Tanks in World War II

• 1. Introduction

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  Tanks in World War II were not merely machines of war. They became the decisive instrument around which entire military doctrines were rebuilt, economies were bent, and battles were won or lost. In the summer of 1940, a single French Char B1 heavy tank named the Eure attacked a column of German armored vehicles lying in ambush at Stonne. It destroyed thirteen German tanks, all Panzer IIIs and Panzer IVs, in the course of a few minutes, then returned safely despite being hit 140 times. That same armor, those same guns, belonged to a French force that was losing the war catastrophically. How could the most heavily armored tanks in the field belong to the side being overrun?

  The answer has nothing to do with steel. It has to do with radios, doctrine, and the speed of thought on a battlefield. By the time Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, its tanks were technically inferior to many of their opponents. Yet by 1941, German armored formations had torn through France, the Low Countries, and deep into Soviet territory. Understanding how that was possible requires looking at the full arc of tank development across the major powers, and asking why the machine that Britain invented in 1916 came to be mastered, at least initially, by everyone else.

• 2. Doctrine Over Steel

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  Almost 80 percent of French tanks went into battle without radios in 1940. That single fact explains more about the fall of France than any comparison of armor thickness or gun caliber. French battle doctrine was built around slow, deliberate movement conforming to pre-planned orders. Radios were simply not needed at most levels. German doctrine, by contrast, was built around speed, flexibility, and mission-type tactics where lower-level commanders made real-time decisions. Every German tank carried a radio, providing what the source describes as "unmatched command and control for flexible employment."

  Germany concentrated its tanks and motorized infantry into Panzer divisions. This approach, popularly called Blitzkrieg, combined tanks with mobile infantry and air support in a way that French tanks, outclassing their German counterparts in firepower and armor, could not counter. French tanks were often parceled out in small groups across a broad front rather than concentrated for a breakthrough. By 1943, two-way radio had become nearly universal across all armies, a direct lesson absorbed from the early German successes.

• 3. The Weight Race

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  In 1939, most tanks carried maximum armor no thicker than 30 mm and guns no larger than 37-47 mm. By 1945, the typical medium tank ran over 60 mm of armor and mounted guns in the 75-85 mm range. Weight climbed from around 20 tonnes to 30-45 tonnes for medium tanks. Light tanks, which had dominated most armies at the start of the war, gradually disappeared from front-line service entirely.

  The turret, always considered but not universally adopted before the war, became recognized as essential. A gun mounted in a rotating turret could engage targets in any direction and fire from behind cover with only the turret exposed. A gun mounted in a fixed casemate forced the driver to turn the entire vehicle onto the target, a slower process that became dangerous if the vehicle was immobilized by track damage or engine failure. Even the largest and most powerful of German tank destroyers were found abandoned on battlefields after a battle, having been immobilized by hits to their tracks or front drive sprockets. The vulnerability of the fixed casemate was later systematically exploited by opposing tank forces.

• 4. The T-34 Effect

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  Life magazine wrote in October 1942 that the best tanks in the world were probably the Russian tanks. The T-34 had entered service in 1940-1941 as the successor to the BT series, carrying a 76.2 mm dual-purpose gun and well-sloped armor that could withstand most German weapons. Its discovery during Operation Barbarossa forced the Germans to reconsider their entire armored force. The Panzer III and Panzer IV, caught off guard, could not penetrate the T-34's armor at normal combat ranges while the T-34's gun could go through all German tanks.

  The T-34 had a critical weakness: its crew of four meant the tank commander doubled as the gunner. Unlike French tank commanders who had to load their own guns, the Soviet commander was spared that task, but his attention was still divided between aiming and scanning the battlefield. German tank commanders, free to observe and direct, held a consistent tactical advantage even when outgunned.

  When the Soviets upgunned the T-34 in 1943 to create the T-34-85, they installed a larger turret with an 85 mm gun capable of holding three crew members. This finally freed the tank commander to focus entirely on battlefield awareness. The T-34's chassis proved so adaptable that production of nearly all other Soviet tank types was halted at its peak, directing all available resources toward this one platform.

• 5. American Mass

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  During the Louisiana Maneuvers in September 1941, the US Army used trucks with the word "tank" painted on their sides. After Pearl Harbor, even the 10th Armored Division had no tanks, so crews trained by marching in formation on roads, executing orders as if they were in armored vehicles. Within months, American automobile factories had converted entirely to military production. By February 1942, companies such as General Motors and Chrysler were applying mass-production methods to tank manufacturing. The United States built as many tanks in the first half of 1942 as in all of 1941, with 1,500 completed in May 1942 alone.

  The M4 Sherman became the most widely used Allied tank of the war, with approximately 40,000 produced. It was the only tank used by virtually all Allied forces through the Lend-Lease program, equipping American, British, Canadian, French, Polish, and Chinese units. The Soviet Union received about 4,000 M4s, in addition to over 8,000 tanks total from the United States. The Sherman earned grim nicknames: Germans called British soldiers "Tommies" and named the tank "Tommycooker" for its tendency to catch fire when penetrated. A US Army study completed in 1945 found that 60-80 percent of older dry-stowage Shermans burned when their armor was breached, though wet-stowage versions brought that figure down to 10-15 percent.

  Near the war's end, the M26 Pershing arrived as the first operational US heavy tank, mounting a 90 mm gun. Only a small number reached combat in Europe, most notably during the 9th Armored Division's drive to seize the Bridge at Remagen.

• 6. Germany's Late Gamble

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  Germany's pre-war plan called for the Panzer III as the main medium tank and the Panzer IV as fire support. When Poland was invaded, only a few hundred of these were available. The invasions of Poland and France were carried out primarily with Panzer I and Panzer II light tanks armed with machine guns and a 20 mm autocannon, supplemented by Czech-designed vehicles such as the Panzer 35(t) and Panzer 38(t) with 37 mm guns. Even in 1941, Panzer III production reached only about a thousand tanks, forcing the continued use of Czech vehicles as substitutes.

  The T-34's appearance forced an improvisational redesign. The Panzer IV, originally a support tank armed with a short-barreled 75 mm howitzer, was refitted with a long-barreled, high-velocity 75 mm gun to counter the Soviet medium tank. Monthly Panzer IV production rose from 39 in 1941 to 83 in 1942, 252 in 1943, and 300 in 1944. The Panther, developed as the new German medium tank, had sloped armor comparable to the T-34's but shared essentially the same engine as the Tiger I while offering better frontal protection and gun penetration at a cost of weaker side armor. The Tiger II, known to Allied troops as the King Tiger, combined a powerful gun with very heavy sloped armor, making it superior to nearly any opponent in a one-on-one engagement; poor mobility and reliability severely limited how it could be used.

  Germany's tendency toward entirely new designs late in the war, rather than upgrading existing models, reduced the number of tanks available to German formations and helped the Red Army consolidate its initiative on the Eastern Front.

• 7. The Smaller Armies

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  Poland was the first nation to face the German Blitzkrieg, and it entered the fight with a tank that outgunned its most common German opponents. The 7TP light tank, a development of the British Vickers 6-ton, carried a 37 mm anti-tank gun and was the world's first diesel-powered tank in production. Only about 132 were built between 1935 and the outbreak of war. The motorized Polish unit that performed the best during the 1939 campaign operated with 16 old Vickers tanks and 4 tankettes, using them in ways that extracted far more from their limited firepower than most units managed.

  Italy fielded tanks roughly comparable to light tanks of other nations. The M15/42, a 15-tonne tank, entered production in January 1943, but was already obsolete by the time it appeared. Italy introduced a unique classification system in 1938, labeling vehicles by category letter, weight in tonnes, and year of acceptance. The resulting designations produced the P26/40, considered heavy by Italian standards at 26 tonnes, which placed it closer in weight to the American medium M4 Sherman at 30 tonnes than to what other nations called a heavy tank.

  Japan built 6,450 tanks between 1931 and 1945, with half produced by the Mitsubishi Company. Steel priority went to the navy and air force, keeping the army short of modern designs. A decisive warning came in 1939 at the Battle of Khalkin-Gol on the Soviet-Mongolian border, where Japanese tanks were badly outclassed. The lesson was recognized too slowly. Most modern Japanese tank designs, such as the Type 3 Chi-Nu medium tank, were deliberately held back from the Pacific campaigns and reserved for a mainland defense against invasion that never came.