The Future of Tanks and Drones

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Just visit history. com slash subscribe There were a lot of ways to die on the Western frront A British sniper could put a three hundred three round through your skull if you showed him an inch of helmet above the paris High explosives, shrapnel, machine gun barrages, gas that scorch your eyes, throk and lungs, blinding, suffocating bayonet in your guts and a chance meeting a night ich land A supersonic grenade fragment Tfing run for a British aircraft Disease, trench fever, gangree from a cut off the rusty barbed wire German troops manning the defeners around the French Village of Fleur in september nineteen sixteen on the Song that they hadd seen it all the ears of German centuries onn the early morning of the fifteenth of September cameame a strange screeching Loring They had them before they saw One witness reports we heard strange throbbing noises. lumbering slowly towards us. cameame three huge mechanical monsters such as we had never seen before These mechanical monsters were steel plated lumbering beasts Rhomboid in shape. metal tracks that traceed the outline of the outer edge Barrels of guns Bistled 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 the H.G Wells in school, they might have recognized the almost Animent machines conjured from the industrial age A dystopian Crushing beast Given life by engineers On they came Barbed wire crumpling beneer impenetrable tangles of wire which had ripped the flesh of any men who gingerly tried to pick their way through Crushed to matting old shell holes or trenches which infantry adapter work their way around this monster could just lunge straight across It moved freely across no man's land place. For until now, movement had been a novelty That is alma. The Germans who didn didt have their wits about them who had not lost their nerve. They manned machine guns and sprayed thousands of rounds at whatever it was Comrades watched in consternation as those rounds bounced off, like steel raindrops off a hardened roof. U They came Some defenders, while they made the obvious choice others stated their posts And they died in a hail of gunfires as the monstrous invention straddled the trench in its guns and filated along the length of the defenses beind this vehicle. sheltering in its leee, like boats moored up behind a seawall taking the brunt of a gale were files of infantry. ly they're li path have been smoothed by the steel beasts theirir bodies sheltered by his b. British eyeitness was watching the infantry 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 Jerry's collollecting 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 at 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 land ships, with engines propelling them across an ocean of mud, clad in steel plates, They would instead be known It was a new era in warfare. And I think a lot of those present that day We' talking all about that moment, We' been talking all about tanks on this podcast today The subsequent history, bring it up to the present. Our contributor is one of the best in the business. He's Mark Urban, a brilliant journalist, author, broadcaster Hes with the Sunday Times now, but he's was on Newsnight at the BBC for a long time. he' a great inspiration to me. He always seeks out that sweet spot between history and current affairs 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 gonna talk all about tanks Past present and whereere they have a future Enjoy Mark Irban, what an honour to have you on the podcast? Well, what an honour to be hon it Great story, great story of the tank. rememarkable 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 nineteen fourteen and had descended into stalemate had gone much length than anyone expected, with far, far higher casualty figures with terrible terrible bloodshed for a few meters of ground gained and lost. And we're not talking about Ukraine. We're talking about the First World War on the Western frront. particly example exxplain what challenges were faced by those who sought win a battle to move the front line forward to march towards the enemy 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 frontline But this idea that the means of defense had become much more powerful than the means of offense, there's various ways of seeing it. I think pretty quickly after the war broke out in nineteen fourteen, 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 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 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 nineteen fifteen, so just over a year after the war had started There were already people in the British Army and indeed the French arrmy 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. They have been invented. The internal combustion engine, machine guns, armor plate There are armored 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. put a lot more weight over soft ground without sinking. And they pretty soon discover that if they try and take their armored 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 Lincoln fosters Late in nineteen fifteen. 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 us 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 is the Eureka moment in a way, and the 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 Lzzen shappe 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, theseese odd sort of rhomboid shaped tanks And they went into action for the first time in september nineteen sixteen And the early results were not too good. You have to wait over a year in November nineteen seventeen before the Battle of Combre and the first mass use of tanks. somethingomet like three hundred and fifty on quite a narrow front to see a real breakthrough, a breakthrough of several miles And that's when everybody realizes They've been in at the birth of something quite special. And why is it that using them in masks 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 prot the infantry and you have a hundred thousand troops and you've got a hundred tanks or every sort of thousand or so you know 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 togetherether. What difference does that make? 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 Sm battle in september nineteen sixteen and it's something around four dozens. And they say, oh yes, you know, 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 to be couched in terms of helping the infantry, theseese 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 stillill in the mud, notithstanding their tracks and everything else. Some might even get knocked out, and then you'd be left with ones and tw'os and they couldn't really have much of an effect. Whereas in Combre, if you had, for example, a dozen tanks in the space of a couple of hundred meters 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 another tank fifty or one hundred 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 poured 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 Broken ran because they were so afraid of these unstoppable beasts And yet the war goes on and in the end, historians go, well, tanks didn't win worldorld one 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 petrols leaking all over them, catching fire me. It's a nightmarish place to serve. Yeah, absolutely. And those early ones, the British ones, you needed 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 nineteen eighteen, the so called Kaiserschach 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 German' very nearly won and that's months after. Combrey, you know And even after that, although by then The British and French and even Americans were all using tanks by mid nineteen eighteen 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 nineteen twenties and thirties 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, you know, 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, you know there's an Australian major general quoted in the book who just said a few years ago when asked to review whether the Australian army still 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 War, I think Okay, so in the nineteen twenties, you' 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 sort of philosophical debate raging in Germany in France, Britain and elsewhere, in America in the nineteen twenties and early thirties 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, o, 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. 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 Bononey 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 twenty, twenty five miles on a tank of gas and then they run out of fuel because they were only designed to go a very short distance But then those theorists started to 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, you know, I'm afraid it's one of those bitter As of history that the two Armies where they realize that are the Soviet Army, which from the mid nineteen thirties on, the Red Army is buying tanks by the thousand and have been inspired by those ideas of people like Bononey Fuller and Basil, Little Hart and other British writing on military affairs and they're thinking, yes. We see what you're saying, you know, if the tank motors for a hundred kilometers into the enemy rear and shoots up all their supply dumps and airfields and command posts, they could just collapse You know, it's the beginnings of what we might call Blitzkrieg. And so they invest and the Germans late on in the late thirties, they finally get it And then they start investing big time as well But the British are sort of hobbling on with a trial armoured brigade Fighting over resource is, 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, that I know, 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 And what's going with the technology? I mean, the use of radios bec very important. You can talk to tanks and they can talkalk back arrmor, speed. what are the exciting things that are are suggesting that actually tanks are going to have a big role in the next war 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. 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 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 nineteen thirties, the technology has really come along And it's the Germans, of course. Now, the German army decides because of the expense of radios 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 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 arrmy went for something similar in the late nineteen thirties. Only some of their 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, o the enemy's coming, whatever. And then things become much more joined up. And that helps to explain in may nineteen forty how the Germans beat the French, who have a larger army, they have more tanks, A lot of these tanks like the Charb are more heavily armored 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 maneuver round it onto its flanks, to its rear in order to hit the armor 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 nineteen forty 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 stookers 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, you know, in all its might, defeated in the matter of what, three weeks 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 have been a bit blind as to what the actual value of armoud forces was to think, well, we'd better get some in a hurry. And that's when the Americans start trying, for example, to quickly put ride the mistake they made at the end of the First World War of disbanding their tank corps Is that in some ways the greatest moment of tank warfare? I mean, we actually we come ono that, there may be nineteen sixty seven or something of that. But do you think in some ways, nineteen forty, that campaign, that lightning campaign that humiliated the mightiest army on the planet of the French arrmy is that the tanks enjoying their greatest moment of reputation 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 nineteen forty or even the one that went into Russia the following year was largely un mechanized that ninety percent of the division's 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 Panler 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 Klauswvitz was concentrating at the key point with this armoud 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 ten percent of their divisions motorized or armored, but boy, did they understand how to use them effectively There are some other moments. You mention the nineteen sixty seven 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 easastern Front, Some people say Kusk. 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 of the Normandy Bridgehead in september nineteen forty four the advance through the low countries, liberating places like Bruges and Brussels. I mean, that was astounding. You know, that was kind of a hundred miles a day type of advance So there have been other moments, but undoubtedly, that may nineteen forty dash to the channel was a sort of defining moment, I think of armoud warfare. 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Make the most of it at bestwestern. com No additional purchase necessary for Seeps, See bonus Pint ten season and Sweeps rules for details and visit bestwestern. com for complete terms and conditions What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam Who was Paul Revere And did the Vikings ever reach America Don Weildman And on American History hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership Find American History Hit twice a week every week, wherever you get your podcasts. American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit Let's come on to the easastern frront now because the sort of emphasis of on armored warf well that's where the main armoud clashes will take place in terms of numbers Operation Barbossa Se half of nineteen forty one You get these same thing, Germans will advance for Mars Mars Mars from 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 in nineteen forty and suddenly your headquarters behind you suddenly got German voices on the radios and you go, my goodness, we're surrounded. You might give it up or you might But actually the trick is sometimes No, 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 Yes I think in the early phases of Barbarossa, you get some very heroic Red Army soldiers who stand comeome what may, but of course, they get outflanked. Yeah massive encirclements. 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 nineteenth century, and you know one of his favorite moves was what was called the Meuvere Sourt Aarrier, 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 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 form brigades of anti tank guns. so you might have seventy two 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 Kussk 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 armored counter atttack where you held your tanks back Battcurast. It's summer knife I three, defeat at Stalling Grad has taken place. This is Germany people debate this, but sort often seemed 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 ninet hundredeen forty three Do you subscribeed? Is it the largest tank battle in history Yes, I think so. The Kurussk battle took place over a very wide area involved a million and a half soldiers, but there was this particular clash at Prokhorovka We' in a single day over several miles of front I think the Russians lost something like three hundred and fifty tanks They claimed the Germans had lost two hundred and something including fifty five tigers, in fact The Germans had lost fourteen, including one tiger. But that's a whole story about how historians went back 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 GolA and the Sinai front in the nineteen seventy three 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 nineteen seventy three battle wasn't a huge tank fight, but now, I think Prokharovka is the kind of crrowning moment in that sense. 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 that just put horizontally and stuck on a tank They've got Panthers people on the Soviet side you got these T thirty fours. now. They're often characterized as sort of O engineered, a lot of technology, very expensive, fewer numbers against just mass produced. T thirty fours that their own crews can fix and give them a screwdriver and they canort pretty much fix anything. Would you rather a lot of T thirty fours or would you rather have these Very, very highly engineered German tanks 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 isn ant extraordinary crereation 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 exposive shell that goes bang and is good for taking out things like machine gun nests and basically helping your infantry to get forward. 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 the 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 withith these extraordinary rates of exchange of twenty, twenty five T thirty fours 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 Ter he falls 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 then what we think of as the Tiger About fourteen hundred made with the T thirty four, twenty three thousand of the initial version and when you add in the later version with the eighty five Mimeter gun You're talking about over fifty thousand made in the war. So as an exercise in sort of out prodroucing 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 eleven man hours of maintenance for each hour in battle. And some of the commanders who get them, you, 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 T thirty four is such a sort of rudimentary piece of kit by a 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 KursSk battle The key ones are all in the Ural mountains. They've been moved out of European Russia or built in places like Cheyaabinsk and Nishni Tagil. Each of them has a training regiment co located with the factory And the soldiers who were 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're going to be the gunner, you put that part of the tank in and adjust it and set it So 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 term 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 T Edy for 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. If you're making a documentary, Mark, when you're doing one of your wonderful films or I make a documentary about World War I, when you quickly grab the attention, the first second, you're just putting a black and white thing of a tank driving p Why is the tank iconic in that war? Is it because it was theort decisive arm? It like Napoleon said you make war with guns? Is it in the secondecond World you do make war with tanks? Or do they just look really cool? And the cameram men like filming them? What's the takeaway for the tank after the Second World War 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 into the machine he's making. And then you think of the poor old tank crewan 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 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 Grouges 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 a machine like being to some of these tanks and they end up representing in one sense national personality, that the Tommigo has that sort of huge instrument of German brutality and that' all 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 bothoth national will And indeed The high machine age warfare, I guess you'd call it After the war Vast, vast numbers of tanks being built all over the world preparation, I suppose for emotional World War II on the planaines of Germany Interestingly, those tanks get used in sort of unexpected places, don't they? And that's what's so fascinating about the clashes in the Golen Heights and nineteen ninety three, these massive tank battles between Egypt and its neighbourors in places where using Soviet and American and British inspired kit, in places where no one was probably expected to be used, the raugged borders between state of Israel and Syria, for example, but You know, again, let's keep the technology, tellell me how tanks develop and become ever more effective. 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 F Wld War as well and 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 ninetiney forty six, forty seven where tanks actually go out of production For the only time in the Cold War period, obbviously, 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 decisive point. And if you do that, you're going to get mute 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 Koreer and various other things teach them that no perhaps they do need tanks. and the fact that the Soviet army kept ten thousand tanks in East Germany through the forties and early fifties 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. goingo 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 forties, 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 nineteen sixties, The Soviet Union is developing what you call composite or laminate arm. 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 propells. you get what I call finin stabilized discarding Sabo 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 a T sixty four, which in certain ways is the most revolutionary tank of the Cold War It's the first tank in the world with composite armor. 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 onn 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 It's ten tons lighter than a Tiger tank So you can see in the course of twenty years from the end of the war how technological advance allows the Soviet Union to produce this tank, the T sixty four which advances in all those different aspects predictably enough, had all sorts of teething problems because it embrace 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 More tanks after this folks don't go away What started the Civil War ended the conflict in Vietnam Who was Paul Revere And did the Vikings ever reach America D downown Wildman And on American History hit, my expert guests and I are journeying across the nation and through the years to uncover the stories that have made America We'll visit the battlefields and debate floors where the nation was formed, meet the characters who have altered it with their touch, and count the votes that have changed the direction of our laws and leadership Find American History Hit twice a week every week, wherever you get your podcasts American History Hit, a podcast from History Hip You mentioned Surance you mentioned T sixty fours. They're fighting in the Middle East. They are very, very important both on the Sinao front and up north in the Goand during the nineteen thirty three War when the state of Israel perhaps came closest to defeat in recent history And those are some extraordinary tank battles Yes, absolutely. And I think one of the things you see from the Sinai battles is when we eventually get to this question of does the tank have a future? is that just as Monty discovered in World War I, the desert is a sort of unique place. I mean, Rommel calls it the only place where armored 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 going to 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. des proves to be extremely important. But the other thing of course one sees in ' seventy three. So in ' seventy three, when they mount their initial counterattack against the 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 Ely on But then again, you come back to this point about combined arms. And I think when we look at the seventy three warar, air power, of course, is absolutely critical. And once the Israelis stabilize the situation, both having lost quite a few aircraft in the first forty 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 Goland where some of those centurions It is almost like Etern Front stuff They not charp twenty kills or they indeed register that they've been hit ten, fifteen, twenty 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 Ochestra of war, that the bringing together of all arms brings the Israeli success in that conflict an interesting use airp though, is the fascinating thing is that tanks and airpower are roughly, roughly, roughly the same age and have developed together and separately There have always been arguments, P who say actually one day P will do for the tank. It will make the tank obsolete on the ground argument it was there in the Yng Capur W when you see this kind of balance shifting It was there in Second World War, if you have absolute mastery, then you can rein down fire on tanks on ground the German Waff and SS units aren't able to get to the beach in Normandy because they're being ripped apart by air power as they move up Take me to the last twenty or thirty years and now with the emergence of drones. So precision, weapons, drones, weapons system delivered from the air have they provided An existential challenge for the tank, do you think 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 a transparent battlefield. Now I'm not that old, but even forty five 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 concentrate force and advance 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 basases in Saudi Arabia and then aiming their missiles at them. And then the electronics sphere where for the first couple of years on that front in the east of Ukraine 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 all of you got your mobile phones off Because even though we were thirty kilometers 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, you know, that fires a shell forty kilometers or whether it's a drone that flies twenty five 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. were 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 aerirplane to blow up down to a depth of maybe forty feet the ground, we see drones being used in such depth now up to thirty, forty kilometers that the Ukrainians have got big problems even evacuating their casualties And that's caused them to look to uncruded 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 going to change the batteries on all these robots or uncrwed systems. You know, in the end, and if the battlefield changes, one side suddenly loses twenty kilometers 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 well 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 taxed, 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 the British government has decided to press ahead with its Ajax armored vehicle, veryy 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 armored tracked vehicles Who would be a defense procurement person? Your buying kit, which will be used in ten to fifteen years time, with an understand of history, it will definitely be used against an enemy you weren't expecting to fight, in a climate you won't expect to fight, in a place you won't expect them to fight It just is Brutal isn't it? Totally right. And you know, one of the funniest things is about the Ajax. I mean, it was originally commissioned after many full starts to replace something called the combat vehicle reconnaissance brackets tract