Angry Planet - One tank to rule them all

Episode Date: April 4, 2017

War nerds love tanks. The battlefield behemoths drove onto the scene in the early days of World War I, replaced the cavalry and became synonymous with war. But which one is the best? This week on the show, author Steven Zaloga walks us through the ins and outs of armored vehicles. He explains how the French Renault doesn’t get enough credit, how the Sherman came to dominate Europe and how people always forget about the Russians. It’s everything you ever wanted to know about tanks but were afraid to ask on War College this week. How have wire guided missiles changed the game? What’s reactive armor and why does it explode? And what, if any, is the point of tanks in low intensity warfare?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. What's the important element in tank warfare? Is it actually just the hardware, or is it the training in tactics, or is it the human element? On today's show, we get back to basics.

Tanks. Everything you wanted to know, but forgot to ask. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. With us today is Stephen Zilloga. Mr. Zologa is a senior analyst at the Teal Group, an expert on military tech and the author of more books than I could count when I'm, looked him up on Amazon. He's here with us today to talk about those impressive battlefield

behemoths, The Tank. Stephen, thank you so much for joining us. Nice being here. So how many books have you written? Quite honestly, I'm not sure. It's probably in the neighborhood of 200. Part of the issue is that some of them are compilations of other smaller books. And also, quite honestly, I do other publications for various other agencies and things, so it's kind of hard to keep track of precise numbers. And what percentage of that do you think is just about tanks? Probably more than half of my books are about tanks. I also write more conventional military history campaign type books, although as often as not, they involve a certain measure of tank warfare since I tend to concentrate on the Second World War. So inevitably, there's a certain amount

of tank warfare in virtually all of those battles. I also do some writing in aerospace fields. I've done a number of books dealing with missile technology. So what is it about tanks that you think fascinates people? Obviously, it's got its hooks into you. It's an interesting field because it's a dominant technology during 20th century warfare and of course even into the 21st century. So I think that that's what gets people excited. It's a fairly modern, novel technology that really saw it come to maturity during the Second World War. And of course, there's a lot of interest in Second World War history. And so I think inevitably there's a lot of interest in tank history connected with that.

Well, let's dig into that history a little bit. Can you tell us about the origins of the tanks? I'm thinking World War I was really the first time we saw them, right? Yeah, there's actually some antecedents. There's armored vehicles that start appearing, you could say, almost as a early as the American Civil War, and that would start with armored trains, which are actually the most primitive, most dinosaur-like of armored vehicles. Then around the turn of the century, you start to see people putting armor on automobiles leading to the birth of the armored car.

But both the armored car and the armored train are very limited in mobility. The armored train, obviously because of its reliance on railroad tracks. And the armored car, because the early ones are dependent on commercial technology, and they're really very much roadbound. And so when World War I turns from a war of maneuver, as it was in the first months in 1914 during the war, to a stagnated war, a trench war, especially in Western Europe, the armored cars are no longer viable on the battlefield.

They simply can't move across shell-shocked terrain. And so some interest develops in coming up with a vehicle which has the good features, namely the armor protection and the firepower, but which has the ability to get across shell-torn terrain. And that's where the tank comes in, starting roughly in 1916. And so can you elaborate a little bit more on what the original battlefield purpose of these machines was? The problem in World War I was that.

various types of technology crowded out the offensive and turned the war from a mobile war into a more static war. And that would include weapons such as the magazine-fed infantry rifle, certainly the machine gun, and the proliferation of fast-firing field artillery. So what basically happened is that the armed maneuver, the traditional armor maneuver, the cavalry, the horse cavalry, was basically swept off the battlefield. That left the infantry, and the infantry was almost annihilated by these new technologies, which tend to favor the defense. So when infantry tried to stage attacks across open ground,

they were shattered by rifle fire, which in the First World War was much more long-range and fast-firing than in previous wars. Machine guns made the situation even worse, and then field artillery made it almost catastrophic. for the infantry. So there was a need for a technology to overcome the defensive stagnation on the battlefield, and that was the tank. And the reason for that was that the tank could address several of the issues posed by these new weapons. The armored protection of the tank could protect the crew against the most common threats, the rifle fire and the machine gun fire, and its tracked mobility

allowed it to advance across shell-torn terrain, and so it was able to defeat some of the defensive technologies. It could serve as an antidote, for example, against machine gun nests. The mobility, of course, also offered the possibility of restoring a certain measure of mobility to the war, certainly not to the extent of horse cavalry, at least not in the First World War, but as the technology matured, the tanks could certainly return. an arm of mobility to the battlefield, basically a form of armored cavalry. And is there a side in World War I that you would say did tanks better? Who was the dominant tank power?

There were actually two main developers of tanks during World War I. We always think of the British because, of course, the British come up with the first practical battle tank. But the French follow very quickly. In fact, there was a surprising lack of cooperation between the two allies during World War I. Although the British are first and quite successful in 1917, 1918, the French actually has some important innovations, the most important of which was the development of the Reno F.T. tank, which is the antecedent of most modern tanks.

It pioneers the classic layout for a tank, namely driver in the front, turret in the middle, an engine at the back. The British designs, sometimes called rhomboid tanks, were a very archaic design. there were basically a technical dead end. They served quite well in World War I. They accomplished their mission, but the layout was very archaic and not really suitable for further development, whereas the French Reno proved to be the basis for most modern tanks. So when you say that the British were kind of the first to come up with it,

when you look back at all that old technology, what was the first machine that you look at and say, that's the first tank, as we know tanks today? Well, it's hard to say first tank. Actually, the first tank was probably the British tank called Little Willie, but it never really got onto the battlefield. The first practical tank was the British Mark I, which was one of these rhomboid designs. That is, the tracks went all the way around the hull on both sides. It had its armament and sponsonsons on either side of the tank. These were armed with six-pounder guns to begin with, and then later with machine guns. So that's certainly the first tank. The French followed very shortly with a type called the Schneider CA1, which was basically an armored box on tracks.

It was armed with a short 75-millimeter gun and two machine guns. The British Mark I evolved quite quickly through a whole series of tanks, ending towards the end of the war with the Mark 5 star, which was mechanically more robust than the early Mark I, but essentially similar in layout. The French proceeded from the Schneider and another early primitive tank, the Saint-Schimonde, into the Reno F.T. And the Reno was different in a number of respects. One of the important respects was that it was much smaller and therefore cheaper to build. And that was an idea of the head of the French armored force during World War I, the colonel, later General S. Zien, who came up with the idea. He called it the B theory.

rather than have a relatively small number of large cumbersome heavy tanks, he wanted a large, large number of small tanks, which he called the B-swarm, on the grounds that the Germans had already started to come up with countermeasures against tanks, namely moving field guns up into the forward trenches. And so once the field guns got up there, they could certainly destroy the early types of tanks. And so you needed more tanks.

need to be able to overwhelm the small number of field guns up there. And so that was, it's a main contribution to this concept behind the Rain OFT. And that becomes an important element of future tank warfare. Tanks have to be numerous in order to accomplish their mission. You can't use them really very effectively in small numbers because there's any number of technical antidotes to tanks if the tanks are there in very, very small numbers. Right. It becomes a big, huge target, right? Yes, they are. They're not, especially the early tanks. The early tanks are not very well armored. The early tanks typically have about a half inch of armor, which is vulnerable even to weapons such as the early German anti-tank rifles, which is a big, sort of like an elephant

gun firing a 13-millimeter bullet. So if an infantryman can carry an anti-tank rifle, then the tank is in a certain amount of trouble. Needless say, later on, armor becomes thicker, but then, of course, infantry anti-tank weapons become more efficient. So there's this constant interplay between tanks and anti-tank technology once it becomes clear that the tank is going to become an important weapon on the battlefield. Can you give us an idea of what it was like to operate these machines during World War I? How many people were inside? I know it was going to differ depending on which one you're in, but what does it like to be a person inside one of these machines? The early tanks were actually quite terrible as far from the,

ergonomic standpoint from the standpoint of the crew. And I'm going to distinguish between the early British ramboyes and early French tanks like Sanchomon and Schneider and then the later Reno. But the early tanks generally have the engine in the center of the hull, and so the crew is actually working around the engine. So there's a variety of reasons why it's terrible inside the tank. To begin with, you've got tremendous amount of heat, you have engine sound, you have leaking exhaust fumes. And then once battle begins, and you start firing the machine guns and guns, on board the tank, the tank interior begins to fill with cordite. Now, on top of that, the early vision devices, which are simple slits in the armor, they're not very good to begin with.

So when you combine smoke and exhaust fumes and all these other features, it also becomes very difficult to simply operate the tank, to simply see outside and see the targets. So in a sense, there's something like a siege weapon, more than the modern tank. They're not very reliable, they're very hard to fight. They're good for breaking through an initial line of trenches, but they're not very durable. They're very hard for the crew to operate. The crew can only operate in them for a few hours before becoming exhausted. The tank itself becomes mechanically exhausted after traveling very short distances. During most of the early tank battles, probably more than half the tanks don't even survive the first battle, not because of combat problems,

such as enemy guns, but rather simply because of breakdowns and crashing into shell holes and things of that sort. So they're really kind of a one-shot weapon. They're good for about a day of fighting. Now, the Reno FFT is a little bit different. They're much smaller. They only have a two-man crew, a driver, and a commander. They still have some of the problems, although to not quite the same extreme degree, they do have the problems of fumes inside the tank and poor vision devices.

but they are a bit smaller. Their suspension is a little bit better. So they're pointing in the direction of the modern tank. The other important difference is that the Rayno FT, because it's built off of common automotive components, it's more durable. And so RainoFTs could operate for several days before becoming mechanically exhausted.

And that's a very important feature in the evolution of tanks and one that's usually overlooked. After World War I, one of the big issues becomes how can we make tanks durable enough to become a true mobile weapon? That is mobile for more than simply a day. You know, how can they become a weapon more comparable to traditional cavalry? All right, forgive my munitions ignorance. But you said the tanks would often fill up with cordite.

And I thought that they had, that smokeless powder had just kind of been invented around this time, right? because that's a big part of why the machine guns became, you know, actually battlefield capable, right? Do they not have smokeless powder munitions in the tanks yet? They do, but the smokeless powder doesn't mean that there's no fumes from the guns. That simply means that when the gun fires, they don't get this gigantic cloud of smoke out in front of the gun. So it is true that they have a less distinctive form of smoke when they fire, but they still create by-profile. that leach into the inside of the tanks and that are quite poisonous. And quite honestly, that remains a problem even into World War II,

although on World War II tanks, they have recognized the problem, and there's fans inside the tanks, usually up on the turret roof, that are intended to suck out the fumes. But there are significant fumes when guns are firing. Now, that's more the case with a tank than a machine gun being used by an infantry, unit or by a field artillery unit because those weapons are being used out in the open air. And so a lot of the fumes basically get blown away by the wind or dispersed naturally, whereas inside the tank, they tend to be confined. And so that becomes a significant issue during fighting

inside tanks in World War I. All right, Steve, I'm going to pause here for a break. You are listening to Reuters War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. We are talking today with Stephen Ziloga about everything you ever wanted to know about tanks, but we're afraid to ask. We'll be back in just a minute. Hi, thank you for listening to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. Welcome back. We're here with Stephen Zaloga.

We're talking tanks. And Stephen, right before we broke, we had just kind of started to get into World War II. Now, just like you said at the top of the show, when people think tanks, I think in tank combat, they really think World War II. was World War II really the golden age of armored conflict? Well, it was certainly the first war where tanks play a role right from the beginning. And that's because the tank underwent a great deal of technical maturation during the inner war years, especially in the 1930s. There's very little technological development of tanks in the 1920s because nobody has any money.

Most armies are stuck with a large inventory of old World War I tanks. They're not buying much in the way of new tanks. But in the 1930s, as war clouds start brewing, both in Europe and in Asia, there's more development of new tanks. And they start to see combat use actually before the outbreak of World War II. They're using Asia in the conflicts between China and Japan and also in the conflicts between Japan. and Russia or the Soviet Union. But most importantly, they see combat starting around 1936 in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. And that particular conflict is very important because it involves several of the major European powers. It involves the Soviet Union. It involves Germany. And to a lesser

extent, it involves some of the other great powers. It's the first conflict since World War I, where there's large numbers of tanks used and where there's lessens. to be learned. The lessons are oftentimes mislearned, but it's the first time that the modern 1930s tanks are used. And some armies think that the Spanish Civil War proves that anti-tank guns, the modern 37-millimeter anti-tank guns, are going to sweep tanks off the battlefield the same way that machine guns swept cavalry off the battlefield in World War I. But more perceptive observers realize that tanks have demonstrated in Spain something that they didn't demonstrate in World War I, and that is that they could be used to conduct battles or campaigns for more than a single day. There is a number

of campaigns in Spain where tanks participate for days or weeks, and that's a major change. The endurance of the tanks is a major change from the First World War to the Spanish experience. So the the two big powers, Germany and the Soviet Union, continue to put a great deal of reliance on tanks, and they continue to build up their tank force. All right, I'm going to ask you the question that people on the Internet have argued for decades now. Sherman or Panzer? I think it's actually the wrong question. I did a book recently called Armour Champion, which is the subtitle, is the best tanks of World War II.

And the reason I say it's the wrong question is because there's different tanks at different points of the war. And a tank at one point in the war, which might be the best, is terrible at another point in the war. So to give you an example, the Sherman tank in 1942, when it first appears in combat, is one of the best tanks in the world. But I don't think that that argument can be made for the Sherman tank in 1945. So it all depends on what you're talking about as far as the time frame. So when I did that particular book, I broke the war down into several different campaigns or several different periods and took a look at the major combatants there. And so at various points in the war, various tanks are certainly the top design.

So, for example, in the Blitz Creek period, roughly the Battle of Poland in 1939 through the Battle of France in 1940, you can make the argument one way or the other that say the French Samoa S35 is the best or the German Panzer 3 is the best. Now, the other factor that I have to throw in here and one that's usually lacking when describing the best tank is you have to somewhat describe the parameters.

And what I did in that particular book is I described two different value systems, and that is the best tank from the standpoint of the crew, meaning if you had a tank to choose, which one would you choose from the crew's standpoint, and you're probably going to want a strong armor, a very powerful gun. But there's another set of criteria

what I call the commander's best tank. That is the higher level perspective. And at that perspective, it's somewhat different. You don't necessarily want the tank with the best armor or the tank with the best gun, you want the tank that gives you the most battlefield power. And so that starts to involve issues such as the cost of the tank, meaning you want a tank that you can buy in big enough numbers that it has an effect on the battlefield. And number two, you want a tank that's reliable enough that when you start a campaign,

you're going to end the campaign with a lot of tanks still running. So you don't necessarily want a tank that's very, very well armored and has a powerful gun if it costs far too much money, meaning you can't have very many of them. And also there's a very good chance due to the limitations of technology that a big, heavy, powerful tank is also going to be a tank that breaks down very quickly. So by the end of the campaign, you have hardly any of them in use. And so the commander's perspective is very different than the perspective of the perspective of, the tank crew. The tank crew wants to survive. They want to triumph at the local level. The commander, though, is looking at what the tank does for him, what battlefield power it gives to him. And so you're looking for different criteria. And that's why most armies end up adopting a tank that

isn't especially well-armored or well-armed compared to the very high-end tanks. So, for example, the Soviet army adopts the T-34 tank, which in 1941 is actually quite well-armored and quite well-armed, but which by the end of the war is fairly mediocre in those respects. But it's cheap, it's very durable, so it ends up becoming the central element in the red army's armored force. And the same can be said for the Sherman tank. It's not the world's most thickly armored tank. It's not the best armed. but in 1945 it's dominant on the battlefield because there's just thousands of them

and they can be built in very large numbers. Now when you get into the Internet arguments, most of the fanboys and the World Tank players, they want to favor things like Tiger Ones, in the Soviet case, the IS2, Stalin Heavy Tank, things like that. And it's easy to understand why. Things like the Tiger and the IS2 and tanks like that, are extremely well-armored, very survivable.

They have very, very powerful guns, so they're very attractive from that standpoint. But it's oftentimes overlooked that the tiger was hideously expensive, and so less than 2,000 of them were ever built in comparison to tanks like the Sherman and T-34, where they were built in numbers like 50,000. And they were not very reliable. The technology, the automotive technology at the time really was at the cutting edge with tanks like that,

And so they had very poor reliability rates. So in the case of, for example, the Tiger 1, on average, only about 25 or 30 percent of the tanks were operational at any one given time due to mechanical breakdowns. So once again, from the tanker's perspective, the Tiger 1 is wonderful, the IS2 is wonderful. But from the standpoint of a battlefield commander, more mediocre designs such as the T-34 and the Sherman are the real war winners because you have lots of them and they give you a lot of battlefield. power. All right, so let's fast forward to the modern day. What do you see as the role of the tanks in the modern battlefield, and how have they changed in recent decades? When you think about tanks on the modern battlefield, the problem is that you sort of have to define the battlefield. And by that, I mean that tanks in some conflicts are quite central the way they were in World War II.

Examples of that would be the Mid-East Wars. For example, the various wars bought by Israel. Israel against various of the Arab armies, and also, for example, the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War. In both those wars, tanks played a role very, very similar to what they played in World War II. Those conflicts are high-intensity conflicts fought by peer competitors, two armies, which are fairly close in capability. Besides those type of wars, though, the post-World War II environment has seen a lot of low-intensity conflicts. Sometimes we call them guerrilla wars, but they also include conflicts such as we've seen over the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its large conventional armies fighting against insurgencies or guerrilla forces or irregular forces, whatever you want to call them. And so tanks are used in both categories of wars, but they're used in very different fashions. In the high-intensity conflicts, such as the Mideast Wars, they continue to be used as.

as an offensive shock force. They're the centerpiece of most modern armies when fighting in high intensity conflicts. So let's just skip that for a while because that role is much more familiar, much closer to World War II. In the case of low intensity conflicts, tanks are still important, but I might add also that there's been a big change since World War II. It actually started in the middle years of World War II, and that is the deeper mechanization of the battlefield. In 1939, when the Panzer Division strike in Poland, virtually all of the armored vehicles are tanks. Everybody's invested their money in tanks as their principal armored vehicle. But as the war goes on, there's a proliferation of other vehicles,

and that includes especially armored infantry vehicles, vehicles intended to get the infantry across the battlefield. And so in the modern world, when low-intensity conflicts flare up, there's not only tanks in the battlefield, there's large numbers of other types of armored vehicles, including armored infantry vehicles, self-propelled artillery, other types of weapons. So when you're talking armor in these conflicts, as often as not, you're talking armored vehicles other than tanks.

And they have a somewhat different role in low-intensity conflicts. For example, they're used for missions that are not quite the same. same. For example, convoy protection. If you look at the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, one of the missions of armored vehicles, not tanks specifically, but armored vehicles in general, was to move troops and supplies through essentially no man's land. And you saw a very similar use in Vietnam, where convoy protection was a major issue. They're no longer used in the same type of offensive method that they're used in a high-intensity conflict because the war is fought in a fundamentally different way. So armies are very hard-pressed in developing modern armored vehicles because the big

question is, what war are they going to fight in? And the answer for most armies, especially the United States and major European powers, is they're going to fight in a variety of conflicts, and so you need a variety of armored vehicles to satisfy different requirements. So it gets very messy. A tank like the M182 Abrams is very, very well suited to high-intensity conflicts. It can be used in low-intensity conflicts, but it's really not central to fighting, for example, in the recent past in Iraq and Afghanistan, although it was used there. In those low-intensity conflicts, other types of vehicles become predominant, protected vehicles, M-Rap-type vehicles for convoyes, light armored vehicles, various type of armored troop carriers. And so the tank starts

to take a backseat to other forms of armored vehicles in those low-intensity conflicts. What do you think about the effect wireguided missiles are having on all of this, right? Because this is a weapon that can often hit and destroy these armored vehicles and from a distance that they can't retaliate from. Any tank missiles have actually been around quite a while. The Germans were actually starting to field type in 1945, although it didn't see very much significant use. They really start to show up in the 1950s. There's actually a great deal of cooperation between the French and the Germans that lead to the first generation of missiles. They really start to show their effectiveness in 1973.

In the 1973 war between Israel, Egypt, and Syria, where the Egyptians and Syrians start using a new generation of Soviet anti-tank missile. This shows itself to be quite effective. But what ends up happening is the usual technological interplay, and that is to say when new weapons show up, in this case, any tank missiles, the tanks come up with new technologies. In the case of the Israelis, it was the development of reactive armor. And what reactive armor does is that it counteracts the effect of the shape-charge warhead on the anti-tank guided missile,

and therefore significantly degrades the effectiveness of anti-tank missiles. So what happens after reactive armor appears in the 1982 conflict is that various other armies, the Soviet Army, the United States Army, various other armies start looking at methods to get around the reactive arm. And so there's a new generation of missiles that either fly over the tank and fire a special formed warhead. against the top surface of the tank, or in the case of other missiles, for example, the U.S. Army's javelin, they fly a ballistic course and come down from the top and detonate a shape-charge

warhead against the thin roof armor of the tank. So there's this constant interplay. So there's certainly been some times when anti-tank missiles have made it much more difficult for the tank to operate in the battlefield, but there's also periods where tank technology is advanced to counter the anti-tank missiles. Right now, the big talk is active protection systems. And those are systems that are mounted on tanks or other armored vehicles, which basically are intended to shoot down anti-tank missiles. And the first effective system is the Israeli trophy system, which is currently mounted on Markava tanks in the contemporary Israeli army.

These have been used effectively along the border, not in a full-scale conflict, but there's been some exchange of fire from, for example, Gaza against Israeli tanks patrolling there, likewise up on the Syrian frontier. So that's the next stage of the contest that we're going to see. New generation and tank guided missiles facing new generations of protective technology, namely the active protection systems. All right, Stephen, I've got one more question for you. and I think it may not be one that is as simple as an answer as I'm expecting, but we're going to find out. What's your favorite tank? I would probably say the T-34 because I started my writing career writing about the T-34.

I got into the business of writing about tank history because I felt that there was an enormous gap in the knowledge about tank warfare back in the 1960s and 1970s when I was sort of growing up and getting into this. and that big gap was knowledge of Soviet tanks. Now, it happened that my field of study, I was studying Eastern European history. I had language background in Russian and Polish, so I could read the Russian and Polish accounts of Soviet tank development. So I started, my first book was literally a book about the T-34.

So from the long-term perspective, probably the T-34, in more recent years I've gotten back into writing a lot more about the U.S. Army in World War II. And so I've done a lot more work. I've really sort of not totally abandoned, but largely scaled back my writing on Russian subjects and increased my writing on U.S. Army and World War II. And so the Sherman Tank, I wouldn't say it's one of my favorites, but it's a subject that I found fascinating because it deals with these complex issues about the nature of tank warfare. The technological versus the tactical versus the human element. What's the important element in tank warfare?

Is it actually just the hardware or is it the training in tactics or is it the human element to understand how the Sherman performs in World War II? You can't understand its performance without looking at all of these various aspects. So that has kind of changed my focus in recent years. And so I wouldn't say that I have a favorite tank, but I certainly have some subjects I enjoy writing about. And in the old days, in the 1970s, when I was first starting to write, it would have been T-34. Today, I'd say it's probably the Sherman Tank.

Stephen Zuloga, thank you so much for coming on War College to talk to us about tanks. Nice to talk to you. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Heedick. It's hosted by Matthew Galt, who also wrangles our guests. It's produced by me, Bethelhab Day. If you'd like to support our show, please leave us a favorable review and rating. in iTunes. We received one recently from Pat Farlow, who says, quote, War College is direct and

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