I thought I'd give this a bit of exposure, since I have a bit of a passion for all things tanks. And I know danasan will appreciate it.
This post was inspired by a few other websites which have done something similar.
Credits will be given at end of post.
I'll go into a bit of history of tanks first:
Apart from Leonardo da Vinci's drawing of a round, tank like armoured wagon, the first description of a tank-like vehicle and its usefulness in trench warfare is found in an H.G. Wells short story, "The Land Ironclads", in the
Strand Magazine, December 1903. Some eight years later, in 1911, the first two practical tank designs were developed independently by Austrian engineering officer Günther Burstyn and Australian civil engineer Lancelot de Mole.
Burstyn designed his tank with a sprung suspension and armed with a single gun located in a revolving turret - a design quite similar to modern tanks - but he was unable to design a track that could carry the weight of the vehicle and propel it at reasonable speed. He submitted his idea of a "land torpedo boat" to the Military Technical Committee in Vienna but the idea was rejected as lacking sufficient merit; he did, however manage to patent his invention (Zl. 252 815 DRP).[7][8]
Around the same time de Mole designed "a tracked armoured vehicle" and sent his sketches to the British War Office. His idea was rejected, but after the Great War the British royal commission awarded de Mole £965 for expenses, and in 1920 he was appointed C.B.E.[8][9]
Landship development, originally conducted by the British Navy under the auspices of the Landships Committee was sponsored by the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill and proceeded through a number of prototypes, importantly among them the Little Willie, designed by William Ashbee Tritton and Walter Gordon Wilson as the first-ever completed tracked tank prototype vehicle, culminating in the Mark I tank prototype, named
Mother.[10]
The "tank" moniker was the consequence of a security strategy during development. Staff was told that the devices were to be water carriers for use in the Middle East. The workers gave the machine the logical nickname "tank" and the name stuck. The first tank to engage in battle was designated
D1, a British Mark I, during the Battle of Flers-Courcellette on 15 September 1916.
In contrast to World War II, Germany fielded very few tanks during World War I, with only 15 of the A7V type being produced in Germany during the war.[12] The first tank versus tank action took place on 24 April 1918 at Villers-Bretonneux, France, when three British Mark IVs met one German A7V.
Mechanical problems, poor mobility and piecemeal tactical deployment limited the military significance of the tank in World War I and the tank did not fulfil its promise of rendering trench warfare obsolete. Nonetheless, it was clear to military thinkers on both sides that tanks would play a significant role in future conflicts.
In the interwar period tanks underwent further mechanical development and, in terms of tactics, J.F.C. Fuller's doctrine of spearhead attacks with massed tank formations was the basis for work by Heinz Guderian in Germany, Percy Hobart in Britain, Adna R. Chaffee, Jr. in the U.S., Charles de Gaulle in France, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky in the USSR. All came to similar conclusions, but in the Second World War only Germany would initially put the theory into practice on a large scale, and it was their superior tactics and French blunders, not superior weapons, that made blitzkrieg so successful in May 1940.[13] For information regarding tank development in this period, see tank development between the wars.
Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union all experimented heavily with tank warfare during their clandestine and “volunteer” involvement in the Spanish Civil War, which saw some of the earliest examples of successful mechanised combined arms—such as when Republican troops, equipped with Soviet-supplied medium tanks and supported by aircraft, eventually routed Italian troops fighting for the Nationalists in the seven-day Battle of Guadalajara in 1937.
World War II was the first conflict where armoured vehicles were critical to success on the battlefield and in this period the tank developed rapidly as a weapon system. During the invasion of Poland, the Panzer II and the captured Czechoslovakian Panzer 38(t) light tanks predominated. The Somua S35 and Char B1 in the French Army and the Panzer III and Panzer IV medium tanks appeared in numbers during the Battle of France, while the North African Campaign brought the British Crusader and Matilda into combat with the panzers. In Operation Barbarossa, the Wehrmacht encountered the Soviet T-34, which set the pattern for tank design for the rest of the century. By the time of the Invasion of Normandy, the Germans were fielding heavier Panther and Tiger tanks against the Allied M4 Medium (named the Sherman by the British). By the final stages of the war, an arms race in heavy armour produced tanks like the Tiger II and Iosif Stalin, as well as aborted super-heavy tank projects like the Maus, Tortoise, and T28. But it was development of medium tanks that would lead to the main battle tank of the Cold War.
During World War II, the tactics and strategy of deploying tank forces underwent a revolution. Heinz Guderian, father of the German panzer forces, said "Where tanks are, the front is", and this concept became a reality in World War II. Following the Invasion of Poland where tanks performed in a more traditional role in close cooperation with infantry units, in the Battle of France deep independent armoured strategic penetrations were executed by the Germans, a tactic later called blitzkrieg or 'lightning war'. Early war German tanks sacrificed firepower and protection for mobility and reliability. Blitzkrieg made use of innovative combined arms tactics and radios in all of the tanks to provide command and control which made them more effective tank for tank than their Allied opponents, despite the Allied machines being more than a match for the panzers one-on-one. The French Army, with tanks equal or superior to the German tanks in both quality and quantity, employed a linear defensive strategy to which the armoured cavalry units were made subservient. The French also had poor command and control systems, lacking radios in many of their tanks and headquarters. In accordance with blitzkrieg tactics, German tanks bypassed enemy strongpoints and could radio for close air support to destroy them, or leave them to the infantry. A related development, mechanised infantry, allowed some of the troops to keep up with the tanks and create highly mobile combined arms forces.
The word
tank was first applied to the British "landships" in 1915, before they entered service, to keep their nature secret. There are at least three possible explanations of the precise origin of the term:
- One is it first arose in British factories making the hulls of the first battle tanks: workmen and possible spies were to be given the impression they were constructing mobile water containers or tanks for the British Army, hence keeping the production of a fighting vehicle secret.
- Another is the term was first used in a secret report on the new motorised weapon presented to Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, by British Army Lt.-Col. Ernest Swinton. From this report, three possible terms emerged: cistern, motor-war car, and tank. Apparently tank was chosen due to its linguistic simplicity.
- Perhaps the most compelling story comes from Churchill's authoritative biography. To disguise the device, drawings were marked "water carriers for Russia." When it was pointed out this might be shortened to "WCs for Russia," the drawings were changed to "water tanks for Russia." Eventually the weapon was just called a tank.
We start with a French tank, The FT-17, known as the first "modern tank," was designed by French car manufacturer Louis Renault during World War I. On average, it could move at the swift speed of 4-5 miles per hour! A young Captain Dwight D. Eisenhower trained with such tanks (without the machine guns) at Camp Colt on the Gettysburg Battlefield.
Next, we have a cutaway of a M4 Sherman Tank:
The
M4 Sherman, formally
Medium Tank, M4, was the primary
tank used by the
United States during
World War II. Thousands were also distributed to the Allies, including the
British Commonwealth and
Soviet armies, via
lend-lease. In the
United Kingdom, the M4 was named after
Union General
William Tecumseh Sherman, following the British practice of naming their American-built tanks after famous
American Civil War generals. Subsequently the British name found its way into common use in the U.S.
The Sherman evolved from the
Grant and Lee medium tanks, which had an unusual side-
sponson mounted 75 mm gun. It retained much of the previous mechanical design, but added the first American main 75 mm gun mounted on a fully traversing turret, with a
gyrostabilizer enabling the crew to fire with reasonable accuracy while the tank was on the move.
[4] The designers stressed mechanical reliability, ease of production and maintenance, durability, standardization of parts and ammunition in a limited number of variants, and moderate size and weight. These factors made the Sherman superior in some regards, to the earlier German
light and
medium tanks that had swept across Europe in the
blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939-41, and which still made up the majority of the German armor—albeit usually in up-gunned and up-armored variants—forces in the later stages of the war. The Sherman ended up being produced in large numbers and formed the backbone of most Allied offensives, starting in late 1942.
The original Shermans were able to defeat the relatively small German tanks such as the Panzer III and IV they faced when first deployed in
North Africa. Later, they found themselves more evenly matched against the newer up-gunned and up- armored
Pz.Kpfw. IV medium tanks. Many models were outmatched by the 45 ton
Panther tank and wholly inadequate against the armor and range of the 56 ton
Tiger I and later 72 ton
Tiger II heavy tanks, suffering high casualties against their heavier armor and more powerful 88 mm cannons. Mobility, mechanical reliability and sheer numbers, supported by growing superiority in supporting
fighter-bombers and
artillery, offset these disadvantages. Later versions of the Sherman introduced 76 mm guns, giving them better armor
penetration than the original 75 mm gun, though still insufficient at range against late war German heavy tanks.
Technical Features of M4 Sherman
Length: 5.84m
Width: 2.62 m
Height: 2.74 m
Weight: 30.3 tons
Engine: Patt & Whitney air-cooled, fuel gas.
Proporciom Power / weight 14 hp / ton
Veloccidad: 38.5 kph
Range: 193 km
Armament:
75 mm gun M3 L/40
Browning .30 cal machine gun to point the canyon
Browning .30 cal antiaircraft gun, sometimes a .50 cal.
Types of ammunition:
Crew: 5
Armor: 62 mm
Next up we have the
Panzer IV
The Panzerkampfwagen IV (PzKpfw IV), commonly known as the Panzer IV was a tank developed by Nazi Germany and used extensively in World War II. Car was originally designed as a means to support the infantry, working together with the anti-tank Panzer III.
Later, they improved their armor and weapons and assumed the role of active combat tank. The Panzer IV was the most common German tank of World War II, and was used as the basis for other combat vehicles, such as mobile tank destroyer and antiaircraft artillery. After the war was built approximately 9,000 Panzer IV.
Technical Features
Nationality: Germany
Crew: 5
Length: 5.89 m
Width: 2.88 m
Height: 2.68 m
Armor: 80 m
Speed: 40km / h
Range: 300km
Weight: 23Tn
Weapons
Main Armament: 75 mm Cannon KwK 40 L/48
Secondary Armament: 2 x 7.92 mm MG34
Next up we have a WW1 Tank, the A7V:
The
A7V was a
tank introduced by Germany in 1918, near the end of
World War I. One hundred vehicles were ordered during the spring of 1918, but only 21 were delivered. It was nicknamed "
The Moving Fortress" by the British because of the shape of the hull. They saw action from March to October of that year, and were the only tanks produced by Germany in World War I to see operational use
The tank's name was derived from that of its parent organization,
Allgemeines Kriegsdepartement, 7. Abteilung, Verkehrswesen. In German the tank was called
Sturmpanzer-Kraftwagen (roughly "assault armoured motor vehicle").
The A7V was 7.34 metres (24.1 ft) long, 3 metres (9.8 ft) wide, and the maximum height was 3.3 metres (11 ft). The tank had 20 mm of steel plate at the sides and 30 mm at the front; however the steel was not hardened
armour plate, which reduced its effectiveness. It was thick enough to stop machine gun and rifle fire, but not larger calibres. This offered protection comparable to the thinner armour of other tanks of the period, which used hardened steel.
The crew normally consisted of up to sixteen soldiers and two officers[
clarification needed]: commander, driver, mechanic, mechanic/signaller, twelve infantrymen (six machine gunners, six loaders), and two artillerymen (main gunner and loader).
The A7V was armed with six 7.92 mm
MG08 machine guns and a 5.7 cm Cockerill-Nordenfelt fortification gun mounted at the front. Between forty and sixty cartridge-belts, each of 250 rounds, were carried as well as 180 shells for the main gun, split 90:54:36 between canister, antitank, and explosive. These were the official figures, up to 300 rounds for the main gun were actually stowed.
The "
female" variant had two more machine guns in place of the main gun. It is not entirely clear how many started this way or were converted. Some sources say only chassis number 501 saw combat as a female.
Next we have the T-34 and the T-34-85:
As you can see, the T-34 does not have ammo boxes in the Turret.
The
T-34 was a
Soviet medium tank produced from 1940 to 1958. Although its
armour and armament were surpassed by later tanks of the era, it has been often credited as the most effective, efficient and influential design of
World War II.
[4] First produced at the
KhPZ factory in Kharkov (
Kharkiv,
Ukraine), it was the mainstay of Soviet
armoured forces throughout World War II, and widely exported afterwards. It was the most-produced tank of the war, and the second most-produced tank of all time, after its successor, the
T-54/55 series.
[5] In 1996, T-34 variants were still in service in at least 27 countries.
The T-34 was developed from the
BT series of
fast tanks and was intended to replace both the BT-5 and BT-7 tanks and the
T-26 infantry tank in service. At its introduction, it was the tank with the best balanced attributes of firepower, mobility, protection and ruggedness, although initially its battlefield effectiveness suffered from the unsatisfactory
ergonomic layout of its crew compartment, scarcity of
radios, and poor
tactical employment. The two-man
turret-crew arrangement required the commander to aim and fire the gun, an arrangement common to most Soviet tanks of the day; this proved to be inferior to three-man (commander, gunner, and loader) turret crews of German Panzer III and Panzer IV tanks.
The design and construction of the tank were continuously refined during the war to enhance effectiveness and decrease costs, allowing steadily greater numbers of T-34s to be fielded. In early 1944, the improved T-34-85 was introduced, with a more powerful 85 mm gun and a three-man turret design. By the war's end in 1945, the versatile and cost-effective T-34 had replaced many
light and
heavy tanks in service, and accounted for the majority of
Soviet tank production. Its evolutionary development led directly to the T-54/55 series of tanks, built until 1981 and still operational as of 2010 and which itself led to the
T-62,
T-72 and
T-90 tanks which, along with several Chinese tanks based on the T-55, form the backbone of many of the world's armies even today.
The T-34 was among the most important weapons systems in the Red Army in World War II. At the time it was first fielded in 1940, commentators considered one of the finest tank designs in the world. By mid-war, the T-34 no longer technically outclassed its opponents, but it remained effective in combat.
As the T-43 was cancelled, the Soviet command made the difficult decision to retool the factories to produce a new model of T-34 with a turret ring enlarged from 1,425 mm (56 in) to 1,600 mm (63 in), allowing a larger turret to be fitted. The T-43's turret design was hurriedly adapted by V. Kerichev at the
Krasnoye Sormovo Factory to fit the T-34. The resulting new T-34-85 tank had a much better gun and finally, a three-man turret with
radio (which had previously been in the hull). Now the commander needed only to command the tank, leaving the operation of the gun to the gunner and the loader. Another very significant piece of equipment was the
Mk.4 observation periscope copied from the British and Polish pre-war design, permitting the commander an all-around field of view, which was mounted on the turret roof.
Rear view of a T-34-85. In the centre is a circular transmission access hatch, flanked by exhaust pipes, MDSh
smoke canisters on the hull rear, and extra fuel tanks on the hull sides.
Overall production slowed down somewhat while the new tank started its production run. Although a T-34-85 was still not a match for a Panther, the improved firepower made it much more effective than before. The decision to improve the existing design instead of tooling up for a new one allowed the Soviets to manufacture tanks in such numbers that the difference in capabilities could be considered insignificant. In May 1944, the Wehrmacht had only 304 Panthers operating on the
Eastern Front, while the Soviets had increased T-34-85 production to 1,200 tanks per month.
Next we have the IS-2 Tank:
IS-3 with T-10 Turret: ammo not all round but only to the right and rear:
The
Iosif Vissarionovich tank (or
IS tank, also known as the
Joseph Stalin tank), was a
heavy tank developed by the
Soviet Union during
World War II and first used in the Kursk area in September 1943. The tanks in the series are also sometimes called
JS or
***1048;***1057; tanks.
The heavy tank was designed with thick armour to counter the
German 88 mm guns, and carried a main gun that was capable of defeating the German
Tiger and
Panther tanks. It was mainly a breakthrough tank, firing a heavy
high-explosive shell that was useful against entrenchments and bunkers. The IS-2 was put into service in April 1944, and was used as a spearhead in the
Battle of Berlin by the
Red Army in the final stage of the war.
The IS-122 prototype replaced the IS-85, and began mass production as the IS-2. The 85 mm guns could be reserved for the new T-34-85 medium tank, and some of the IS-1s built were rearmed before leaving the factory, and issued as IS-2s.
The main production model was the
IS-2, with the powerful A-19. It was slightly lighter and faster than the heaviest KV model 1942 tank, with thicker front armour and a much-improved turret design. The tank could carry thicker armour than the KV series, while remaining lighter, due to the better layout of the armour envelope. The KV's armour was less well-shaped and featured heavy armour even on the rear, while the IS series concentrated its armour at the front. The IS-2 weighed about the same as a German Panther and was lighter than the German heavy Tiger tank series. It was slightly lower than both.
While the design was good for its time, Western observers tended to criticize Soviet tanks for their lack of finish and crude construction. The Soviets responded that it was warranted considering the need for wartime expediency and the typically short battlefield life of their tanks.
Early IS-2s can be identified by the 'stepped' front hull casting with its small, opening driver's visor. The early tanks lacked gun tube travel locks or antiaircraft machine guns, and had narrow mantlets.
IS-2.
Next we have the Ferdinand, later renamed the Elefant:
notes: rear - ammo, above - crew, bottom (from left to right) - electric engine, fuel tank, engine.
Another schematic of Ferdinand but it's huge to post here: http://armor.kiev.ua/wiki/images/7/7f/Ferd_3.png
The
Elefant (
German "elephant") was a
"schwerer Panzerjäger" (
heavy tank destroyer) of the German
Wehrmacht used in small numbers in
World War II. It was a built in 1943 under the name
Ferdinand, after its designer
Ferdinand Porsche. In 1944, after modification of the existing vehicles, they were renamed
Elefant. The official German designation was
Panzerjäger Tiger (P) and the ordnance inventory designation was
Sd. Kfz. 184.
Next we have the Panther:
Images are too big so links as follows:
Link 1
Link 2
And the Jagdpanther:
The
Jagdpanther (German: "hunting
panther") was a
tank destroyer built by
Nazi Germany during
World War II based on the chassis of the
Panther tank. It entered service late in the war (1944) and saw service on the Eastern and Western fronts. Many military historians consider the
Jagdpanther to be one of the best tank destroyers of the war due to the combination of the very powerful
8.8 cm KwK 43 cannon and the characteristically excellent armor and suspension of the
Panther chassis.
Next we have the KV-1S:
The KV-1 S was designed by N. F. Shashmurin.2 Armor was reduced to make tank faster as a common complaint from the front was that the KV-1 wasn't manoueverable.2
The armor was made thinner and the turret made smaller.1 A vision cupola was added to turret.2
Improvements
Transmission, cooling, and lubrication systems were improved.1,2
The KV-1-S had a new gearbox and main clutch installed.1
Production
KV-1 S: 1,233, 1,3701
Production: Autumn 1942 - 19432, August 1942 - late 19431
1940: 3342
1941: 1,2322
1942: 1302, 7801
1943: 4521,2
Usage
Kursk
The 53rd Guards and 57th Army Heavy Tank Brigades were equipped with KV-1-Ss at Kursk and took part in the heavy fighting from July 12 - 14, 1943.1
Berlin
It is not known for sure but there were reports of KV-1-Ss taking part in Berlin during the operations to take the city in April - May 1945.1
KV-1S