Armoured Warfare - Interwar Period

Interwar Period

During the 1920s, various British and French commanders who had been associated with the development of the tank were involved in developing the new ideas. The significant split in philosophy can be said to be French and British in schools of thought.

The French school proposed the armoured forces to be largely an infantry supporting arm, demanding heavily armoured tanks armed with infantry support guns, as well as 'cavalry' tanks operating en masse to break through the enemy defensive lines. Although seen as retrograding and reminiscent of WW1 tank use, it advocated a doctrine that included a desire to introduce an element of manoeuvre without expecting collapse of the enemy infantry's defence.

The British school leaned more towards more mobile and lighter designs supported by equally mobile units of infantry, artillery and sappers to replace horse-mounted cavalry. These self-contained motorised detachments would depend on the tank only to provide a way to penetrate the main enemy defensive lines, and would seek to bring about defeat of the enemy by severing the lines of communication and supply as had been done during the previous century.

Both doctrines were faced with the reality during the 1920s that the armoured vehicles (as early road transport in general) were extremely unreliable, and could not be used in sustained operations.

In Britain Liddell Hart wrote extensively on tank warfare and the theories of Colonel Fuller. The British War Office sanctioned the creation of the Experimental Mechanised Force which was formed on May 1, 1927, under Colonel R. J. Collins. The units were entirely mobile and consisted of reconnaissance tankettes and armoured cars, a battalion of 48 Vickers medium tanks, a motorised machine gun battalion, a mechanised artillery regiment, which had one battery of fully tracked self-propelled guns capable of acting as conventional or anti-aircraft artillery (Birch guns), and a motorised company of field engineers. The unit carried out operations on Salisbury Plain and was observed by the other major nations, the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. Although its performance was recognised, it was disbanded in 1928.

All European states (with the exception of Germany), the USA, and Japan, would create their own experimental mechanised forces during the late 1920s, many using either French or British vehicle designs or even directly purchased vehicles, but largely borrowing from both to develop their own doctrines. Early in the 1930s after the rise to power of the Nazi Party in Germany, German officers were sent to observe and participate in development of armoured doctrine in the USSR.

In the 1930s the British Army began the conversion of its cavalry from horse to tanks. Although there were differences on where British military strength should be developed, with the Royal Air Force and Royal Navy being favoured by some in power, all but a few regiments were fully converted by 1939.

In the Soviet Union during the early 1930s Red Army and German officers collaborated in developing use of tanks based on 2nd generation vehicles using turreted main weapons, and experimenting with different chassis configurations and drive trains. One important acquisition for the Red Army turned out to be the purchase of a T3 chassis from an inspired US designer J.W. Christie which served as the basis of the Soviet BT series of fast tanks. The Red Army in particular was much influenced by the theoretical works of Marshal Tukhachevsky who advocated "large scale tank warfare" in the early 1930s His theories died with him with his execution in 1937, but were revived with General Georgy Zhukov's mass tank, artillery, and air attacks at the battles of Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan) in 1939, during the Soviet's undeclared war with Japan. These tactics would be repeated on a larger scale a week later by the German army during their invasion of Poland in September 1939. This development led to the intent by the Red Army to form a massive tank force of thousands of vehicles.

As Europe neared another conflict, doctrinal development of armoured warfare was still in development, opinion split between proponents of infantry as the primary combat arm, and those arguing that infantry was to become the supporting arm of the more mobile armoured forces. Use of armoured warfare was most prominently tested during the Soviet-Japanese Border Wars conflict in 1938.

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