Rolling Thunder: A Century of Tank Warfare

245 Pages·2013·2.8 MB·English

by  Kaplan

FOR MARGARET
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Pen & Sword Aviation
an imprint of
Pen & Sword Books Ltd
47 Church Street
Barnsley
South Yorkshire
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Copyright © Philip Kaplan, 2012
ISBN 000-0-00000-000-0
eISBN 9781473832077
The right of Philip Kaplan to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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apologizes to any copyright owners we were unable to contact during this clearance process.
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE ROAD TO WAR
THE GENIUS
BLITZKRIEG
THE BATTLE FOR FRANCE
BARBAROSSA
T-34
THE DESERT FOX
EL ALAMEIN
KURSK
ARDENNES
BEST OF THE BEST
TANK MAN
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Efforts have been made to trace the copyright owners of all material used in this
book. The author apologizes to any copyright owners we were unable to contact
during this clearance process.
The author is grateful to the following people for their kind assistance and
contributions in the development of this book: Pauline Allwright, Ernest Audino,
Fritz-Rudolf Averdieck, Jeff Babineau, Malcolm Bates, A.G. Bramble, Ludwig
Bauer, Rex Cadman, Donald Chidson, Valerie Chidson, Neil Ciatola, Jeff Dacus,
Daimler-Chrysler Historical Collection, J. Ellison, Chris Everitt, John Ferrell,
David Fletcher, Eugene Flowers, George Forty, Will Fowler, Florence Garetson,
Gaston Gee, Hans Halberstadt, Robert Hartwig, Douglas Helmer, Laura Hirst,
Eric Holloway, James Jinks, Steve Joseph, Hargita Kaplan, Neal Kaplan,
Margaret Kaplan, Sam Katz, Johannes Kugies, Martin Langford, Jacques
Littlefield, John Longman, Martin Middlebrook, Steve Nichols, John Nugent,
George Parada, Heinz Renk, John Schaeffer, Charles Shenloogian, David
Shepard, Richard Watson, George Worth.
INTRODUCTION
“Caterpillar landships are idiotic and useless. Nobody has asked for them and
nobody wants them. Those officers and men are wasting their time and are not
pulling their proper weight in the war. If I had my way I would disband the
whole lot of them. I am going to do my best to see that it is done and stop all this
armoured car and caterpillar landship nonsense!”
So said Royal Navy Commodore Cecil Lambert, Fourth Sea Lord, in 1915.
Lambert clearly disapproved of the Royal Navy Armoured Car Division, an
organization established in October 1914 with the support and enthusiasm of the
First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, to develop a new line of
armoured cars.
On 12 September 1914, the German Army lost the first Battle of the Marne
and quite soon after that the Royal Navy dispatched some personnel from the
UK to France to protect the air base near Dunkirk. A part of their task there was
rescuing pilots who had been shot down in that area, and to accomplish that, the
Admiralty chose to send over some armoured cars. The Navy bought 100
vehicles from Rolls-Royce and shipped some of them to France where they were
fitted with a boxlike armour covering, shrouding the main unit, the front wheels
and the driver’s head. The balance of the R-R order was modified in England for
action later that autumn in the war. They were fairly effective, but did not wholly
protect their crews from overhead sniper fire. By December the British
“armoured car” establishment had developed a somewhat refined version with
overhead armour and a top-mounted machine-gun. This version was more
effective and certainly an improvement on the earlier vehicle, but by the time it
entered service the battlefield situation had deteriorated into mere trench warfare
stalemate. The new armoured cars had shown promise, but they were incapable
of crossing the trenches or the barbed wire.
By the following February, Churchill had set up the Naval Landships
Committee whose remit was the design and construction of a new, tracked
armoured vehicle based on a design of Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton of the
Royal Engineers. Swinton believed he could make a caterpillar-tracked
armoured vehicle that would be capable of destroying machine-gun positions
and barbed wire barriers, and more importantly, crossing the trenches and other
obstacles on the battlefield with relative ease. The early trials were not
encouraging, but the Churchill committee pressed on and the result was the
vehicle they called Little Willie.
Little Willie aroused the interest of the British Army which liked what it
saw, but wanted something with roughly twice the capability. At that point, two
of the committee members, William Tritton and W.G. Wilson, joined forces to
come up with an entirely new design with tracks that ran around the perimeter of
its rhomboid sides. Its armement included two six-pounder guns and four
Hotchkiss machine-guns, and it was powered by a 105 hp Daimler engine. It was
nicknamed Mother and it performed well in its initial demonstration for Lloyd
George, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener, other army and navy officials and
cabinet members in February 1916. Orders for 100 of the machines soon
followed. The odd-looking vehicles were being built under a cloak of secrecy
and both workers and executives referred to the machine as a “tank” and it was
destined to completely alter the future of land warfare.
THE ROAD TO WAR
The origins of mechanised land warfare go back to the earliest chariots, which
were predecessors of the early armoured cars, an ancestry that greatly predates
that of the tank. One dictionary definition of tank is: An enclosed heavily
armoured combat vehicle that is mounted with cannon and guns and moves on
caterpillar treads.
In common with the tank, that early chariot was operated as a military
vehicle by a crew. It was composed of a driver, a bowman who could also throw
a javelin when required, and, for armoured protection, a shield bearer. It has
been established by Russian archeologists that some Bronze Age warriors in
Central Asia used chariots as mobile launching platforms from which they shot
arrows and hurled javelins at their enemies.
The Hyskos, (or “Princes of the Lands”), an obscure race of mountain
warriors from the area that is now known as Kurdistan, are believed to be the
first people to have engaged in combat from war chariots. The Hyskos entered
northern Egypt in about 1700 BC to establish a dynasty that lasted four
centuries, with the key to their military success being a chariot-based mobile
strike force. But they were ultimately overthrown by a more powerful Egyptian
army.
In 1479 BC the army of the Pharoah Thutmose III, the Assyrian Army, and,
in c. 972-931, the army of King Solomon, were all famous for their mighty war
chariot forces. It was not until the sixth century BC, however, that Cyrus, the
king of Persia, developed the chariot into a what has been acknowledged to be a
truly impressive and highly effective fighting vehicle. He designed a very sturdy,
long-axled version operated by a two-man crew. The vehicle’s axles with small,
extended scythes and the horses that pulled it had armour protection. It was quite
light in weight, relatively fast, and the most resistant to overturning of any
chariot design to that point. Perhaps in a forethought of the eventual tank
concept, he also pioneered an enlarged wagon-shaped model that included a
central tower, a battering ram, and room for a twenty-man crew.
But before the tank on the field of battle, a period of warfare dominated by
the presence of great beasts, elephants adapted to a land combat role of sorts by
the mounting of long lances to their flanks and swords on their trunks. The
concept was the brainchild in 327 BC of the rajah Porus whose army faced the
invading forces of Alexander the Great. The Indian intended that his elephants
were to be employed as “infantry tanks” sent forward to part Alexander’s lines
to allow the supporting Indian cavalry to reach the enemy troops. It is believed
that each elephant carried a fighting cage howdah as a “cockpit” with a crew of
up to four men. The appearance of and the threat posed by these enormous live
weapons must have been awesome and genuinely frightening to Alexander’s
men, and he was moved by that initial exposure to amass and create an elephant
fighting force of his own.
Next in line to field elephants in combat was Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar
Barca. Hannibal was a Punic Carthaginian military commander who, in 202 BC
thrust his war beasts into action against the forces of the Roman Scipio in the
Battle of Zama, Hannibal’s final battle. There the shrewd Roman outfoxed
Hannibal, whose eighty elephants were sent in to break Scipio’s battle line. As
the animals neared the opposition, the shattering blast of many Roman horns and
trumpets sounded, terrifying and confusing the elephants which then panicked
and ran back through Hannibal’s own ranks. In the ensuing chaos, the Romans,
like Alexander before them, were inspired to build a fighting force of the beasts
into their own armed forces, a force they employed effectively for two hundred
years.
In a notable battlefield event of 55 BC, reconnaissance troops of the Roman
Julius Caesar were met in what they referred to as Brittania by the determined
spear attacks of the enemy forces who appeared aboard light chariots. Caesar
later reported that the British charioteers crossed the field at great speed, while
“crew members” threw javelins at their foes, confusing and disorganizing them.
The chariot crews then dismounted and attacked the Romans on foot. The
chariot drivers continued on beyond the point of the action and halted, ready to
carry their dismounted fighting men away to safety, if such an escape were to
become necessary. So devastating were such attacks to the Romans, so
substantial were their casualties in the encounters, that many historians have
believed they eventually led to Caesar’s withdrawal from Britain.
Eventually the interest in and appeal of making war through the deployment of
chariots gave way to the simpler and more efficient approach to killing one’s