To illustrate the first of the four circles of the national defence perimeterThis week, Athéna has chosen to tell the story of a piece of equipment that has been an integral part of the imagination of warfare for 107 years: the battle tank.
1916: THE FIRST TANKS SOW TERROR IN GERMAN LINES
In the early 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci was already designing tank prototypes. At the beginning of the 20th century, the French general staff, preferring horse-drawn vehicles, rejected the project of artillery captain Léon Levavasseur, the first in history to combine armour, cannon and tracked traction. So it was not until the outbreak of a world war that the first battle tanks finally realised a dream that was almost as old as war itself: to be able to advance under enemy fire while firing and remaining protected. In the middle of the conflict, their arrival in the German trenches was a resounding success. These pioneering machines, the Mark I, were British and kept the name "tanks" because their creators had disguised their top-secret design as a simple project for self-propelled water tanks intended for use in Mesopotamia. Rejected by the Minister for War, Lord Kitchener, the programme had seen the light of day thanks to the insistence of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
Weighing more than 28 tonnes on the scales, housing eight soldiers under its armoured shell measuring almost 10 m long by 4 m wide by 2.4 m high and armed with two 57 mm Hotchkiss guns, the Mark I was not necessarily a tactical success during its first engagement on 15 September 1916 in the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, one of the episodes of the Battle of the Somme. Of the 49 tanks involved, only 9 reached their objectives. But the damage they caused was considerable and, above all, they caused panic in the enemy trenches.
"A CROCODILE IS CRAWLING INSIDE OUR LINES!
In "Soldats de France" (the magazine of the Chair of General Tactics and Military History of the French Army)[1]historian François Cochet quotes an edifying testimony[2] on the reaction of German soldiers to a Mark I, south of Courcelette: "A man came running up on the left: "There's a crocodile crawling inside our lines!" The unfortunate man had lost his head. He had just seen a tank for the first time and had equated this huge, rearing, tilting machine with a monster. The enemy had brought a tank into our lines, a new fighting machine, the existence of which we had not suspected and against which we had no defence. Shooting it with a rifle was like shooting it with a blowpipe. Professor Cochet's comment: "A particularly impressive and terrifying material and psychological shock.
On the French side, from the start of the war in 1914, the General Artillery Committee finally realised that the Levavasseur project of 1903 could be useful. The Schneider CA1 tank would be the
the first armoured vehicle to fly the French flag, on 16 April 1917, for the Chemin des Dames offensive, with mixed tactical success but, once again, a major psychological impact. It was not until the famous Renault FT tank, launched into battle at the end of May 1918 during the Third Battle of the Aisne, that the first forms of "armoured warfare" really came into being. The 360° swivelling gun turret of the "victory tank" would later be adopted by all tanks, and almost 4,000 examples would equip some thirty countries around the world until 1949.
[1] Issue 19, Spring 2023, p. 10.
[2] Extracted from : Trevor Pidgeon, The Tanks at FlersFairmile Books, 1995, quoted by Henri Ortholan, The tank war, 1916-1918Bernard Giovanangeli éditeur, 2007.
SECOND WORLD WAR: TO EACH HIS OWN ROLE
During the inter-war period, the various powers embarked on the development of tanks, each dedicated to a different role, which were launched on the battlefields of the Second World War:
- Light tankIts weight of less than 10 tonnes and its rather thin armour (10 mm) make it very fast, at around 40 km/h. It was therefore assigned to reconnaissance or pursuit missions, like the German Panzer I and II tanks deployed in the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) at the start of the conflict. On the French side, the Hotchkiss 35 (then 38 and 39) served until the defeat of 1940.
- Medium tankThe most famous examples are the American M3 Lee or Grant and the M4 Sherman, the German Panzer IV and V and the Soviet T34, which weighed between 10 and 20 tonnes and had 30 mm of armour. Improved throughout the war, they were gradually eclipsed after the war by the emergence of the main battle tank concept.
- Infantry tankWith its high firepower and thick armour, it was heavy and slow and was gradually overtaken by more modern tanks and anti-tank artillery over the course of the conflict, even though the British Churchill and Valentine and the Soviet T26 (12,000 examples!) made their mark.
- Heavy tankThe FCM-2C: a direct descendant of the tanks used in the First World War, the FCM-2C weighed over 20 tonnes, mainly because of its thicker armour, and was inevitably slower, but very effective at destroying lighter tanks and fortifications. The French FCM-2C mastodon, described as "super-heavy" with its 68 tonnes and crew of 12 soldiers, was one of the most impressive... but was never really used, its dozen or so examples being bombed or blocked and then scuttled during the Battle of France in 1939-40.
- Breaking tankThe Soviet KV-1: supposed to bring victory simply by being on the battlefield, it has great firepower and thick armour. The Soviet KV-1, of which nearly 3,000 were built, proved highly effective during the conflict. The French FCM F1 super heavy tank, a "fortress" weighing 139 tonnes, 10 m long by 3 m wide and with 120 mm armour, designed to break through the Siegfried Line, was limited to a single prototype because of the defeat in 1940.
- Fast chariot (or cavalry): called cruiser tank by the British people who designed it, it is the a real innovation in tank design at the start of the Second World War. Intended to operate independently of infantry tanks and breakaway tanks, because it was more agile and faster, it eventually found itself overtaken, as the conflict progressed, by the increased speed of heavier, better armoured tanks. But this concept would inspire the next generation of tanks: the main battle tank. Examples: Covenanter, Cruisader, Comet, Centurion...
POST-WAR AND TODAY: THE LECLERC MAIN BATTLE TANK
The main lesson of the Second World War when it came to tanks was that mission-specific tanks were often powerless in battle situations for which they were not designed. At the start of the Cold War, the major powers came to the same conclusion, and merged the concepts of breaker tank, infantry tank, fast tank and tank hunter (an anti-tank vehicle) into a single one: the main battle tank, or main battle tank, or universal tank. The idea is to combine thick armour, fast speed and significant firepower: solidity, speed and aggressiveness.
The British Centurion, which entered service in 1946, was the first of its kind. By the early 1970s, most armies were equipped with them. In November 1990, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) defined the battle tank as follows, in its Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe :
"The term "battle tank" means a self-propelled armoured fighting vehicle, which has high firepower, obtained primarily from a direct-fire main gun at high muzzle velocity, necessary to engage armoured and other targets, which has high all-terrain mobility, which provides a high degree of self-protection, and which is not primarily designed or equipped to transport combat troops. Such armoured vehicles are used as the main weapon system of tank formations and other armoured formations of land forces. Battle tanks are tracked armoured fighting vehicles that have an unladen weight of at least 16.5 tonnes and are armed with a gun of at least 75 millimetres calibre that can rotate 360 degrees. In addition, any wheeled armoured combat vehicle that enters service and meets all the other criteria mentioned above is also considered to be a battle tank."
THE LECLERC HITS MOVING TARGETS ON THE MOVE
Since 1946, dozens of models have been designed by around twenty countries. In the 1960s, the second generation included protection against nuclear, bacteriological and chemical weapons; the third, which arrived in the 1970s and is still in service today, is gradually adding digital sighting systems to improve firepower, composite armour and thermal imaging.
The French Leclerc tank falls into this category. The successor to the AMX-30, a great success of French industry that is still used by a number of countries, the Leclerc has been exported much less, because it was developed too late compared with its competitors: apart from France, only the United Arab Emirates and Jordan use it. In comparison, the German Leopard 2 is used in 23 countries.
Designed by Nexter (formerly GIAT Industries), the Leclerc entered service in 1993 and is currently the only vehicle in service with the French army, with 220 currently in service. With a length of 6.9 m and a weight of 54 to 57 tonnes depending on the version, it reaches speeds of 70 km/h on the road, 60 km/h on land and, despite its weight, 32 km/h in less than 5 seconds. The automatic ammunition loading system of its 120 mm gun means that it requires a crew of just 3 soldiers (tank commander, driver and turret operator), compared with 4 in other tanks. Its ability to load and also to fire while rolling at fixed or moving targets up to 4,000 m is unique compared with its rivals. In short, the Leclerc combines speed, mobility and precision, making it one of the best tanks in the world today.
No longer produced since 2008, but scheduled for service until 2040, it is currently being modernised ("XLR" version) for integration in the Scorpion digitised combat system. The first XLRs are expected at the end of the year.
HORIZON 2040: THE MGCS, A COMPLEX FRANCO-GERMAN PROJECT
In 2017, France and Germany officially announced the launch of the development of the Main Land Combat System (MGCS). Main Ground Combat System). Planned to succeed the Leclerc and Leopard 2 around 2035-2040, this 'augmented' tank is expected to use artificial intelligence and nano-technologies to integrate into the Titan programme (successor to the Scorpion) with other air or land vehicles, while potentially carrying robots or drones.
"Should", because since 2017, the programme has suffered a number of setbacks. Initially supported 50/50 by Nexter and its German counterpart Krauss-Maffei-Wegmann (KMW) within the KNDS joint venture, since 2019 it has seen a third operator invite itself into the cockpit, the other German industrialist Rheinmetall. Each company now manages a third of the programme, with Germany taking the political lead.
Since then, the negative signs have been piling up: this year, the German Ministry of Defence announced its intention to order Leopard 2A8s, the latest version of KMW's best-seller, to replace tanks donated to Ukraine. At the same time, Rheinmetall is pushing ahead with its KF-51 Panther, while its management seems to be playing against the MGCS programme...
But that's no problem: politically, the two countries are maintaining their firm intention to bring the project to fruition. On 10 July in Berlin, at a joint press conference with his German counterpart Boris Pistorius, the French Minister for the Armed Forces, Sébastien Lecornu, said of the MGCS: "We want to do it. And we're not doing it just for industrial reasons. We need to define a future to this segment of military equipment.
