In 1915, the first tanks appeared on the battlefields. Nobody expected World War I, they did not prepare for it, and it was even more difficult to foresee the nature of the coming battles.
Already in the fall of 1914, Swinton, a British officerArmy, seconded to France, began to realize that the main problem of the advancing infantry would be to overcome the distance between the front edges of the attacking and defending forces. It is difficult to go to full height on the enemy, hidden behind the parapets of a full profile of trenches and armed with rapid-fire machine guns, and by the end of this path no more than half of the personnel will remain from any unit. Something you need to cover the body of soldiers, and to perform this task, he proposed the simplest solution. We need to take an ordinary agricultural machine, a Holt tractor manufactured in the USA, and sheathe it with armor. It is interesting that such first tanks of the First World War were forcedly reproduced in 1941 during the defense of Odessa, they were called "NO" ("frightened").
The idea was not very successful, as the requirements forThe chassis in the design of agricultural machinery did not match the complexity of rough terrain, which was to move during the offensive. But the task from this did not lose relevance, it was just necessary to solve it differently.
Главное, что учли конструкторы Несфильд и Мэкфи, designing a fundamentally new model of military equipment is the ability to overcome wide ditches and trenches. Known for the films about the Civil War, the diamond-shaped silhouette of armored monsters was just the manifestation of the original engineering thinking of English inventors. The first tanks of the First World War were called “Big Willie” and “Mark”, their distinctive feature, in addition to the characteristic trapezoidal shape of the armored corps, was the arrangement of arms on the sides, in special projections. At the same time, the name of a new type of armored vehicles (English "Tank"), which means "tank" or "tank", appeared.
French tanks of the First World Wardesigned with a wide variety of technical solutions and fantasy. Initially, they were going to be built as low-speed mobile miniature artillery batteries, protecting the infantry with their silhouette and providing fire assistance to it. However, soon the designers came to the conclusion that it was necessary to build relatively light machines capable of quick maneuver. The Renault FT17 is most relevant to modern ideas about this class of weapons, if only because it has a turning artillery turret located above the armored corps. Similar vehicles of the royal Romanian army participated in the attack on the USSR in 1941, when two FT-17s, preserved from the time of the Civilian, became exhibits of Soviet museums long ago.
As for the fighting qualities possessedGerman tanks of the First World War, their characteristic difference was the powerful artillery weapons, which later became the hallmark of German armored vehicles. The main sample, A7V, was huge, it should have entered it as if in an armored train carriage, through a door. Two mechanics constantly monitored the work of the engines, except for them inside the body was artillery crew. The commander, machine-gunners and the driver were together with them a populous crew. The car was slow and slow.
All the first tanks of World War I possesseda serious drawback: it was practically impossible to stay in them for a long time due to the strong gas content and high temperature created by the operation of an engine that was in the same space with the crew. Powerful motors have not yet been created, and the assembly technologies have not suggested any other way of articulating parts, except for riveting. Reservations withstood a bullet hit, sometimes a light projectile, the effect of any field artillery of more than three inches caliber had a destructive effect on equipment and personnel.
In Russia, tanks began to be built later than in other industrialized countries, but they achieved very serious successes in this matter. But that's another story…
