Dark Earth: History of the Tank

Exactly. His schemes and obsessions coloured much of German war production.

  sdarkshade

With the reformed German Army being able to use British Centurions and American M-48s themselves, which tank did the Germans find the best.

But not good enough to keep using British ore American tanks and instead going back on building their own.

American Tank Development Part I: 1861-1919

The history of the American tank can be traced back to the US Civil War of 1861-1865 and the use of armoured steamwagons to move heavy artillery in the support of several protracted sieges, particularly those of Vicksburg and Petersburg, which served as a harbinger of the grim industrial warfare to come over the next century. Other means of moving siege guns around the battlefield proved to be extremely unwieldly in comparison to the reliability of the steamwagon. However, in the vastly reduced postwar army, these tactical lessons were forgotten vehicles were laid up like so much other heavy equipment for the next three decades. The bloody Indian Wars of the 1870s and 1880s were fought primarily with cavalry and the vast distances of the Great Plains highlighted the key weaknesses of the mechanical horse and the steamwagon – short tactical range and a lack of speed in comparison to their equine counterparts.

The next major conflict to involve the United States was the Spanish-American War of 1898-99. Although the most well-known battles of the conflict were primarily naval affairs, such as the Battle of Manila Bay in the Pacific and the grand clash of the battlefleets at the Battle of Santo Domingo in the West Indies, the protracted ground operations in Hispaniola gave some scope for the employment of armoured steam powered vehicles. Two Civil War era steamwagons were used to convey men and guns to the forward trenchlines alongside several smaller contraptions of more modern construction. Their utility was noted by several individuals of note, including Colonel William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, General George Custer , Colonel Theodore Roosevelt of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment, better known to posterity as the ‘Rough Riders’ and former Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, who visited the battlefield during the protracted Siege of Santo Domingo.

As the 20th century dawned, the primary threat to the security of the United States was Germany. Relations between the two powers had been on a slow decline since the Caribbean Affair of 1895 and hit new depths with the 1902 Venezuela Crisis, which briefly put the two empires on the brink of war. The primary response to the menace of Imperial Germany came through the growing United States Navy and the formidable array of coastal artillery emplaced around East Coast ports, but also through an increase in the size of the United States Army to 125,000 by 1912 and a gradual introduction of powerful modern equipment. Armoured cars and Holt tractors were acquired in small numbers, with the latter permitting the movement of artillery across a variety of arcanely simulated broken country in annual maneuvers in 1910 and 1911. The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt had seen an overall move towards preparedness that was tempered during William Jennings Bryan’s Democratic administration and its more pacific instincts. The bitterly fought election of 1912 saw the mercurial Roosevelt return to the White House in a most narrow triumph after the Whigs, Democrats and Socialists split the vote against him. The initial years of his third term were marked by cooling of relations with Mexico and considerable alarm at the deterioration of international relations in Europe.

The outbreak of war in July 1914 was met with general dismay and a generally unified determination to balance traditional neutrality with the protection of American interests in Europe and on the high seas. The early engagements between German and British cruiser and battlecruiser forces drew considerable attention and demonstrated that there was no guarantee that the conflict would not spill over into the Western Hemisphere. The subsequent Battles of the Falkland Islands and Trinidad bought events perilously close to American shores and put paid to many utopian hopes of confining the conflict to far-off Europe. This new war spread out across the globe like the Seven Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars and the Crimean War, but unlike those, it was a true World War in its own right. Roosevelt’s policies of preparation of the United States Army to cope with a variety of contingencies lead to a rush of proposals for innovative weapons from luminaries such as Thomas Edison and unknown scientists alike. The US Army’s artillery park began a much needed expansion and modernization that would prove to be exceptionally prescient in the battles of 1917 and 1918. However, the American genius for manufacturing and the burgeoning strength of the automobile construction industry combined in its happiest marriage in the development of nascent armoured vehicles.

Edison’s Armoured Steamwagon proposal of 1912 was revisited in December 1914 and early 1915 as the armies of Europe became bogged down in the bloody slaughter of trench warfare and many minds across the Atlantic turned to the optimal means of achieving victory in the increasingly likely circumstance of American involvement. The updated design was a 69 ton tracked vehicle powered by two steam engines and capable of crossing a broken battlefield at 4mph while carrying an armament of four machine guns. Unlike the rhomboid vehicles then currently under secret development in Britain, Edison’s proposal was far more rounded and capable of higher road speeds over short distances. Independent design work was carried out by a number of manufacturing, arms and engineering concerns, with Bethlehem Steel’s Machine Gun Destroyer incorporating an angular ram prow for breaking through field works and wire defences. Perhaps the most interesting early American design was the Algernon Steam Triship, a 387t tricycle behemoth armed with multiple 2.95” mountain howitzers mounted in sponsons and powered by a unique system of clockwork automatons. The War Department declined to pursue development on grounds of practicality and the inventor was later committed to an asylum for attempting to smoke a herring. The debut of British and German tanks and landships in late 1915 proved to have a chilling effect on the myriad indigenous American armoured vehicle designs and the attentions of the War Department turned towards the development of improved European-type vehicles.

The United States of America declared war on the German Empire on March 3rd 1916, following a gradual series of provocations beginning with the heinous sinking of RMS Lusitania and culminating in the Zimmerman Telegram, which offered German support to Mexico to regain the territories lost in the war of 1848. President Roosevelt mustered the considerable ire of the U.S. public and began the arduous process of raising and arming the greatest force ever to leave the Americas under the command of General John Pershing. The first American troops reached France in July 1916, memorably proclaiming ”Lafayette, we are here!” before the tomb of the Revolutionary War hero, but it would take over a year before US forces could be independently deployed in the field in appreciable numbers, due to the sheer size of the logistical task before them. One of the key early decisions taken to ameliorate the difficulties of supply was to employ, where possible, the standard munitions and armaments of the more experienced Allies, which lead to the adoption of British heavy and French light tanks during the campaigns of 1917 and 1918. An Anglo-American joint effort for the development and production of a new heavy tank began in November 1916, but was not expected to produce appreciable numbers of vehicles for at least a year. In the interim, licenced production of existing Allied models was the only means available to supply US armoured forces.

The first tank to enter mass production in the United States was the Mark IV heavy tank, which augmented British production and saw service with the American Expeditionary Force’s newly established United States Army Tank Corps at the Battle of Arras and the First Battle of St. Mihiel, the latter being the AEF’s first major independent victory in the latter half of 1917. It was well liked for its toughness, hard-hitting armament and relative reliability, but there were never enough available for decisive employment nor for coping with the numerous mechanical casualties and battle losses that came with such a war. Twenty-six were destroyed in one of the most devastating German draconic attacks of the latter half of the war in the early stages of the Battle of Arras. 390 were built in the United States during 1917, but the Mark IV was always intended as an interim type while the Anglo-American Mark VIII or ‘Liberty tank’ was developed.

The Renault FT-17 proved exceptionally popular and well-suited to the American way of war, which emphasized offensive action and the continual application of heavy firepower along the enemy front. French industrial capacity had its limitations and the Inter-Allied Tank Commission recommended that the Renault FT be manufactured in the United States. Several vehicles, plans and parts were shipped across the Atlantic aboard the battlecruiser USS Powhatan to the Ordnance Department. Orders were placed with several private armaments concerns for the manufacture of tanks and, despite initial difficulties from incompatible measures and bureaucratic bumbling, the first American vehicles rolled off the production line in November 1917. A total of 1265 were built out of a total order of 5800 over the course of 1918 and they served as the mainstay of the peacetime American tank force of the 1920s.

In January 1918, the first of 1032 US manufactured Mark VIIIs entered service with the AEF, representing a substantial increase in capability over the Mark IV and light tanks through the firepower of its 12pdr main gun and sponson mounted 6pdrs and its more powerful engines. It would prove to be the backbone of the U.S. Tank Corps in the bitter fighting which halted the German Spring Offensive and the great successes of the Allied Meuse-Argonne and Lorraine Offensives that followed in the Hundred Days that ended the war. The tremendous victory at the Siege of Metz and the vaunted achievements of Pershing’s tough dwarven artillerymen from the Appalachian and Rockies would not have been possible without the grinding breakthroughs spearheaded by the Liberty Tanks that allowed the doughboys to encircle and reduce an entire German field army. During the final weeks of pursuit through to the Rhine, many Mark VIIIs were hastily adapted to include a shielded position for AEF wizards atop the main turret in order to suppress hastily erected enemy field positions; most were removed postwar in the great contraction of the Tank Corps.

One of the less successful vehicles planned for the U.S. Tank Corps was the Ford 5-ton M1918 light tank. Design as a cheap alternative to the FT suitable for mass production, 20,000 vehicles were ordered in March 1918, but only 102 were produced by the Armistice in November. A small, two-man light tank armed with a single .30/06 machine gun, the M1918 had a short operational range, was not substantially faster than the heavy and medium tanks of the time and was markedly inferior to the FT in firepower and top speed. The single squadron that did see action in France proved that it did have a certain degree of viability on the battlefield when used to escort infantry during the pursuit phase of an offensive, but overall, the vehicle was too small and too slow to provide a useful basis for future development.

The rapid German collapse in the latter half of 1918 came as a surprise to the Allied High Command, who had expected the war to carry over into 1919. This was reflected by the extensive plans put in place to effect a decisive defeat of the Imperial German Army in the field in that year, the strategy known as Plan 1919. Initially developed by then Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, one of the British Army’s most prescient armoured warfare thinkers, it called for a breakthrough by concentrated artillery, infantry and almost 5000 heavy and superheavy tanks to be followed by a fast thrust by thousands of medium and light tanks into the enemy’s rear, destroying headquarters, supply dumps and railheads and ravaging their lines of communication. This would be supported by several thousand aeroplanes specially designed for bombing and trench fighting and the use of new, powerful war gasses. The role of the American Expeditionary Force would come to the fore in this strategy, Pershing’s reinforced army group of 76 divisions providing the southern arm of the grand assault and American factories producing ever increasing numbers of Medium Mark As and Mark VIII Heavy tanks to arm the grand alliance.

The final American tank project of 1918 emerged directly from the ambitious scope of Plan 1919 and was quite possibly the most powerful Allied tank of the Great War. Unfortunately for its proponents, it never saw action in the manner of the British Dreadnoughts, but the 138t M1920 Superheavy tank represents the epitome of the first decade of American tank design. It was armed with a 5” gun capable of penetrating the armour of any enemy tank and wreaking untold havoc on all but the most formidable fieldworks and protected by almost three inches of frontal armour plate, a colossal amount for this era. Whilst the M1920 could not quite reach the top speed of the Dreadnought, it was surprisingly maneuverable for a tank of such sheer bulk. It’s one downfall can be deduced by its designation, as the protracted development process meant that the war had finished by the time design work and the testing of a prototype had been completed. Only four M1920s were produced in the atmosphere of rapid retrenchment that pervaded the U.S. military establishment in the immediate postwar years. They would remain immobile and seemingly forgotten for over two decades until their own rendezvous with destiny.

Overall, the few American tanks of the Great War were successful vehicles that represented variations of and improvements upon their British and French counterparts, belying the wide range of unorthodox and creative designs that had so permeated peacetime. Like the other victorious Allies, the U.S. Army would greatly reduce the numbers of their postwar tank force in the heady throes of peace as the true role of tanks and other tracked armoured vehicles was the subject of intense debate and theorizing. The years ahead would be lean and bitter, but their eventual harvest was bountiful.

armored steamwagons in the Civil War and it seems the Union forces where the once that deployed them the most.