In 1915, the first tanks appeared on the battlefields. Nobody expected the First World War, they did not prepare for it, and all the more difficult it was to foresee the nature of the upcoming battles.
The challenge is a breakthrough of defense
Already in the fall of 1914, Swinton, a British army officer, seconded to France, began to realize that the main problem of the advancing infantry would be to overcome the distance between the front edges of the attacking and defending forces. It’s difficult to go to full height on the enemy, sheltered behind the parapet of trenches of a full profile and armed with quick-fire machine guns, and by the end of this path no more than half of the personnel will remain from any unit. The soldiers’s bodies needed to be covered with something, and to carry out this task he proposed the simplest solution. You need to take an ordinary agricultural machine, a Holt tractor manufactured in the USA, and sheathe it with armor. It is interesting that such first tanks of the First World War were forced to be reproduced in 1941 during the defense of Odessa, they were called "NI" ("for fear").
The idea was not very successful, since the requirements for the chassis in the design of agricultural machinery did not correspond to the complexity of the rough terrain on which it was to move during offensives. But the task did not lose relevance from this, it simply needed to be solved differently.
The first are the British
The main thing that the designers Nesfield and McPhee took into account when designing a fundamentally new model of military equipment was the ability to overcome wide ditches and trenches. Famous for films about the Civil War, the diamond-shaped silhouette of armored monsters just became a manifestation of the originality of engineering thinking of English inventors. The first tanks of the First World War were called "Big Willy" and "Mark", their distinguishing feature, in addition to the characteristic trapezoidal shape of the armored hull, was the location of weapons on the sides, in special ledges. Then came the name of a new type of armored vehicles (Eng. "Tank"), which means "tank" or "vat".
France does not give up!
French tanks of the First World War were designed with a wide variety of technical solutions and imagination. Initially, they were going to build them as slow-moving mobile artillery mini-batteries, with their silhouette protecting the infantry and rendering fire support to it. However, soon the designers came to the conclusion that it was necessary to build relatively light vehicles capable of quick maneuver. "Renault - FT17" to the greatest extent consistent with modern ideas about this class of weapons, if only because it has a rotary artillery tower located above the armored corps. Similar machines of the royal Romanian army participated in the attack on the USSR in 1941, when two FT-17s, preserved from the time of the Civil, long ago became exhibits of Soviet museums.
Germans are pressing
As for the combat qualities possessed by German tanks of the First World War, their characteristic difference was powerful artillery weapons, which later became the hallmark of German armored vehicles. The main specimen, the A7V, was huge, it should have been entered like an armored train car through a door. The operation of the engines was constantly monitored by two mechanics, in addition to them, there was an artillery crew inside the case. The commander, machine gunners and driver together with them were a crowded crew. The car was slow and slow.
Common defects of different designs
All the first tanks of the First World War had a serious drawback: they were practically impossible to stay in for a long time due to the strong gas contamination and high temperature created by the operation of the engine located in the same space with the crew. Powerful motors have not yet been created, and assembly technologies did not imply other ways of joining parts other than riveting. Reservation withstood hit by a bullet, sometimes a light projectile, the action of any field artillery of a caliber of more than three inches had a devastating effect on equipment and personnel.
Tanks began to be built in Russia later than in other industrialized countries, but they achieved very serious successes in this matter. But that's another story…