Emily Briffett (6:13)

What can we actually say is the first tank?

Mark Urban (6:17)

Well, people often say there's a prototype that was made at Foster's in 1915 called Little Willie, which is still on show at the Tank Museum at Bovingdon Camp in Dorset. That is the first tank. Well, that's. It's a prototype. So you then get to one called the Mark 1, which was used in action by the British army in September 1916 at the end of the Somme offensive. When General Haig had launched his offensive a few weeks before, it gone pretty disastrously, as we know, and at the end of it, he was looking for something to try and improve the result very late in the battle. And the people who were making, deploying and operating the tanks kept saying to him, no, you know, we've only got a few dozen of these in France. We should wait until we've got lots, because once we use it, we'll have lost the element of surprise. The Germans will know we have these machines. And Haig didn't listen to them and he sent, I think it was between 35 and 40 tanks into action in September 1916, and they were in little penny packets. So, you know, eight were given to this division and 10 to that, and the result was pretty unimpressive. Some of them got knocked out by German field guns, some of them sank in the mud. And even though they had the tracks and everything, and they should have stayed above it, but very soft ground, you will think. And the whole thing was, to be honest, a damp squib. And the arguments went on in GHQ in France for the next few months and it really. It took more than a year before what is regarded by many as the first significant tank attack in military history, which was launched in November of 1917 at Combra by the British army. And there were well over 300 tanks used in that attack. And by then, the Germans knew the threat was there. They knew the machine had been designed to cross a gap of up to nine feet, a trench up to that wide. So they'd re dug all their trenches in that sector to be 12ft wide. So they thought they would stop the tanks. But the British had an answer for that. They had big bundles of brushwood on top of each one, which, as the tank got to the edge of the trench, cables were cut and these huge bundles of wood fell in. They were called fascines. And they effectively allowed the tanks to run over that wider gap. When the German soldiers realized that was happening, there was mass panic, so called tank fright. You know, they were shooting guns and machine guns and things at these big metal machines the bullets were bouncing off. They couldn't stop them. They thought the trench would stop them. It didn't. And so suddenly the whole German line began to collapse. And that was the thing. Through all the suffering of those first three years of the war in France everyone had been longing for and waiting for, was a breakthrough attack in which the lives expended, often tens of thousands, as at the Somme, would gain you something more than a few hundred yards or even nothing.

Emily Briffett (9:28)

I was wondering if we might be able to select maybe five key moments in the history of the tank that really saw either a change in the role or change of purpose or a change that completely just shifted what a tank was.

Mark Urban (9:45)

Yeah, well, gosh, yeah, Five. Okay. Well, clearly the thing we've just been talking about is the first one, and you could argue a couple of different aspects of that story are very significant, but the, you know, the eureka moment when they've develop a track in Lincoln that will stay on the thing, and then that means it can meet the War Office requirements, cross the right gaps, go up a step, a vertical step of a certain height, all those things. So that is. That is a eureka moment. And there's a telegram from one of the guys running the committees in London, effectively saying it's. We've done it, as that happens, late in 1915. Then you get the actual use, the first mass use of tanks in November 1917, I think then you've got to get through to the Second World War and possibly the invasion of France by the German army in May of 1940, when there'd been a lot of people between the wars saying, well, we've never really used tanks properly. We. We only designed them to go a very short distance in the First World War, just to get through the trench lines. But what if we broke through and then we just kept driving, we pushed the tanks through and we just let them go for 100 miles or for 50 miles. What would happen, you know, would an enemy army collapse? And there were a number of theorists who worked on this, including a British colonel, Boney Fuller, who insisted that a whole new style of warfare would be possible. And people subsequently applied the name blitzkrieg to that. But it's in May 1940, a couple of days into the German assault on France, that they push three quarters of their armored formations through a very tight gap in the wooded hill country of the Ardennes, which people thought, well, they won't use them there. You know, there's only a small number of roads and bridges that will get you through there. But the Germans knew, therefore they wouldn't meet up with much armored resistance. And they punched a hole through at a place called Sedon Sedan, if you're English. And they really. Then they just let rip. And then they started flooding across northern France. And one of the German commanders who's quoted in the book said, you know, I didn't have any orders from that moment that we broke through at Sedan until I reached Calais on the English Channel a couple of weeks later. So that's the moment there, I think, that we're talking about. The significance of the moment is the moment of armored breakthrough warfare, or blitzkrieg, as people subsequently called it. The next big thing that happens is that a new type of shell is developed. Instead of just being a lump of metal that you fire very, very fast like a big bullet, and it just smashes its way through the armour, which is the basis upon which tanks were trying to knock one another out pretty much throughout the Second World War. Someone then develops a shell that goes bang. Uses an explosion to create a bolt of metal. It's called a shaped charge. And that was first used in the field by the Germans late in 1942 by an armored vehicle. And that changes everything really, because what people start to realize after that is that even a gun that can't send the metal shot at really high speed, a gun of lower performance can fire a shell that can still knock out another tank. And then what people realized towards the end of the war is that actually these shaped charges, you put a rocket on the back and any ordinary soldier can carry one of these. And if you've heard in recent conflicts of people referring to rocket propelled grenades, that's what they are. And those started to appear. Well, the British first came up against them in Normandy in 1944. But they get developed towards the end of the war, the capabilities improve considerably. And by the end of the war, the Americans have fielded a bazooka, similar kind of thing, with a shaped charge that can knock out any tank that the Germans have in service. So that's a big moment because it means all those previous calculations about making the metal thicker and thicker, which increases the weight, which means you need a better engine. All those other things. Dilemmas of tank design have hitherto been based on the idea that you knock one another out with a very powerful gun that sends a shot of metal towards the enemy. Then everything changes. And actually, in a way, tanks have never really recovered from that moment. If you look at the conflicts against insurgents, you know, it might have been in Vietnam, it might have been British forces in Basra in 2007. And of course, what we've seen going on in the Middle east in the past two years, insurgents use shaped charges. They don't have tanks of their own with those powerful guns to knock you out. And that's become the dominant threat in that sense. So I guess that my last. So that's four moments. Invention of the track and tank, first mass use of tanks. Blitzkrieg, shaped charge. And my fifth moment would be the emergence of what's called an automated protection system, or an APS, first used in battle, I think, nearly 20 years ago. What is it? An automated protection system is a kind of highly advanced system. I mean, you've got to have computing and everything else in its modern state of advancement. For an APS or automated protection system to become possible, it marries up a set of radars around the tank, normally actually placed on the turret with a computer that when those radars pick up a missile or something could be a drone coming towards the tank, they calculate, if it continues on that trajectory, is it going to hit us? And they then use weapons mounted on the tank to shoot it down. And that's like a big shotgun shell that they fire into the path of the missile to destroy it. Now, for example, the new British tank, the Challenger 3, which is in an advanced stage of development, has got a system like that put on it. And every other country that makes tanks is looking at things like that. In other words, a way to stop the enemy just knocking it out as soon as it appears on the battlefield, a protective system. And people are now talking about, you've got the radars, you've got the fire control computer, but add a laser weapon to shoot down the incoming drones or missiles, because obviously these things that go bang that they've got on there at the moment, you can only load so many at any one time. So that's where it's going. That's the next big change in tank warfare.

Emily Briffett (16:33)

Obviously, these big changes, they require a lot of resource to go behind them, whether that's in the terms of the actual design, the economic power behind it. So I guess what role did industrial capacity play in determining which nations became and have become tank powers? Was tank power development more a matter of engineering brilliance or economic might?

Mark Urban (16:58)

Ah, well, that's an excellent question. Well, of course, in, in the ideal world, you've got both in many ways, if we think about the tank and maybe, you know, aircraft like the Spitfire, they are representatives of machine age warfare. So what do we mean? We mean that industrial innovation, use of materials, design, production becomes a vital factor in winning. And of course, as you imply, the scale of production as well becomes another vital factor. So you've got a constant trade off, just as you've got a constant trade off between the characteristics of the design itself, the way it balances firepower, protection, mobility, what they call the eternal triangle of tank design. You have a constant trade off between, if you like, quality and quantity. And of course, in the Second World War, you see that in buckets and you look at something like the Sherman tank. Many people will have heard of the Sherman. It's a kind of iconic World War II tank design. And the Americans made 49,000 of them in some months, single months. At Detroit, where they built this huge four line assembly plant, they were making more than 2,000 in a month. Now if one says, well, the most impressive technological achievement of the German tank design industry in the war was the Tiger, they only made 1300 and something of those in the entire war. And you've got 2,000 Shermans a month coming off the production line. So in the end, you know, it's that old truism, quantity has a quality all of its own. If you look at the Sherman and you compare it to the Tiger, in many ways it's very inferior. You know, the gun is less powerful, the armor is less thick, the engine isn't great on the Tiger. But the, the Americans, they're scratching their heads when they're making the tank, thinking, what have we got that can power, you know, a vehicle of 28 to 30 tons? And they haven't actually got anything. So they resort to all kinds of strange expedients. They take a radial piston engine from a fighter plane and put it in sun marks. They get a couple of bus engines, you know, obviously weighs a lot more than a bus. Let's get two of these engines and slave them together. They try all sorts of things. But the salient point here about the Sherman is that the massive success in terms of production quantities, simplicity of supply chain and its rapid speed into Service and to some extent its adaptability. These were all big factors in the design. All came about from being willing to use off the shelf components so early on. For example, when it first appears and they get the first ones into production, I mean, the suspension is essentially the suspension from an American bulldozer type thing that's been used by farmers and construction people. They just take that suspension hole and make it in far larger quantities and stick it on the side of the tank and wrap a track around it. The engine, as I've just mentioned, they take an engine from. Well, it's been used on airliners and light aircraft and they stick it in the back because that can produce enough horsepower to speed this thing along at 30 miles per hour and so on. The gun is an anti aircraft gun that they've just adapted. So you get this alternative, if you like, between. It'll do off the shelf. There's a war on, you know, we want quantity type of approach to engineering and the kind of exquisite engineering that the Germans believe is the answer. And happily for our forefathers, they back the wrong horse. They believe, and Hitler himself says it at a conference in 1942, that their superior technology can outweigh the numbers of their enemies. And that's the philosophy of the Tiger and some of the other vehicles the Germans made towards the end of the war. And of course, you know, one to one against that Sherman, they would most times win. But of course there were many more of them. And as for the Russians, I mean, they made more than 50,000 of their T34. I mean, it was only really designed to last a couple of weeks once it was in the field because they got knocked out so quickly. In fact, Emily, now here's a piece of tank trivia another military historian has worked out, Steve Zaloga, his name is great author on tanks, that the T34 was the most destroyed tank in history. Now what does he mean by that? That the highest proportion of those made were destroyed. So they made just over 50,000. And he reckons 44,000 of those were destroyed in battle. And you know, if you read a bit about Stalin's Russia, it comes as no surprise to learn that for the Red army, the machines and the poor people inside them were pretty much expendable. And if they had to lose hundreds of them taking a particular position on the Eastern front, so be it. That was the price as far as they were concerned.

Emily Briffett (22:15)

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Emily Briffett (24:58)

So I guess as well as Things like economic might, the industrial capacity, national culture, politics also played a major role here.

Mark Urban (25:07)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, in the Soviet Union, you've got a system where, you know, through the system they have of industrial planning, of central control, you know, through the Gosplan, the state planning organization, all these other things, they can mobilize amazing resources and they can mobilise individuals. And when, for example, Germans invaded Russia and they came through Ukraine and Belarus and they took over, for example, a few months after they. They started the invasion, they took over the factory in Kharkiv where the T34 was developed. Well, the Russians shipped out the factory. They. They realized it was about to be overrun. They put all the machinery onto trains, all the staff. They took them to the Ural Mountains, and three months after they'd moved out of Kharkiv, they were producing new tanks in the Urals, new T34s. Just three months later, they'd got a whole new factory going. But you're in the middle of nowhere, you're in the Ural Mountains, there aren't enough people for you to get production ramped up. So what do they do? The Russians then have a system, The Soviet Union, I should say. It wasn't just Russians where all the guys who were being trained as tank crews, and I should say there were women as well, get sent to the factory. And the idea is that first they help to build them because there's this shortage of labor, and then after, you know, a month or whatever of working at the factory, they take their tank away. And it might literally been a tank that they helped to build, so the driver's understanding of the engine or the gunner's understanding of the gun and how it works and how you strip it down and clean it and all the rest of it, it's pretty good because they've actually helped build them themselves. Now, no other country, the Germans, the Brits, the American, no other country in the war had a system like that. So when it comes back to your question about sort of culture or the way of life in certain countries and in the Soviet Union at war, you know, it was pretty nasty and feelings were not spared. People were just thrown into this process and, you know, it produced that rather strange result there that the guys who were going to operate the tanks actually helped to build them.

Emily Briffett (27:26)

Well, I was going to ask you about the relationship between the designers and engineers and actually those who used the tank in combat. I guess that's a slightly odd situation, but could you tell us more broadly about that relationship Was there a disconnect or were they more aligned?

Mark Urban (27:45)

That's a bit like the one, you know, that poor bloody infantry, or the guy sitting in his trench and it's raining and, you know, the water's dripping off his nose. He's always going to think that the generals are nice and warm in a chateau somewhere. You know, that sort of First World War stereotype of lions led by donkeys and all that stuff. And, of course, in tanks, you always have a similar dynamic going on. And because it's a machine, the operators are cursing the people who designed it. And, you know, from my own short experience as a tank soldier in the British Army, I was on the Chieftain tank and, boy, was there a lot to be critical of the people who thought of that one. You know, the engine was absolutely horrible. It kept breaking down. The drivers would be under there, covered in oil, trying to repair the thing. So there is this divide between the users and, you know, what they called in the World War II, the boffins. You know, the clever chaps with slide rules and glasses back at Chertsey and where they would design the tanks. And I guess it is probably true that all the armies, if you look at that Second World War period when tank warfare was really at its height and the battle for innovation and for an edge was so relentless and rapid that, you know, a year, 18 months after something had been introduced, you could say, basically, it's over for this, we need a new one. So in that situation, the interplay of ideas between the people who use them and the people who designed them and made them was really important. And I think all of the nations struggled to an extent. I think the Soviet Union, the Red army was probably the best at it, but there were all sorts of expedients were used. So, you know, there might be some officer who'd commanded tanks successfully for six months, and people thought, gosh, well, he. He's not got himself killed. He's been in a lot of awful battles. Maybe he needs a period out of the line. And, you know, they might have got sent as a staff officer to advise the people making the tanks. In America, a system began very early on with the Sherman, and the Grant was another earlier tank. When they'd sent them out, the first people to use the Sherman in battle were not the US army, it was the British army in North Africa. They sent several hundred there. And pretty soon after they got there, Chrysler, who made most of them, decided, well, what we need to do is we need to send some teams of engineers out to Egypt to help the Brits repair them and get feedback on what's, what's wrong with it and what could be improved. So they did, and they had their own teams of, you know, what these days you'd call contractor support or whatever in Egypt helping to mend them. And when the angry British tank driver got out, cursing the clutch or whatever, or that, you know, they were there. So they did try to make the flow of information between the battlefront and the factory better. But I'm not sure anyone ever really aced it. I suppose you can say what happened at the end of the war is that by that point the British had had several truly dreadful tank designs and they finally came up with one that was just too late to, to be used in the war, called the Centurion. And arguably, of the 10 tanks I choose in, in the book, I think arguably the Centurion is the best because it's the best balance between all these things we've been talking about, the different characteristics and industrial innovation and quantity and all these other things. And there was a lot of input into that from fighting soldiers. And I think you can argue that's why it's. It was one of the best and certainly the best British tank.

Emily Briffett (31:30)

Can we say the experience of the average soldier has improved in tanks, or is that just not the case?

Mark Urban (31:38)

Well, one of the great innovations of the Centurion that brought it love from its crews was a military kettle, a system called a boiling vessel. It became the first tank in the world to have a constant supply of hot water so that you could get the tea on. You know, if you were driving along and it was 5 degrees outside and pelting with rain, and you just driven your tank 200 miles on an exercise in Germany, a cup of tea was very welcome. So it had that, I mean, look, a lot of people, I think, look at them and they look at the terrible things that happen. You know, when one is hitting sometimes and the ammunition goes off and people see those videos now from Ukraine turrets blowing off, the people inside, obviously all killed. I think you wouldn't get me one of those. And I think, yes, you can say notwithstanding that the price of failure, of catastrophic failure is still awful for the people concerned. It's a long way from the earliest tanks In World War I, where we had eight guys inside, the engine was in the middle of the space they were in, it was like a big box. So you had these sort of red hot exhausts on the engine, you know, the tanks pitching about on the rough ground. If you fell and put your hand on the exhaust, you know, terrible burns, fumes coming off the engine, all sorts of things that made it absolutely hideous to be in there. The crews often staggered out and threw up because of carbon monoxide poisoning. But even so, you know, they did appreciate being in that metal box. That meant that someone firing a pistol or a rifle couldn't kill them. They needed to look for something, you know, with a heavier punch to kill the people in the tank. And I remember interviewing soldiers who'd served in British World War II tank regiment. This was about 12 years ago when I was writing a book, another book on tanks called the Tank War. And it was very interesting. The. When I said, do you have any freedom of choice as to where you ended up or where you just conscripted and sent off there? And a good few of them said, no, no, I. I kind of volunteered. And in. Early in the Second World War, if you volunteered, you could say where you wanted to go. So in order to have a control over their destiny, they volunteered. And obviously, as the guys I'd been interviewing were, were in a tank battalion, they would. They'd volunteered for the tanks. And when I said why, they said that, you know, talking to their father or their uncle or a family friend at the fireside or over the Sunday lunch table who had been a veteran of the First World War, that all of these guys had said to them, don't go to the infantry, you'll never come back. You know, you're going to die. That, that very powerful folk memory in Britain of the loss, you know, the huge losses of soldiers in the First World War meant that a lot of these guys volunteered for tanks because they felt they would have a better chance of survival. And I think to an extent, that's still the case. You know, if you look at Ukraine, there's so many different ways to knock tanks out there. We see the videos, we hear a lot of the Ukrainian and Russian commanders saying it's incredibly hard to use them because of all the drones. You know, the enemy can see you coming before you can bring them together, they get knocked out, etc. Etc. But they still need big, heavy tracked armored vehicles, for example, to take their infantry forward. There's no alternative to that. And being inside those vehicles, they've got some chance of surviving, whereas if they're on foot, they've got virtually no chance.

Emily Briffett (35:16)

So tanks have got this really symbolic dimension that I mentioned earlier, both as tools of domination, as tools of liberation. How much do you find that the symbol of the tank influences Decisions for procurement or even just on the battlefield. You mentioned the fear factor earlier.

Mark Urban (35:35)

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, if we think back to events like the Tiananmen Square events in 1989, the crushing of the Chinese student protest, one brave man standing at the head of a column of tanks, you know, that sort of symbolizes defiance of. Of, you know, a kind of metal fist of oppression and totalitarianism at other times. And I witnessed this myself. I, as a journalist, I was with the coalition forces in 1991 when they liberated Kuwait City. And, you know, at that point, the people ran out, were laughing and crying and, you know, welcoming the people who arrived as liberators. And so, yeah, it can symbolize all of those things, But I think in the end, it also symbolizes might in an industrial sense. And that's why, for example, the British, who feel that they invented it, they kind of did. I mean, others were at work. You know, the French were at work at the same time on their tanks, but we got ours in, in the field, slight faster, but we kind of invented them. And so the idea, I remember when it came up in the 80s, we had to replace one generation of tanks with another. You know, so then you get mps standing up saying, we can't let this be yet another story of a, you know, a British success, a British invention that we end up buying from someone else because we can't make them anymore. And that still lives on with this program, what I call the Challenger 3. Now, it's actually a German company that's kind of rebuilding our tanks and redesigning them. But we still just like this idea that they're going to be assembled in this country, and. And this question about national pride. And it lives on in the most extraordinary way, because if you look at a tank now that the actual metal bashing, you know, the armored envelope and the engine and the gun, you know, it's a very small proportion by value of that machine. I mean, one of those machines now can cost 10, 15 million pounds. And obviously, an enormous amount of the value is in the code and the electronics and the night vision equipment and all these other highly sophisticated electronic or computerized components. But we still see this as a source of pride, that we should make these vehicles. I guess it's a bit like shipbuilding, where we get a sense of unease as an island nation that we must still carry on building warships at scale. So I think it's kind of hardwired, isn't it, into the national psyche that these things are symbols of national innovation.

Emily Briffett (38:11)

And pride and propaganda since has played into it in terms of developing this legacy.

Mark Urban (38:17)

Yeah, the people who built those early tanks in 1917, 1918, there are posters. If you go onto the Imperial War Museum website into collections, you can still see examples of some of these posters that were put up in the factories and certainly at Foster's in Lincoln, the factory I've mentioned a couple of times, where the first tanks were created. By 1918, three quarters of the workforce on the shop floor were young women. And the men had all been, you know, conscripted or volunteered. They'd gone to the front, except for the kind of foreman, the tradesmen who knew the technical trades. But a lot of the work was being done by women. And the posters on the wall said things like, the tank is a British invention, it saves lives. You know, there was a huge emphasis there on, on the fact that the work that they were doing was designed to save lives. You know, I. E. You wouldn't have to cross no man's land on foot in the same way if you had a tank in front of you to deal with the enemy. I think in the way people look at these objects now, particularly the Second World War ones, they do have great pride. And in the former Soviet Union, for example, it became the norm for T34, you know, their workhorse World War II tank, to be on a plinth in city squares across the former Soviet Union. Outside army camps, you know, they were all over the place. They became this kind of national symbol of the war and of the success of the Red army, you know, driving them all the way to Berlin, defeating the Nazis. And yeah, they are potent symbols. I mean, I think just as they represent a certain type of industrial power and victory, they also become targets for people who say, you know, we're interested in the white hot heat of technology. You know, we want the latest. We. We don't think tanks are ever going to survive on the modern battlefield. And actually, people have been saying things like that pretty much since the first time they were used, that this will never last or the day of these things is over. There was a big moment of that at the end of the Second World War. Atomic weapons, shaped charge weapons, all these other things. People said, no, no, no, we won't need these anymore. So. So, yeah, you do have a sort of a counter tendency, I think, among people who favor, you know, adopting advanced technologies. It might be drones, it might be, you know, might be more fighter aircraft are saying, tanks, forget it, you know, it's so over. This is the sort of Horse and cart stuff. And as far as warfare is concerned, and they are, you know, like any machinery on the battlefield could say the same for the type of fighter aircraft that were being made 25, 30 years ago. It's not easy for them to survive over the Ukrainian battlefield. And so the tendency towards systems without people in them, both tanks and aircraft, seems to be very strong now. And while I wouldn't exactly say it's all over for the tank, I think the tank with people in it still does have a future for some time. I think ultimately it will be uncrewed armoured vehicles, just as it will be with aircraft that engage over the battlefield.

Emily Briffett (41:38)

So if we were to picture it, it would be thinking about almost like a pendulum swinging between new innovation, new development for the tank. We can say that the tank likely has a future.

Mark Urban (41:49)

Yeah, well, let's go back to the thought that was contained in your first question, which is, what is it and how do we define it? Now, if you have a tank that has no people in it at all, is it still a tank or is it just a sort of robot, you know, a sort of killer robot or whatever you want to call it, Particularly if AI plays a big role in the way it chooses its target and its route across country and how it drives and what it engages and all those sorts of things. But, I mean, yes, let's just assume that we're going to allow such a system, then I would say, yeah, they will continue. And even if we talk about armored vehicles with people in them, I think if we talk about the next 10 to 20 years, of course, drones, uncrewed systems, including ones that operate on the ground, are going to become more and more widespread. But as I sometimes say to people, and I'm not being facetious, who's going to plug the battery in when this uncrewed system gets to the end of its mission and it has to be reloaded and recharged and. Or whatever damage dealt with, or you're still going to have bases, as you do today, where drones are launched from, with people. And your drones might successfully capture a tract of land, but then you're going to have to move those people forward to establish new bases so the drones can range forward from those new bases, because you've just taken some, some of your enemy's country and you're going to need people to do that. And if you're going to move people across country, you know, in an environment where there are lots of different things that can harm them, you're going to end up with a metal box on tracks, probably with some sort of weapon on top, and you're back to square one. You know, it's a tank again.

Emily Briffett (43:41)

That was Mark Urban speaking to Emily Brifitt. Mark's book Is tank the 10 war machines that Changed the World and the Remarkable Men Behind Them.