Anti-tank warfare

• 1. Introduction

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  Anti-tank warfare began the moment the tank itself appeared on the Western Front in September 1916. German troops were surprised by the armored machines; their General Staff was not. Within months, the German Army was already working to kill the very weapon that had been designed to kill them. What followed across the next century was a technological arms race played out in the mud of Flanders, the deserts of North Africa, the steppes of the Soviet Union, and the streets of modern cities. How did armies learn to stop a machine that was built specifically to be unstoppable? And what happens when the weapons designed to kill tanks start killing the very doctrines that sent the tanks forward in the first place?

• 2. The Tank's Weakness

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  The first British tanks of 1916 carried armor only 6 to 12 mm thick. That was enough to stop rifle fire and shell fragments, but a near miss from field artillery could disable or destroy the vehicle outright. If the fuel tank ruptured, the crew could be incinerated. Communication was equally primitive. There was no way for tank crews to talk to the infantry walking alongside them, and radios were not yet portable or robust enough to be mounted inside the vehicle. Some Mark IV tanks at Cambrai had Morse Code transmitters installed specifically as messaging vehicles, a workaround that underlines just how improvised the whole enterprise was. German infantry learned quickly that if machine guns could separate the supporting Allied infantry from the advancing tanks, the tanks would push forward alone and become vulnerable to close assault by pioneers and sappers. Attaching a field telephone to the rear of a tank to communicate with following infantry would not even become standard practice until the next war.

• 3. Germany's First Countermeasures

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  Because Germany was the only nation facing enemy tanks in 1916, it was the first to develop practical anti-tank weapons. Three approaches emerged almost simultaneously. Pioneers bound multiple stick grenades together into what was called the Geballte Ladung, or Bundled Charge, and used it to blow off tank tracks at close range. A bolt-action 13 mm rifle, the Mauser 1918 T-Gewehr, gave infantry a stand-off weapon, though it suffered from fouling after only two or three rounds and produced recoil that neither the mechanism nor the rifleman could sustain. The most effective early solution was a 3.7 cm cannon from Rheinmetall, rushed to the front in early 1917 and capable of destroying a tank outright using large-caliber armor-piercing ammunition. The divisional 7.7 cm field guns, already at the front, were also issued special armor-piercing rounds. When disabled tank crews refused to surrender, German forces engaged them with flamethrowers or kept firing mortars until a direct hit ignited an internal fire. The losses to Allied tanks in some operations reached as high as 70 percent of the vehicles that started an attack.

• 4. The Science of Penetration

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  For most of the interwar period, the dominant anti-tank projectile was the armor-piercing kinetic energy shell, which defeated armor by direct physical pressure. Then, in the late 1930s, a different approach was tested: the shaped charge, a concept that traces back to an accidental observation by Professor Charles E. Munroe at the U.S. Torpedo Station in Providence, Rhode Island. Munroe was detonating blocks of explosives on armor plating and noticed that blocks with recessed manufacturing letters cut an imprint of those letters into the steel. The indentation in the explosive surface focused the blast energy, creating what became known as the Munroe Effect. On detonation, a shaped charge produces a high-velocity jet of metal that flows like a liquid under the extreme pressure, penetrating armor hydrodynamically. X-ray diffraction has since confirmed that the metal in this jet actually stays solid throughout. The depth of penetration depends on the length and density of the jet and on the strength of the opposing armor. The discovery drove two further developments: more advanced steel manufacturing for armor, and spaced armor, which could cause the jet to detonate prematurely or at the wrong angle before reaching the main plate.

• 5. Spain as a Laboratory

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  The Spanish Civil War of the 1930s gave both Germany and the Soviet Union a preview of what the next war would demand. Wehrmacht officers organized the Nationalist anti-tank defense, integrating guns into obstacle systems designed first to slow a tank attack, then to separate the tanks from their supporting infantry using machine-gun and mortar fire, and finally to force the remaining armor into head-on engagements where artillery could finish the job. Purpose-designed anti-tank mines were used in combat for the first time, destroying tank tracks and forcing engineers to clear them on foot. The delay bought time for Nationalist field artillery to engage the Soviet-supplied tanks. For the Republicans, those tanks were the lightly armored Soviet models, and Soviet tanks armed with 45 mm guns had no trouble destroying the German light tanks sent to oppose them. A Soviet tank battalion sent to aid the Republican cause was nearly wiped out in a single engagement. The lesson landed at Stavka just in time. Almost simultaneously, German officers and Red Army planners had been secretly cooperating on offensive tank tactics in the Soviet Union since the early 1930s. In Germany those ideas culminated in Blitzkrieg. In the Soviet Union they became deep battle doctrine, tested successfully at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol.

• 6. World War II: Escalation

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  Two factors delayed serious Allied anti-tank development at the outset of the Second World War: the resignation of France and Britain to Poland's defeat, and the subsequent shock of the German offensive in the West. The Red Army, by contrast, had excellent anti-tank designs either in late development or recently rejected as unnecessary; those could now be rushed into production. Of the iconic Soviet weapons that emerged, two were built exclusively for anti-tank purposes: the T-34 tank, one of the most-produced tanks in history, and the Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft, which crews called the flying tank and which was one of the most-produced aircraft of any kind. The Il-2 carried two 23 mm cannons, unguided rockets, and up to 2.5 kg shaped-charge anti-tank PTAB bombs, and its airframe was armored to let pilots approach at very low altitude through small-arms and machine-gun fire. German anti-tank gun calibers grew in parallel: from the 37 mm weapon its own crews nicknamed the Panzeranklopfgerat, or tank door knocker, for revealing its position without penetrating Soviet armor, to 50 mm, then 75 mm, then the famous 88 mm by 1943. The Red Army answered with 45 mm, 57 mm, 76.2 mm, and 100 mm guns deployed in layered defense. At Kursk, the Red Army deployed more artillery regiments than infantry regiments, and towed gun densities reached more than 20 guns per kilometer of defended front.

• 7. Missiles and Modern Threats

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  Guided anti-tank missiles appeared in a helicopter role when the French mounted SS.11 wire-guided missiles on Alouette II helicopters in the late 1950s. The first man-portable guided missile to enter service was the Soviet AT-3 in 1961. The United States was among the last major powers to develop one, fielding the BGM-71 TOW in 1970. The 1973 Yom Kippur War shook tank designers worldwide when Soviet first-generation wire-guided missiles, used by Egyptian forces against Israeli armor, inflicted heavy casualties and triggered a genuine crisis of confidence about the tank's future. The RPG-7, developed from the German Panzerfaust 150 by way of the Soviet RPG-2, became one of the most widely used anti-tank weapons on earth, favored especially by irregular forces. Its successor, the RPG-29 Vampir, later damaged Merkava IV, Challenger 2, and M1 Abrams tanks in Middle Eastern conflicts. Modern tandem-warhead systems like the FGM-148 Javelin address reactive armor by firing a first warhead to detonate it, followed immediately by a second that defeats the underlying steel. During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, drones and loitering munitions added a new dimension, hunting and destroying tanks from above in a way that required no ground-based crew within range of the target. The Bell AH-1 Cobra, which entered mass production in 1966 as the first purpose-built attack helicopter, was equipped with TOW missiles in 1973. Active protection systems, including the Russian Arena and the Israeli Iron Fist, now intercept incoming projectiles in midair, suggesting that the contest between armor and the weapons designed to defeat it has no end in sight.