snow's History Hit
Dan Snow's History Hit
The Origins of the Tank
00:51:38
In an era of drones does the tank still have a place on the battlefield?
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- [00:00]
Dan Snow
Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard iii. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com subscribe.
- [00:33]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [01:10]
Dan Snow
banks of the Thames, it's 1666 and the city is a towering inferno. In front of you, the Great Fire rages through the Stuart Capital. If you're visiting London this summer, let me Dan Snow, historian and born and raised Londoner, be your personal guide in a brand new series of audio walking tours from history hit. I tell you the stories of where some of England's most explosive history happened. We'll follow the destructive path of the Great Fire of London and explore where and how King Charles I met his grisly end. All you need is your smartphone and the voice map app. Using your location, it triggers the story automatically so you can keep your phone in your pocket and your eyes on the history as you walk. Step into London's past. Download VoiceMap from your app store or go to VoiceMap Me Historyhit. That's VoiceMap MeHistoryhit.
- [02:11]
Mark Urban
Hey prime members, you can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [02:26]
Dan Snow
There were a lot of ways to die on the Western Front. A British sniper could put a 303 round through your skull if you showed him an inch of helmet above the parapet. The high explosives shrapnel. Machine gun barrages. Gas that scorched your eyes, throat and lungs. Blinding, suffocating, A bayonet in your guts and a chance Meeting on a night patrol in no man's land. A supersonic grenade fragment. A strafing run from a British aircraft. Disease. Trench fever. Gangrene. From a cut off the rusty barbed wire. The German troops manning the defences around the French village of Fleur in September 1916 on the Somme thought that they had seen it all. But they hadn't. To the ears of German sentries on the early morning of the 15th of September came a strange screech, roaring, grinding noise. They heard them before they saw them. One witness reports. We heard strange throbbing noises and then lumbering slowly towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as we had never seen before. These mechanical monsters were steel plated, lumbering beasts, rhomboid in shape. Metal tracks traced the outline of the outer edge. Barrels of guns bristled on either flank. One German witness described them as spewing death. Unearthly monsters. They were monsters. They were faceless industrial monsters. If any of the German defenders had read their Jules verne or their H.G. wells in school, they might have recognized the almost animate machines conjured from the industrial age, a dystopian crushing beast given life by engineers. On they came, barbed wire crumpling beneath them impenetrable tangles of wire which had ripped the flesh of any men who gingerly tried to pick their way through, now crushed to matting old shell holes or trenches which infantry had to work their way around. This monster could just lunge straight across. It moved freely across no man's land, a place where until now, movement had been a novel and it's armor. The Germans who did have their wits about them, who had not lost their nerve, they manned machine guns and sprayed thousands of rounds at the whatever it was. Their comrades watched in consternation as those rounds bounced off like steel raindrops off a hardened roof. On they came some defenders. Well, they made the obvious choice. They ran. Others stayed at their posts and they died in a hail of gunfire as the monstrous invention straddled the trench and its guns enfiladed along the length of the defences. Behind this vehicle, sheltering in its lee like boats moored up behind a sea wall, taking the brunt of a gale, were files of infantrymen. They couldn't believe their luck. Their path had been smoothed by the steel beasts, their bodies sheltered by its bulk. A British eyewitness was watching the infantryman. He reported this was one of those rare occasions when they had passed through enemy fire and they were enjoying themselves, chasing and rounding up Jerries, collecting thousands of prisoners and sending them back to our lines, escorted only by engineers armed with shovels. These mighty steel machines resembled water tanks, slabs of metal riveted together in a. A watertight box. It seems that the need to preserve secrecy resulted in that term being used to describe them. These machines, which probably more accurately could have been described as landships with engines propelling them across an ocean of mud clad in steel plates, they would instead be known as tanks. It was a new era in warfare and I think a lot of those present that day knew it. We're gonna be talking all about that moment. We're talking all about tanks on this podcast today, the subsequent history, bring it right up to the present. Our contributor is one of the best in the business. He's Mark Urban, brilliant journalist, author, broadcaster. He's with the Sunday Times now, but he's was on Newsnight at the BBC for a long time. He is a great inspiration to me. He always seeks out that sweet spot between history and current affairs and tells stories from the past to enlighten us about what's going on today. His most recent book is Tank. It is out now. We're going to talk all about tanks, past, present and where they have a future. Enjoy. Mark Urban, what an honour to have you on the podcast.
- [07:30]
Mark Urban
Well, what an honor to be on it.
- [07:32]
Dan Snow
Great story, great story of the tank. Remarkable story. And I can't wait to hear your conclusions about where we are in tank history at the moment and the lessons from the most recent conflict. But let's go all the way back to a war that was being fought in Europe in 1914 and had descended into stalemate, had gone on much length than anyone expected, with far, far higher casualty figures, with terrible, terrible bloodshed for a few metres of ground gained and lost. And we're not talking about Ukraine, we are talking about the First World War on the Western Front. This particular example. Explain what challenges were faced by those who sought to win a battle, to move the front line forward, to march towards the enemy.
- [08:12]
Mark Urban
Well, I mean, interesting you made the glancing reference to Ukraine and of course, in due course we'll talk about why it is the way it is there on the front line. But this idea that the means of defence had become much more powerful than the means of offense, or there's various ways of seeing it, but I think pretty quickly after the war broke out in 1914, people realized that the combination of shells, high explosive shells, machine guns and barbed wire, it was going to create huge problems as soon as the armies went firm anywhere and dug in and trench lines emerged. And of Course, then over time, those kind of sanitized, sterile landscapes that we see in Nash's paintings of the Western Front, of trees that are just stumps and men under ponchos trudging through the mud, all of that develops. And of course, we remember from studying the Western Front that, you know, really quite small distances were involved. Sometimes the people in the front line trenches could shout over to one another and hear one another, and it could have been a couple of hundred meters, it could be more than that, but really very short distances. And the flower of English youth was cut down trying to get across that ground. Or, you know, one can think about all sorts of other places, Gallipoli, all sorts of other places in that war where things went horribly wrong when people tried to advance. Now, from fairly early on, even late 1915, so just over a year after the war had started, there were already people in the British army and indeed the French army, thinking, look, there must be another way of doing this. And they were studying all kinds of things, technologies and all kinds of ways of trying to close that gap, protect the soldiers, cover the ground. And if we think about the start of the First World War, a lot of the elements of what becomes the tank are. There have been invented the internal combustion engine, machine guns, armour plate. There are armoured cars racing around from the outset. So how does that then become a tank? And what happens, really, the key thing is the invention of the caterpillar track, because that allows you to put a lot more weight over soft ground without sinking. And they pretty soon discover that if they try and take their armoured cars off road, they just sink up to the axles. They're not going anywhere in that mud. And so it's the development of the track and the breakthrough at a British company in Lincoln fosters late in 1915, in managing to make a track that holds together and doesn't keep slipping off the wheels and the idlers that it's running over. That was a problem they had with lots of early prototypes. So they basically made a sort of flange to run over the wheel so the track would stay on a bit like a railway wheel staying on a railway line. And that, that is the Eureka moment, in a way. And that person who sent the telegram in the War Office announcing it talks about proud parents and this being the sort of birth moment of the new war machine. And once you can put things on tracks, you can build these big lozenge shaped tanks that the British had in the First World War. And they are that strange shape because they're designed to cross big gaps, so they sort of tip forward and then the front part bites on the far end of the trench and then the whole machine can flow across. And sure enough, that's what they made, these odd sort of rhomboid shaped tanks. And they went into action for the first time in September 1916, and the early results were not too good. You have to wait over a year, November 1917, before the battle of Cambrai, and the first mass use of tanks, something like 350, on quite a narrow front, to see a real breakthrough, a breakthrough of several mil. And that's when everybody realizes they've been in at the birth of something quite special.
- [12:22]
Dan Snow
And why is it that using them in mass is important? Because there was these great debates, weren't there, that you've got these vehicles, surely the answer is you parcel them out to protect the infantry and you have 100,000 troops and you've got 100 tanks, so every sort of thousand or so, you've got them nicely divided and they can support the infantry. Why is it that the tankies said, no, no, you've got to let us use these as a strike, like a wolf pack, use them all together. What difference that make?
- [12:47]
Mark Urban
Yeah, that's an interesting question. And, you know, at the birth of it, as you say, they are used in the very late stages of the somme battle in September 1916, and it's something around four dozen, and they say, oh, yes, you know, the New Zealand division can have a few, and the Guards and exactly as you say. And of course, a lot of the debate within the officer corps, the general staff, had to be couched in terms of helping the infantry. These were the people who were dying in such terrible numbers in these attacks. But I think what they found in that battle, when they first used them, was that by just using a small number, some would inevitably get stuck still in the mud, notwithstanding their tracks and everything else. Some might even get knocked out, and then you'd be left with ones and twos and they couldn't really have much of an effect. Whereas in Cambrai, if you had, for example, a dozen tanks in the space of a couple of hundred metres or yards, and they're all advancing together, it doesn't really matter if one or two of them get stuck or break down, they've still got interlocking arcs of fire between their guns. The guns were mounted on the sides of these early British tanks and they're able to sweep the trenches ahead of them with fire. And the tactic they particularly liked was once they were over the trench because the guns were mounted in sponsors on the side, firing down the trench lines. And if there was a another tank 50 or 100 yards up, all the better. You know, you'd have interlocking fields of fire. And that's the reason. So to use a lot of them allowed them to keep going, to pour down a much heavier weight of fire, even if some of them got stuck or knocked out. And that caused these celebrated incidents of tank fright where the German infantry firing machine guns and other things at them and, you know, the bullets bouncing off the armor broke and ran because they were so afraid of these unstoppable beasts.
- [14:46]
Dan Snow
And yet the war goes on. And in the end historians go, well, tanks didn't win World War I by themselves. What were their limitations? I mean, the crews were passing out extreme heat inside that cabin. There's engine fumes in there, there's petrol leaking all over them, catching fire. I mean, it's a nightmarish place to serve.
- [15:03]
Mark Urban
Yeah, absolutely. And those early ones, the British ones you needed for, if you wanted to turn left, four men had to coordinate their actions. You had the commander, then you had a guy at the front who controlled the brakes. Then you had two, what were called brake men further back down the tank who would pull a lever to physically stop one of the tracks. And inside the engine, throbbing away at times with a red hot exhaust manifold on it. You know, if you got pitched by the ground and fell and put your hand on the engine, you'd get terrible burns. I mean, the whole thing was a sort of absolute health and safety nightmare in a box, really. I mean, you couldn't have devised a more hellish place to go to battle. But they did realize that a bullet or a fragment of shell could kill the man walking beside them. But they were protected in many circumstances. But your wider point is absolutely right, because of course, early in 1918, the so called Kaiserschlacht, the big German offensive, when they diverted the armies that had been freed up by the Russians going out of the war and transferred from the east to the west, the Germans very nearly won. And that's months after Cambrai and even after that, although by then the British and French and even Americans were all using tanks by mid-1918 on the western Front, the idea that they were the sort of decisive instruments in ending the First World War is overblown. I think the tank advocates fighting for money in the 1920s and 30s tried to argue that. But the thing we learn from it is that the tank is fine and has its place, but it's got to be part of the picture, the so called combined arms where you have the infantry, you have the field engineers maybe building a bridge for it or in some other way assisting its advance. You have the artillery suppressing the people who might be trying to knock out the tank and you bring all these things together. And then under the right circumstances, there's a, an Australian Major general quoted in the book who just said a few years ago, when asked to review whether the Australian army still had a place for the tank, she said, a tank is like a dinner jacket. You don't need it very often, but when you do, nothing else will do. And that proves to be the lesson. By the end of the First World
- [17:22]
Dan Snow
War, I think, okay, so in the 1920s you've already referred to it, what's going on? People are spending less money, so there's just a bun fight for resources. But there are those who think they've seen the future. Right, and so is there a big. Just apart from budget clashing, there's a sort of philosophical debate raging in Germany and France, Britain, elsewhere in America in the 1920s and early 30s.
- [17:46]
Mark Urban
Yeah, absolutely. And you've set the scene rather well there. I mean, yes, in the years after the war, but particularly those early years, grief stricken nations scarred by the loss of hundreds of thousands of their soldiers. I mean they don't want to spend more money on weapons. The British adopt the ten year rule, so called, oh, we'll have at least ten years warning if we have to rearm for another war. Everybody cuts the money quite understandably under the circumstances. You know, they're sailing into the Great Depression, they need the money for other things. And yeah, so that brings about a really aggravated competition for resources. Now in some armies, like the US army, pretty soon after the First World War just completely disbands its tank corps. It just thinks, well, we don't really need these and the cavalry can keep some, but we don't really need them. And in many other places there's no tendency to invest money in it. But there are these people, these theorists like Boney Fuller, he was a British colonel, later major General who had been the chief of staff of the Tank Corps in the First World War. And some others in other armies who think, well no, hang on a minute. We demonstrated that a tank can break through. Now those tanks that were in the First World War, the two that feature particularly in my book, the British Mark IV and the French Renault FT, they could only go maybe 20, 25 miles on a tank. Of gas. And then they'd run out of fuel because they were only designed to go a very short distance. But then those theorists started thinking, well, hang on a minute. Once you've made the hole in the front line, what if you just kept driving? What would happen then? And of course, the first thing they need to do is buy machines that can actually do that, that have sufficiently good engines and enough fuel in them to keep going. And of course, I'm afraid it's one of those bitter ironies of history that the two armies where they realize that are the Soviet army, which from the mid-1930s on, the red army is buying tanks by the thousand and have been inspired by those ideas of people like Boney Fuller and Basil little heart and other British writer on military affairs. And they're thinking, yes, we see what you're saying. If the tank motors for 100 km into the enemy rear and shoots up all their supply dumps and airfields and command posts, they could just collapse. It's the beginnings of what we might call blitzkrieg. And so they invest. And the Germans, late on in the late 30s, they finally get it, and then they start investing big time as well. But the British are sort of hobbling on with a trial armored brigade fighting over resources. You know, these kind of rather bitter battles between cavalry generals who are still insisting that the horse is the queen of the battlefield, and the tankies, you know, oily rags, so called, who are saying, no, no, no, this is the machine age and the person who dominates the landscape with mobility. Highly mobile tracked vehicles can achieve untold victories for far less cost than the terrible slaughter we've just witnessed in the first world War.
- [20:53]
Dan Snow
And what's going on with the technology? I mean, the use of radios seem very important. You can talk to tanks and they can talk back. Armor, speed. What are the exciting things that are suggesting that actually tanks are going to have a big role in the next war?
- [21:07]
Mark Urban
I mean, a lot of people, when they look at tanks and the way they're designed and the principles behind them, they talk about this kind of eternal triangle, which is firepower, protection, mobility. So you make adjustments around these design compromises. If you make it better protected by hanging more armor on it, maybe the mobility suffers if you make it faster, and maybe the gun has to become lighter. This constant compromise in engineering terms. Now, some people argue that a fourth element came into the picture with communications, that once you had reliable radio communications between tanks, you could employ them in a radically different way. And, you know, in the first world war, British tanks often went into action with a basket of carrier pigeons on the top. And there were some experiments by the French with radio tanks. But of course, by the 1930s, the technology has really come along and it's the Germans, of course. Now the German army decides, because of the expense of radios, that they will only give radios that can transmit to officers and that the other tanks in the platoon, commanded by corporals and sergeants, will have radios that can only receive. It's like a sort of device for control freak management in which you can be spoken to but you can't speak. And indeed, the Soviet army went for something similar in the late 1930s, only some of their tanks, tanks were fitted with radios because they were so expensive. But once you get the radios working well between tanks and you can connect them, and of course, you might have some elements of your company who are just over a ridge and they can see what's on the other side, they can, of course, tell you over the radio and say, oh, the enemy's coming, whatever. And then things become much more joined up. And that helps to explain in May 1940, how the Germans beat the French, who have a larger army, they have more tanks. A lot of these tanks, like the Char B, are more heavily armoured and more powerfully armed than the German tanks. And the Germans literally run rings around them. When they can't get past one of these French tanks, they manoeuvre round it, onto its flanks, to its rear, in order to hit the armour they can deal with. And the French, who start off with giving the tank a Morse key for tapping out messages, which you can't imagine is very practical, come to the conclusion very late on that they need radios. But many of their tanks during that pivotal battle of May 1940, don't have radios at all. And the Germans exploit superior doctrine. This idea of going right the way through the depth of the enemy with Stukas and artillery, and then tank attack, so called blitzkrieg, all of that develops and delivers the most terrible shock to all the militaries of the world who've just seen the French army in all its might, defeated in the matter of, what, three weeks? And the Germans getting to the Channel even less than that. So, yes, that causes this huge wave of shock and this huge reflection among those who up until that point had been a bit blind as to what the actual value of armored forces was, to think, well, we better get some in a hurry. And that's when the Americans start trying, for example, to quickly put right the mistake they made at the end of the First World War, of disbanding their tank corps.
- [24:33]
Dan Snow
Is that in some ways the greatest moment of tank warfare? I mean, actually, we come onto that there may be 1967 or something like that, but do you think in some ways 1940, that campaign, that lightning campaign that humiliated the mightiest army on the planet, the French army, is that the tanks enjoying their greatest moment of reputation?
- [24:53]
Mark Urban
Well, it's certainly up there, isn't it? It's in the top three. A lot of people point out that the German army in 1940, or even the one that went into Russia the following year, was largely unmechanised, that 90% of the divisions, infantry divisions, relied on horses. A lot of the artillery was pulled by horses. And it was still in that sense, only a small minority of the German divisions that were Panzer divisions, armored divisions. But of course, in a way that underlines the point that what the Germans were doing, in adhering to the principles of the great theorist Clausewitz, was concentrating at the key point with this armored reserve, this precious number of panzer divisions that they had, and achieving breakthrough and then exploiting it and as it were, keeping on moving as fast as they could to exploit the disarray of the enemy. And so, yes, they may only have had 10% of their divisions motorized or armored, but, boy, did they understand how to use them effectively. There are some other moments. You mentioned the 1967 war in the Middle east, which is a sort of bittersweet victory. It's incredibly quick, it's incredibly effective, but it leaves us with some of the problems, like Gaza, that we face up to today. And of course, there were battles on the Eastern Front. Some people say Kursk was the greatest tank battle of all time. And, you know, even to sing the praises of the British army in the Second World War, when it broke out at the Normandy Bridgehead in September 1944, the advance through the Low Countries, liberating places like Bruges and Brussels, I mean, that was astounding. You know, that was kind of 100 miles a day type of advance. So there have been other moments, but undoubtedly that May 1940 dash to the Channel was a sort of defining moment, I think, of armored warfare.
- [26:43]
Dan Snow
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- [27:51]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [28:27]
Mark Urban
Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the Colosseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from History hit twice a week. Join me Tristan Hughes as I hear exciting new research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancients from history hit. Hey prime members, you can listen to this show ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today.
- [29:13]
Dan Snow
And let's come on to the eastern front now because the sort of emphasis of on armored war, well that's where the main armored clashes will take place. In terms of numbers. Operation barbarossa in the second half of 1941, you get these same thing. Germans will advance for miles and miles and miles. But the problem is the Soviet Union is much bigger and also are people learning that there is one way to deal with this kind of warfare which is not panic. So if you're French or British in 1940 and you suddenly your headquarters behind you suddenly got German voices on the radios and you go, my goodness, we're surrounded. You might give up or you might. But actually the trick is sometimes, you know, don't worry about it. These could be one or two tanks that are causing havoc behind the lines. But if we stay where we are and dig in and fight, we can kind of claw back something from this position.
- [29:59]
Mark Urban
Yes. I think in the early phases of Barbarossa you get some very heroic Red army soldiers who stand, come what may, but of course they get out flanked.
- [30:09]
Dan Snow
Yeah. Massive encirclements.
- [30:10]
Mark Urban
Yeah, yeah. As the Red army develops its system of war, I think they do do exactly what you say. And you know, hearing you talking, it reminded me of the commanders who faced Napoleon early in the 19th century. And you know, one of his favorite moves was what was called the manoeuvre sur les arrieres, which is to basically go deep and threaten the lines of communication of the army you're attacking. And the best response to that was not to panic and to try and, and nip off the salient and engage it. And I think that's true with armored warfare. And of course what the Red army did, when we look at the opening phases of the Kursk battle, I mean they sewed millions of anti tank mines, they dug huge anti tank ditches, they knew it was coming and they knew roughly where it was coming. And they'd also formed brigades of anti tank guns. So you might have 72 guns in one of these anti tank brigades and specialized tank destroyer vehicles. A lot of the armies in the war, the Americans and the Germans, also went for those less so the British. So the whole idea then became this sword and shield idea that when the enemy attacked in a movement like the Kursk offensive, Operation Citadel, you would hold up your shield, as it were, and take the pain, take the blows and slowly wear down the advancing tank force through mines and anti tank guns. And then when you were good and ready, you'd wield your sword, which was your own armoured counter attack where you held your tanks back.
- [31:41]
Dan Snow
The Battle of Kursklitz, summer of 1943, the defeat at Stalingrad has just taken place. This is Germany's. People debate this, but sort of often seen to be Germany's last reasonably big. Hitler probably didn't intend to win the war with it, but a reasonably big offensive in the summer of 1943. Do you subscribe? Is it the largest tank battle in history?
- [32:00]
Mark Urban
Yes, I think so. The Kursk battle took place over a very wide area, involved a million and a half soldiers, but there was this particular clash at Prokhorovka where in a single day over several miles of front, I think the Russians lost something like 350 tanks. They claimed the Germans had lost 200 and something, including 55 tigers. In fact, the Germans had lost 14, including one tiger. But that's a whole story about how historians went back and analyzed the true losses there. But yes, I think that is, I mean, you know, it was later claimed by the head of the Israeli armored corps that if you added the two fronts together, the Golan and the Sinai front in the 1973 war, you had more tanks engaged in a sort of smaller geographic area than the Kursk battle. But I think that's a slightly tendentious. But not to say this 1973 battle wasn't a huge tank fight. But no, I think Prokhorovka is the kind of crowning moment in that sense.
- [33:05]
Dan Snow
And you've got tanks fighting almost bumper to bumper though. Just the whole thing is simply mind blowing. Tell me a little bit about the German and Soviets, their different approach to tanks. The Germans are hoping to punch through these massive defensive belts. They've got the famous Tiger tank with its enormous gun that had been an anti aircraft gun. They just put horizontally and stuck it on a tank. They've got the Panthers people. And on the Soviet side you've got these T34s. Now they're often characterized as sort of over engineered. A lot of technology, very expensive, fewer numbers against just mass produced T34s that their own crews can fix them, give them a screwdriver and they can pretty much fix anything. Would you rather a lot of T34s or would you rather have these very, very highly engineered German tanks?
- [33:47]
Mark Urban
Well, we know that the Red army buried the Nazis and therefore I think we know who in the end had the last laugh or Grimace the Tiger. I mean it is an extraordinary creation and in some ways an awful lot of the tanks that one looks at and get developed, they still have the primary mission. The Sherman, for example, they're basically there to help the infantrymen. So they're equipped with a gun that fires a high explosive shell that goes bang and is good for taking out things like machine gun nests and basically helping your infantry to get forward. The Tiger pretty much as soon as it hits the battlefield, it is sort of self consciously deployed with this doctrine that it's only for use at a decisive point and that its primary mission is to destroy other armor and create a sort of panic effect. And of course you get these reports from the Eastern Front when they go into action. With these extraordinary rates of exchange of, you know, 2025 T34s knocked out for each Tiger in sections of the battlefield there. And I think they are probably reliable. I mean, there's many over claims in the Second World War, but it is undoubtedly true that T34s up against a Tiger had a grossly disproportionate loss rate. But yes, as you say, I mean, in the whole history of its production, the first version of the Tiger, what we think of as the tiger, about 1400 made with the T34, 23,000 of the initial version. And when you add in the later version with the 85 millimeter gun, you're talking about over 50,000 made in the war. So as an exercise in sort of out producing your enemy. And the other thing which you've sort of hinted at there, I mean, the Tiger is an incredibly sophisticated and temperamental machine. They always used to say it needed 11 man hours of maintenance for each hour in battle. And some of the commanders who get them, you know, they write reports to Berlin saying this is basically like a fighter plane in the Luftwaffe in terms of the sophistication and the care we have to take of maintaining it correctly and all that sort of thing. The T34 is such a sort of rudimentary piece of kit by comparison. And the Red army has this system which is unique, I think, which is that each of the big tank factories they have, and by the time of the Kursk battle, the key ones are all in the Ural Mountains, they've been moved out of European Russia or built in places like Chelyabinsk and Nizhnitagil. Each of them has a training regiment co located with the factory and the soldiers who are sent there actually work on the production line. And what they try to do is that if you're going to be a driver, you work on the gearboxes or the engine, and if you are going to be the gunner, you put that part of the tank in and adjust it and set it. They had this extraordinary system which none of the other major World War II powers copied, in which the soldiers almost were born with the tank they were going to fight on. And that I think helped them as well in terms of it was a simple piece of kit to start with, but in terms of giving them confidence to maintain it in the field and keep it going, it was a big help. So, yeah, I think what the T34 ends up summing up is the sort of triumph of production and kind of Soviet Russian defiance and grit, I suppose. To keep it all going in the face of such horrendous losses.
- [37:14]
Dan Snow
If you're making a documentary, Mark, when you're doing one of your wonderful films, or I make a documentary about World War II, we need to quickly grab the attention. The first set, you're just putting a black and white thing of a tank driving past. Why is the tank iconic in that war? Is it because it was the decisive arm, like Napoleon said, you make war with guns. Is it in the Second World War you do make war with tanks? Or do they just look really cool and cameramen like filming? What's the takeaway for the tank after the Second World War?
- [37:41]
Mark Urban
Look? I think it's a sort of very fitting emblem of the machine age, isn't it? And you think of those sort of images of Charlie Chaplin in modern times getting sucked into the machine he's making. And then you think of the poor old tank crewman who sometimes does get mangled by the traverse of the turret or the tank turning over or whatever. But they're inside this huge machine and the machine ends up symbolizing, certainly when it's being used by the Germans and the Russians in the late war, brutality and invasion and dominance. And I think particularly when the tank is advancing but the hatches are closed and the crew are ready for battle. In that sense, it's a sort of dehumanisation, isn't it? I think when it's festooned with smiling soldiers waving and rumbling past. Which is more what you see in the liberation imagery from Paris or Bruges or somewhere like that, when the Allies liberate those places. There you see, it has a very different meaning and it is a symbol of liberation. But I think in its kind of battle state, without the people visible, I think people ascribe almost an intelligence or machine like being to some of these tangs. And they end up representing, in one sense, national personality. You know, the Tony Go as that sort of huge instrument of German brutality and he that evil sort of dogged Red Army. The Brits with the Churchill. It may be slow, but it gets there and it does the job, you know, and they sort of take on this character. I think it's a bit like steam locomotives, in a way. And you read the Thomas the Tank Engine stories and the illustrations put faces and personalities to them. There is something of that, I think, in the way these things in the machine age come to symbolize both national will and indeed just the high machine age warfare, I guess you'd call it.
- [39:38]
Dan Snow
After the war, vast, vast numbers of Tanks being built all over the world in preparation, I suppose, for a notional World War III on the plains of Germany. Interestingly, those tanks get used in all sorts of unexpected places, don't they? And that's what's so fascinating about the clashes in the Golan Heights in 1973. Massive tank battles between Egypt and its neighbours in places where using Soviet and American and British inspired kit, but in places where no one was probably expecting it to be used. The rugged borders between the state of Israel and Syria for example. But again, let's keep the technology. Tell me how tanks develop and become ever more effective.
- [40:15]
Mark Urban
Well, I mean, there is a moment after the war where everybody looking at the use of nuclear weapons thinks, hang on a minute, do tanks actually have a role anymore? And of course there are several moments you can argue it's there from the First World War as well, from the get go where people say, no, no, it's all over, we don't need these anymore. And there's this brief period in America, I think 1946, 47, where tanks actually go out of production for the only time in the Cold War period. Obviously they've got an awful lot of them left over from the war and they sort of think, well, hang on a minute. The whole idea with armored warfare is that you concentrate at the decision decisive point and if you do that you're going to get nuked. So why would you use them in the warfare of the atomic age? And of course the Americans think, now what we need is air mobile divisions and marines and stuff like that to rush around and anyway, Korea and various other things teach them that. No, perhaps they do need tanks. And the fact that the Soviet army kept 10,000 tanks in East Germany through the 40s and early 50s forces Western countries to think, well, hang on a minute, if we're going to fight them, we're going to need some pretty convincing weaponry of our own. Anti tank weapons, yes, the anti tank missile gets developed, but also tanks, going back to this idea, sword and shield. If we can blunt the Red army coming westwards with our shield, we're then going to need a sword to retake lost ground or to bring about their final defeat. So you end up reinvesting in tanks. And of course you get the great British tank of the Cold War. I think in certain ways emblematic of the Cold War, the centurion from the late 40s steadily improved in service for an extraordinarily long time, bought by loads of different armies, a real mark of quality. So what are the technologies that Distinguish that? Well, everything advances, really. The science of building engines that can produce more and more horsepower, the science of armor itself. By the mid-1960s, the Soviet Union is developing what you call composite or laminate armor. In other words, a sandwich of different substances that rather than the just solid cast steel or rolled steel, will disrupt incoming fire by using the different physical characteristics of different materials. And they use different types of metal, they use ceramics, they use various types of things. So that happens on the armor front and on the gun front. Well, you get more advanced propellants, you get what I call fin stabilised discarding sabot rounds, which is a shell that comes out of the gun and various bits fly off and you're left with something a bit like a dart that has enormous penetrative power. So all of this comes along. And so, for example, when the Soviet army produces the T64, which in certain ways is the most revolutionary tank of the Cold War, it's the first tank in the world with composite armour. It's the first tank in the world to have an automatic loading system. And it has a very powerful gun on it. I think it's got something like on the front, three times the thickness of armor of a Tiger tank. The gun itself has two and a half times the penetrating ability, and yet that whole package is 10 tonnes lighter than a Tiger tank. So you can see in the course of 20 years from the end of the war how technological advance allows the Soviet Union to produce this tank, the T64, which advances in all those different aspects, predictably enough, had all sorts of teething problems because it embraced so many new technologies. But you can achieve the same thing, or indeed a much better tank in terms of speed, armor, thickness, penetrating, ability of its gun in a smaller and lighter package.
- [44:08]
Dan Snow
More tanks after this, folks. Don't go away.
- [44:18]
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- [44:38]
Mark Urban
Ever wondered what it feels like to be a gladiator facing a roaring crowd and potential death in the coliseum? Find out on the Ancients podcast from history. Hit twice a week. Join me, Tristan Hughes, as I hear exciting news research about people living thousands of years ago, from the Babylonians to the Celts to the Romans, and visit the ancient sites which reveal who and just how amazing our distant ancestors were. That's the ancients from history hit.
- [45:14]
Dan Snow
You mentioned centurions, you mentioned T64s. They're fighting in the Middle East. They are very, very important, both on the Sinai front and up north in the Golan during the 1933 war, when the State of Israel perhaps came closest to defeat in recent history. And those are some extraordinary tank battles.
- [45:32]
Mark Urban
Yes, absolutely. And I think one of the things you see from the cyanide battles is when we eventually get to this question of does the tank have a future, is that just as Monti discovered In World War II, the desert is a sort of unique place. I mean, Rommel calls it the only place where armoured forces can be used to their full potential. You know, why is that? Well, you could see a long way off and if you've got better sighting and guns than the other side, you can open fire first. There are very few rivers and things that are gonna result in your tanks getting bogged or stuck or think, oh no, we have to take this bridge at this point in order to be able to move forward, all that sort of stuff. So the desert proves to be extremely important. But the other thing, of course, one sees in 73. So in 73, when they mount their initial counterattack against the enemy, Egyptians on the Suez Canal having been surprised, the Israelis have a disaster. And they have an armored division basically mauled by anti tank missiles. The Egyptians very smartly take the Israeli forward positions and then move forward hundreds of anti tank missile teams, which caused huge casualties to the Israeli tanks early on. But then again, you come back to this point about combined arms. And I think when we look at the 73 war, air power of course is absolutely critical. And once the Israelis stabilize the situation, both having lost quite a few aircraft in the first 48 hours of the war, and a lot of tanks, and use their air power effectively, it exposes the Syrians and the Egyptians to all sorts of harm. But yes, there are battles on the Golan where some of those centurions, it is almost like Eastern Front stuff, they notch up 20 kills or they indeed register that they've been hit 10, 15, 20 times and somehow they're still operating. So, yeah, it's a brutal slugging match, particularly on the Golan Heights. But again, it's the victory of the orchestra of war that the bringing together of all arms brings the Israelis success in that conflict.
- [47:34]
Dan Snow
Interesting. Use air power. There is a fascinating thing, is that tanks and air power are roughly, roughly, roughly the same age and have developed together and separately. There have always been arguments, people who say actually One day, air power will do for the tank. It will make the tank obsolete on the ground. That argument, it was there in the Yom Kippur War. When you see this kind of balance shifting, it's there in the Second World War. If you have absolute mastery, then you can rain down fire on tanks on the ground. The German Waffen SS units aren't able to get to the beaches in Normandy because they're being ripped apart by air power as they move up. Take me to the last 20 or 30 years, and now with the emergence of drones. So precision weapons, drones, weapon systems delivered from the air. Have they provided an existential challenge for the tank, do you think?
- [48:23]
Mark Urban
Yes, I think they have. Well, I think what's proving very difficult for what you might call legacy systems, and we could extend that to warships and fighter jets as well, is the advent of what some people call the transparent battlefield. Now, I'm not that old, but even 45 years ago, whatever, when I was being trained as a young soldier, the whole principle was, and we were told, you know, if you can be seen, you can be killed. And therefore, everything was about using the ground to conceal your movements. So you'd go up a sort of canyon or river valley or something to hide yourself from the enemy you were advancing towards so they couldn't see you. And, of course, now all of that is opened up by drones being overhead, and that ability to actually bring force together and concentrate force and advance has become really open to question. Add to that the use of an increasing number of satellites, which even countries like Ukraine and Iran have been able to access commercial imagery of very high quality. The Iranians seeing those American jets at air bases in Saudi Arabia and then aiming their missiles at them. And then the electronic spher, where, for the first couple of years on that front in the east of Ukraine, what each side was looking for was sort of hotspots of mobile phones showing that soldiers were coming together in certain places either to concentrate or for more innocuous uses. I went to a sort of frontline concert by some Ukrainian musicians sent to entertain the troops. And the first thing they said was, have all of you got your mobile phones off? Because even though we were 30km from the front line, they were afraid the Russians would detect it and target it in the time it took for a few songs to be played and try and launch a missile. So all of those things make the soldier, whether he or she is on foot or whether they're in a tank or whether they're in a helicopter or whatever, they just increase their vulnerability. And you end up with this situation where firepower, whether it's from an artillery gun that fires a shell 40km or whether it's a drone that flies 25, can concentrate very quickly. And people, if they're traveling across tens of kilometers or several kilometers, just take a lot longer to come together and indeed to disperse. And therefore you've got this situation reminiscent in that sense of the First World War, where the means of killing people are now way ahead of their means of survival. And so what can they do? You know, we see this in Ukraine. They dig deep bunkers, as they did on the First World War trench lines. But then the Russians might use a glide bomb launched from an airplane to blow up down to a depth of maybe 40ft. The ground. We see drones being used in such depth now up to 30, 40 kilometers, that the Ukrainians have got big problems even evacuating their casualties. And that's caused them to look to uncrewed vehicles. And that's how that started last year at a large scale with the Ukrainians, was using them to evacuate their casualties. And so that's the world we're now getting into, where the battlefield is so lethal that the question of do you actually need people in this flying craft or ground craft or indeed naval ship, is being asked more and more. I think people quite rightly say, can the tank survive with that environment or in that environment? It's a perfectly valid and open question. We don't have the answer to it in a definitive sense. I mean, you could argue if it's got no people in, but it's got tracks and armor and a turret and a weapon on it. It's still a tank, I guess, but equally, I think you can argue that one of the questions I always ask people when I'm doing public events is who's gonna change the batteries on all these robots or uncrewed systems, you know, in the end? And if the battlefield changes, one side suddenly loses 20 kilometres and you have to move your people who are controlling the drones and launching them, you have to move them up. Well, you're still going to need some sort of vehicle to do that. And if it becomes an armored vehicle, okay, that's much more likely to survive than just a car. And then if it becomes heavily armoured, you're going to need tracks so it doesn't sink into the ground. And then you might as well put a weapon on it so it can shoot down drones that are trying to knock it out. So you end up with something which might be a Sort of battle taxi, but it's got tracks and a turret on it and a weapon on it. So I think certainly for the foreseeable future, armored vehicles of some kind. And we're speaking on a day that the British government has decided to press ahead with its Ajax armored vehicle. Very expensive, big, heavy thing, lots of criticism of it, but they just reckon that for the foreseeable future, there's no choice for the army. But they do still need armoured tracked vehicles.
- [53:30]
Dan Snow
Who would be a defence procurement person? You're buying kit which will be used in 10 to 15 years time. With an understanding of history, it will definitely be used against enemy you weren't expecting to fight in a climate you weren't expecting to fight in a place you weren't expecting to fight. It just is brutal, isn't it?
- [53:46]
Mark Urban
Totally. Right. And, you know, one of the funniest things is about the Age Act. I mean, it was originally commissioned after many forms to replace something called the combat vehicle reconnaissance brackets, tracked, better known to people who know a bit about these things as the Scorpion or Scimitar. Now, this was sometimes referred to in the armoured corps as the Dinky, or they were referred to in the tank regiments as Dinkies because they were 14 tons and our chieftains were 58. They had three people in them, they were very small, they had nice wide tracks, so they were light and the ground pressure was less than that of a human foot. So they could go anywhere, remain largely undetected and they were tremendously maneuverable. Now, originally, the Ajax, which weighs in at nearly 40 tons, is about twice the size, physically was bought to buy that. Now that, as you say, if you're a procurement guy who was trying to buy that, that's nonsense. I don't think the Ajax has a future as a reconnaissance vehicle performing the kind of role that the Scorpion was doing back in the day. But I think for all the reasons we were just discussing about, you're still going to need to move people around the battlefield and need systems with long range, night vision, these kinds of things. I think there is still a role for something like the Ajax on the battlefield. It's just not the one they thought it was when they designed it and set the procurement system going all those years ago. I mean, it's incredibly hard. The Ukrainians talk about evolution on the drones, the small ones that are used over the battlefield, happening in six week cycles. So you try a new trick. I will move to this part of the frequency spectrum to control it. And within six weeks the Russians are jamming that part of the frequency spectrum or introducing some other innovation. When you take six years just to write the spec for a new weapon, which is the sort of rate that the Ministry of Defence in Britain's been going at of late, or the us, they know better in that sense. It's just not going to work. And so we are in an age of disruption and innovation at a giddying speed, I think.
- [55:51]
Dan Snow
Well, the big question that lies behind all your work is the Tank. This strange and wonderful platform that existed given a certain set of historical circumstances and will it disappear? Will its lifespan be 120 years or so? It is remarkable, isn't it? And then we all come to look on it like we do HMS Victory. These multi decked wooden battleships that sort of lasted about 300 years and were these astonishingly iconic objects which then disappeared off into obsolescence. Fascinating to know. Fascinating to know. Well, Mark, thank you very much. Come on the podcast, people can read your book and get a better sense of all this. What's it called?
- [56:24]
Mark Urban
There's a long subtitle, but Tank and Mark Urban is all you need to find it.
- [56:28]
Dan Snow
Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Good luck with it.
- [56:30]
Mark Urban
Oh, well, thank you so much for having me.
- [56:35]
Dan Snow
Thanks so much for listening. Thank you folks. We really hope that this has helped you better understand what's going on. Give me a bit of context and if you think your friends, family, colleagues would enjoy that, then please, please do share with them. Whatever your podcast player, whatever you're listening on, it will let you share this as a link or even a WhatsApp message that sharing is the lifeblood of this podcast and what keeps us going. So thank you for listening and thanks for sharing. Join us next time for another episode of Dan Snow's History Hit.
- [57:16]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
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- [57:53]
Dan Snow
You're on the banks of the Thames, it's 1666 and the city is a towering inferno in front of you, the Great Fire rages through the Stuart Capital. If you're visiting London this summer, let me Dan Snow, historian and born and raised Londoner, be your personal guide in a brand new series of audio walking tours from History Hit. I tell you the stories of where some of England's most explosive history happened. We'll follow the destructive path of the Great Fire of London and explore where and how King Charles I met his grisly end. All you need is your smartphone and the Voice Map app. Using your location, it triggers the story automatically so you can keep your phone in your pocket and your eyes on the history as you walk. Step into London's past. Download VoiceMap from your app store or go to VoiceMap Me history hit. That's VoiceMap Me. Historyhit. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard iii. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com subscribe.