Tank The Definitive Visual History of Armored Vehicles

The stalemate of trench warfare in World War I inspired the British invention of the tank. Self-propelled gun-carrying machines that were wrapped in armor and able to traverse broken ground promised to break the static trench deadlock and restore battlefield mobility. This did not quite happen; tanks played an important but not decisive role in the Allied victory. Nonetheless, their future remained bright.

What exactly their role in future war would be, however, became a subject of interwar controversy. At issue was whether tanks would remain the infantry support weapons they had been in the war, or whether they would become the core of new mobile formations capable of decisive victory. Western democracies opted for a mix of the two, while authoritarian regimes in Italy, Germany, and Russia built large numbers of tanks and created independent armored forces.

The opening campaigns of World War II seemed to settle the issue in favor of armored decisiveness. Main battle tanks became bigger and better, their armor thickening and their guns growing ever more powerful; in armored formations they became the arbiters of battle, as well as symbols of military might for civilians and military alike.

Even as tanks grew more formidable during the later 20th century, however, their battlefield supremacy has been challenged by a flood of new, relatively cheap and effective antitank weapons. The changing character of war has further undermined tank primacy. As the clash of mass armies in so-called conventional warfare has given way to smaller scale, more irregular warfare, tanks have lost their central role.

Tank formations nonetheless persist as important components of national armed forces everywhere. Further improvements in armor, weaponry, electronics, and general capabilities have continued, with remotely controlled unmanned vehicles high on many nations’ wish lists. A century after the tank’s 1916 battlefield debut, it remains a potent symbol of military power.