Army & Navy – EQUIPMENT: Decline of the Tank

In a slight fog, at 6:20 on the morning of Nov. 20, 1917, the tank entered modern warfare. At that moment 378 steel monsters rolled toward the German lines on the Cambrai front. The armored vehicles, traveling at three miles an hour and closely followed by British infantry, ripped through the Germans’ intricate barbed-wire defenses, slithered across their wide trenches. The surprised Germans bolted before the tanks’ machine-gun fire. In ten hours 10,000 German soldiers surrendered. The Allied command lacked the wit or experience to make Cambrai a decisive victory, but the tank had made its effective debut. (A few tanks had been so misused at the Somme and in the Third Battle of Ypres that most military men ignored them.)

In World War II Nazi Panzers swarmed through Poland, crushing everything before them. They pushed through the Lowlands and France to Dunkirk. The weapon Germany’s enemies had neglected between wars seemed to be irresistible. The U.S. hurriedly withdrew its few light tanks from the cavalry and infantry and used them as a nucleus for an Armored Force. Bigger guns were mounted on bigger tanks (while U.S. factories in a prodigious tank program poured out earlier, obsolete models). Still heavier armor and welded construction appeared. By 1943, the U.S. Armored Force had burgeoned to 14 divisions.

The Tank’s Reversal. The necessities and lessons of war had set men to work on mobile guns which would knock out tanks. By last week many military observers believed that the anti-tank men had succeeded. The stock of the tank had dropped precipitously:

>Said Major General Levin Campbell, the Army’s Ordnance chief, last fortnight: “In France, in Poland, in the Balkans, Germany pitted tanks against fixed fortifications and against infantry. . . . There were no good anti-tank weapons against them.” The German tanks had only to be “fast enough to rumble through after the enemy’s artillery had been blasted from its fixed positions, which were easy to hit.” The highly touted 60-ton German Mark VI, said the General, is a flop.

> The Cavalry Journal noted: “The dominance enjoyed by armored forces on the battlefields of 1939 and 1940 is over. . . . It is another example of the old story of fire power versus armor. Fire power always wins in the end.”

> After watching the Eighth Army knock out 52 German tanks in twelve hours TIME Correspondent Jack Belden wrote: “Tanks! How futile they appear face to face with these ambush-emplaced guns. Like papier máché boxes they are strewn across the Médinine plain.”

The Tank’s Enemies. Most of the tanks knocked out in World War II have been victims of truck-drawn artillery. Such guns can be hidden in the earth until only the barrel shows, leaving no silhouette for the lumbering tanks to shoot at.

After the towed gun came models mounted on self-propelled chassis. Some of these tank destroyers have been in action: in routing Rommel from Egypt and Libya, General Montgomery had 24 such U.S. weapons (105mm. howitzers) among his 3,000 guns.

The Army last month allowed General Motors and Ford to announce that they were manufacturing the Mio tank destroyer, an armored machine built on an M-4 (Sherman) tank chassis and carrying a high-velocity 3-inch gun. But tank men generally say the Mio is too tall, too slow, and Ordnance continues to experiment with smaller, more mobile machines which can outfire, outrun and outmaneuver the German Panzers.

The British have picked up a Russian wrinkle in tank busting: fighter planes equipped with cannon big enough to stop a tank with armor-piercing shells. In a recent flight in Tunisia, cannoned Hurricanes destroyed five German tanks from the air, left 27 trucks and armored cars burning.

The Tank’s Chances. President Roosevelt long ago revealed that the U.S. had moved tanks down the priority list. But nobody was ready to write off the tank altogether, and no nation would abandon the armored vehicle any more than it would abandon the battleship. The tank is extremely vulnerable when it rushes up front against well-prepared artillery positions, but it is still the best weapon for chewing up infantry—after enemy artillery has been knocked out. As is often their way, military men last week seemed to have swung from one extreme to another. Perhaps one result of the swing away from tanks was the fact, officially attested last week, that Americans at Kasserine Pass sadly misused their armor by not having enough of it at the right places (see p. 14). Rommel still knew how to use his tanks to win battles.