Armoured Warfare - World War I

World War I

Prior to World War I, horse-mounted cavalry performed what is now the role of tanks; manoeuvring and breaking through enemy infantry to attack army lines of communication in the rear. The entry of machine guns on the battlefield, and the increased occupation of the flanks of armies, leading to closed fronts, made cavalry too vulnerable for this task.

Modern armoured warfare began with the need to break the tactical, operational and strategic stalemates forced on commanders on the Western Front by the effectiveness of entrenched defensive infantry armed with machine guns—known as trench warfare. Under these conditions, any sort of advance was impossibly slow and occasioned massive casualties. The development of the tank was motivated by the need to return manoeuvre to warfare, and the only way to do so was to protect soldiers from small arms (rifle, machine gun) fire as they were moving.

Strategic use of tanks was slow to develop during and immediately after World War I, partly due to technical limitations but also due to the prestige role traditionally accorded to horse-mounted cavalry.

Tanks were first developed in Britain and France, as a way of navigating the barbed wire and other obstacles of no-man's land while remaining protected from machine-gun fire. The manoeuvrability of the tank would at least in theory regain armies the ability to flank enemy lines. In practice, tank warfare during most of World War I was hampered by mechanical failure, limited numbers, and general underutilisation.

British Mark I tanks first went to action at the Somme, on September 15, 1916, but did not manage to break the deadlock of trench warfare. In the Battle of Cambrai (1917) British tanks were more successful, and broke a German trenchline system, the Hindenburg Line.

The German Empire produced very few tanks which only saw action late in the war. Only 20 German A7V tanks were ever produced, compared with the over one thousand British tanks produced in the war. Nonetheless, World War I saw the first tank-versus-tank battle in military history in April 1918 during the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, when a group of three German A7V tanks engaged a group of three British Mark IV tanks.

After the disastrous final German offensive, tanks were used at the Battle of Soissons and the Battle of Amiens, which ended the stalemate imposed by trench warfare on the Western Front, and thus effectively ended the war. Following the First World War, the technical and doctrinal aspects of armoured warfare became more sophisticated and diverged into multiple schools of doctrinal thought.