Weaponology (2007–…): Season 1, Episode 13 - Tanks - full transcript

Uncover the killer genes in the tank's family tree.

You're watching the Military Channel.

To go behind the lines.

Tanks are the ultimate terror weapon.

Built to strike fear into the infantry, they flatten everything in their path.

We clean them out and hold on.

Hardware and firepower on the move.

It has firepower, protection and has mobility.

The most important effect of a tank is psychological.

It's a terrifying thing.

Batten down the hatch as we go back through generations of technology to find
out how tanks became the best of the best.

It's time to go ballistic.



The modern main battle tank is the ultimate battlefield hitman.

Dealing out punishment to anyone brave enough to resist.

The M1 Abrams is the roughest and toughest of the lot.

Gas turbine engine and super wide tracks eat up the roughest terrain.

Top secret combination armor makes it almost invulnerable to enemy fire.

And the latest in fire control technology means no one is safe from the giant
120 millimeter cannon, even at night.

The Abrams really is hell on tracks.

When it moves, the earth moves.

It's like a mini earthquake moving across the countryside.

The spearhead of U.S. military might, the M1 Abrams is 60 tons of rushing,
crushing, killing machine.

Now weaponology will unlock its family tree, going back through generations of
technology to reveal how armor plate,

caterpillar tracks and massive ordinance have come together to ensure that the
tank remains heavyweight champion.

Rewind to the beginning.

World War One was bogged down in 400 miles of trenches.



Weaponologists wanted to get things moving again.

Machine guns have become so lethal, our Torre Pisa had become so lethal that the
infantry had a very hard time going across the battlefield.

Infantry attacks were met with slaughter.

In Britain, a committee was assembled under the guidance of a young Winston
Churchill.

The committee's aim was to design a vehicle capable of muscling through the
churned up hell of the Western Front.

Winston Churchill put together a committee that came up with this idea of the
land ship that would be able to sail across trenches

and through hails and holdings and break the stalemate on the Western Front.

Weaponologists needed a rough rider capable of handling the mud and blood of no
man's land.

In their search for mobility, they took inspiration from the humble tractor.

The caterpillar track was invented in 1770 by English inventor Richard Lovell
Edgeworth.

His ideas for spreading a vehicle's weight across even the muddiest fields was
picked up by tractor manufacturers in Britain and America in the early 20th
century.

The caterpillar track was incredibly important.

It meant that vehicles could spread their weight evenly.

What it meant is that you could then move heavy vehicles around, whether it was
up at the side of an incline or across a field or even on fairly soft ground,
and still be able to maneuver.

The British committee took the tractor track and applied it to the idea of
creating a mobile fort.

The project was so secret that work was carried out under a code name, Tank, a
name so boring that no one would be interested enough to be suspicious.

The first tanks were based on the idea of cross-country farm tractors on
caterpillar tracks that were turned into a weapon of war

by bolting a lot of armor plate on them and really just sticking a gun on them.

Trenches were the biggest obstacles.

The first tanks used their rhomboidal shape to first overbalance into and then
crawl out of trenches.

Things were moving again, slowly.

The vehicle behind me is a Mark IV Tank, and it's a rhomboidal shape.

And the reason for that was it was designed to cross trenches.

The first tank deployment was on the 15th of September, 1916, at the gruesome
Battle of the Somme.

In desperation, the British fielded a tiny force of 15 28-ton tanks.

They crawled over the top at barely two miles an hour.

It was not a stellar debut.

The tanks were slow.

There weren't enough of them.

And now the secret was out.

It was easy to ditch them or get them stuck mechanically.

Too many of them broke down.

At the end of the day, their first day, only nine tanks were still operational.

Unfortunately, the Germans now knew what type of weapon the British were
manufacturing.

But in November 1917, the tank did make its mark.

476 British Mark IVs rumbled towards the German trenches.

Despite being capable of a new top speed of only four miles an hour, the tanks
that attacked the Battle of Cambrai broke through the German lines.

The tank then promised mobility back onto the battlefield where he could break
through the other guy's line,

get into his rear, disrupt his supply lines, and then exploit that and win the
war.

The lessons of Cambrai showed that massed attacks were the future.

Tanks would be like running backs, blitzing the enemy's defensive line.

It's not going to be able to do that type of maneuver war for moving four miles
an hour.

It has to move more like 14 or 40 miles an hour.

An all-American design genius came up with the next generation, a family of
tanks capable of rushing into battle at frightening speeds.

J. Walter Christie was a civilian engineer and racetrack speed freak.

Christie's design breakthrough was the independent suspension system.

This is the last surviving example of a Christie tank. This is the original
rubber from 1930.

Christie's suspension system increased the give from four inches to 14 inches.

Now the tank could speed over rough terrain without breaking the tank or the
crew.

What distinguishes the Christie tanks from the other tanks that were common in
the 1920s is this unique suspension system.

Christie developed these big road wheels that have a large spring hidden behind
here in the armor to allow the tank to move at very, very high speeds.

The new Christie tank could bust 40 miles per hour on its tracks.

Christie wasn't finished there. In his quest for speed, he made the tank
convertible,

pop out the rubber for roads and then convert back into a track vehicle for
rough terrain.

On its new rubber tires, the pimped-up Christie tank maxed out at 60 miles an
hour.

What stood up on the fender here is a set of tracks. What the crew could do is
come up here,

take the tracks off the fender and mount them on the wheels just like a
conventional tank suspension.

The new Christie tank that ripped through a house like paper, it's capable of 60
miles an hour.

The military establishment rejected Christie's radical designs.

They didn't enjoy being told what to do by a jumped-up civilian.

Christie's major malfunction in life though was he was a genius and he couldn't
suffer fools.

And he kept pointing to his tanks and saying he was going to put wings on them
and make them fly.

And the Army said, Mr. Christie, we don't need a flying tank. And he said, oh,
you think small, son.

So there was a falling out between Mr. Christie and the United States Army.

America's loss was someone else's gain. Christie sent his designs to the Soviets
where they got a warmer reception.

The Soviets were interested in this at the time, but the Soviets were.

And they purchased two of these tanks and began to experiment with them.

Of course, this is the same suspension system and large road wheels you see on
the famous T-34 tank of World War II.

Christie's suspension system is the daddy of all modern tanks.

The combination of the caterpillar track and the multi-wheeled suspension
principle means that tanks can cope with anything.

Because without the track, you couldn't knock down trees, for example. This
vehicle here can knock down a tree without any difficulty whatsoever.

And it would get you off the road. If you're on the road, you're a sitting duck
in the marshy ground, such as a plowed field.

They're marvelous.

The next great leap forward in the race for speed used technology from aviation.

In the 1950s, the jet engine aircraft replaced old propeller technologies.

A decade later, helicopters got in on the act with a gas turbine.

The gas turbine engines, especially in helicopters, are a very, very efficient
power plane compared to rotary engines and the other type of engines used
before.

Armies raced to soup up tanks with the helicopters' gas turbines. The Soviets
were the first with the T-80.

The U.S. followed suit with the awesome M1 Abrams three years later in 1983.
Both could top 45 miles an hour.

At 63 tons, the Abrams is one of the heaviest beasts on the battlefield.

But it's also one of the quickest, and it's all down to the 1,500 snorting
horses under the hood.

The M1 Abrams evolved from several technological breakthroughs. One was the
turbine engine.

Now you have a 1,500 horsepower engine, you can up-warmer the vehicle because
now you have a real big engine in that vehicle.

But the turbine isn't perfect. The gas guzzling engine needs to suck in huge
quantities of air to generate the thrust it pumps.

That's fine in the clear skies where the chopper lives, but down in the sand and
the dust, it can be a problem.

Clogged engines don't work. But when you're talking about a beast this big and
fast, who's going to argue?

Since 1916, weaponologists have traded protection with mobility, armor with
speed.

But the first job of the tank is to keep the crew alive.

The outside world is hostile. Everybody out there is trying to kill you.

Tanks destroy everything. Huge guns and sheer mass make it the biggest bully on
the battlefield.

That means everybody else wants it dead.

The only thing that keeps the crew alive is the tank's armor.

The M1 Abrams boasts the best protection in the world.

Its top-secret combination armor makes it almost invulnerable to RPGs, small
arms fire, and even other tanks.

Rewind 90 years, tank protection wasn't always this good.

From concept to armor, the earliest tanks were inspired by boats.

The design of this vehicle is actually borrowed from building warships.

The armor is riveted, and this was a standard way they did things in building
ships.

Though tough, the armor had weak points. The half-inch steel sheets were held
together with thousands of rivets.

These rivets were a deadly hazard to the crew inside.

If this armor is hit with any kind of projectile that is substantial, these
rivets get sheared off and they fly around on the inside of the vehicle.

Even the flat sheets of steel could turn nasty. The exterior of the armor was
hardened, but the inside wasn't.

The drawback of that is if a round hits this thing right here, what happens is
there's a resonating wave that's set up and it travels through the armor.

And when it gets to the inside of the armor plate, spalding occurs, and razor-
sharp flakes of metal go flying around the inside.

These deadly fragments meant that the crew had to dress in layers of protection.

Not great if you're sharing a metal box with a great big engine.

The crew had to wear leather boots, leather trousers, leather jacket, leather
gauntlets, a leather helmet, steel helmet over that, hung chainmail down in
front of their eyes to protect them.

And that's not the worst of it. There's an internal combustion engine in this
thing that they're sitting next to, so it's going to get real hot in there.

After the war, weaponologists searched for ways of making lighter but safer
armor.

Again, the work of genius designer J. Walter Christie provided the next great
breakthrough, sloped armor.

Christie took his ideas to the Soviets. His sloped armor emerged in 1941 when
they launched the classic T-34 on an unsuspecting world.

It was probably the most important tank design of World War II.

If you take the thickness of this tank armor, and let's pretend for a moment
that it's 45 millimeters thick, if you angle it like this and the projectile
comes in here, the effect of thickness is actually the thickness here.

And so if it's 45 millimeters thick here, effectively at this angle it's more
like 60 millimeters. So it's a matter of geometry. It's a matter of improving
the armor protection of the vehicle.

The sloped T-34 is about half the weight of the 60-ton German Tiger.

Armor was once again ahead in the race with anti-tank weapons.

In response, weaponologists came up with a new menace, the shaped charge.

On detonation, a lethal jet of molten metal cuts through the armor and bursts
into the crew compartment.

It fires a very, very narrow jet of metal particles that penetrates the armor at
very, very high speed.

Traditional steel tank armor was easy meat for the shaped charge.

New designs were needed to defeat this fresh threat.

In the 1960s, weaponologists in Chobham, England came up with a formula to win
the shaped charge war.

If you can deflect that jet, if you can put different materials of different
densities in the armor package, what ends up happening is that that jet that's
coming in from the warhead from the missile starts to break up and doesn't
penetrate as well.

Flat plates of pure steel were replaced with combinations of deflected
materials.

The exact composition of Chobham armor is still a closely guarded secret.

What has been published has been that it had depleted uranium, aluminum, ceramic
plate, cavallar, which is a manmade material, even rubber plate, various types
of composite materials such as epoxy.

Skip forward a decade, weaponologists don't rest on their laurels.

The duel between tank armor and anti-tank weapons is never over.

Armor designers go to every length to protect their vehicle.

They'll even strap explosives to the side of the tank.

Sounds like a crazy idea, but the explosive power of reactive armor plates
defeat incoming shaped charges.

A package is put onto the exterior armor of the tank containing what is called
explosive reactive armor.

And inside of it is a sheet of plastic explosives and a steel plate.

And when the warhead detonates against it, the warhead starts to penetrate
through this steel box.

It sets off the explosives.

The explosives shoot the plate, shoot the steel plate in front up into the path
of the shaped charge and basically stops the penetrating power of the shaped
charge.

Chobham and reactive armor have been added to the Abrams defensive package.

The combination makes it almost invulnerable to shaped charge warheads.

No single Abrams crewman has ever been lost to enemy action.

Tank armor has risen to the challenge of the world's most deadly anti-tank
weapons.

Soon, tanks would use that same weapons tech against each other.

The race between arms and armor was hotting up.

You saw that tiger moving his turret around in your direction, you knew you had
to do something or you're dead.

The modern main battle tank is all about guns, guns, guns.

The M1 Abrams packs one hell of a punch.

Three and a half tons of pure menace, its 120 millimeter smoothbore cannon could
smash a hole into next Tuesday.

Rewind to World War I when Winston Churchill first convened a tank design
committee, a big cannon was not at the top of the agenda.

They were fixated only on getting men across the killing ground.

The first combat tank was seriously under gun.

The first Mark IV only had machine guns.

A later version had a weedy six pounder.

The ones that were equipped with machine guns were called female tanks and the
ones that were equipped with cannon were called male tanks.

The male tanks guns were borrowed from the Royal Navy.

The male version of this vehicle had guns that came off Royal Naval vessels.

And if you take a look at the battleships of the day, they had guns mounted in
the side.

Initially this was called a land battleship.

These first trench crossers had guns stuck on the side almost as an
afterthought.

This vehicle does not have a turret. It was known as a spawn center.

The gun would have fit into this and it rotates this way.

The drawback of this is you only get about 45 degrees for the arc the gun can
cover.

So the gun can fire out here this way and forward, but that's all the coverage
it has.

The problems of limited field of fire got weaponologists back to the drawing
board.

It was a French company better known for producing automobiles that set the
template for all tanks of the future, Renault.

One of the big innovations here is that it has a turret.

And so you see this very, very typical tank layout of the driver in the front,
the turret in the middle with the armament, and the tank manor, and then towards
the back of the tank you have the engine.

The rotating gun turret was not a new invention.

Once again, battleships of the day provided the blueprint.

But it took the genius of the designers at Renault to adapt them to the new land
battleships.

The advantage, of course, of a turret is that you can swing it 360 degrees so
the tank can protect itself.

It can fire its gun towards the front, but it can protect itself from the rear
as well.

When the Germans fielded their own land ships, it became obvious that tanks
would have to take out other tanks.

Rotating turrets and big guns were the smart play.

By the Second World War, tank on tank was big box office.

Top of the bill was the Battle of Kursk in 1943.

For two weeks that summer, 6,000 German and Soviet tanks slugged it out in the
ultimate heavyweight contest.

Both sides lost hundreds of tanks.

The race between arms and armor was on.

This was an arms race which is still going on today.

So tanks became specialty weapons now, much like fighter aircraft. They were
meant to kill each other.

The most feared tank of World War II was without doubt the ferocious German
Tiger.

And this big cat has 88 millimeter claws.

There was a reason for the incredible power of the 88 millimeter gun.

It was designed to pump a 20 pound shell 30,000 feet into the air and take out
heavy bombers.

It starts its life as an anti-aircraft gun.

So the Tiger great big tank is built around the breach of a great big gun that's
capable of penetrating not only other tanks, but the armor of defensive
fortification systems as well.

U.S. tanker crews were seriously outgunned.

The Tiger could penetrate the Sherman's three inch armor at a range of over a
mile.

The Sherman's 76 millimeter gun could manage about half that.

There's nothing worse than knowing that you can be taken out before you can get
in the first blow.

The 88 could go right through this tank. And we were aware of that.

The King Tiger I guess was the one that really terrified us.

Because if you saw that King Tiger moving his turret around in your direction,
you knew you had to do something or you're dead.

Big guns are all very well, but it's ammunition that wins tank fights.

A whole family of armored defeating ordnance has been reared to take out tanks.

First came plain old artillery rounds that acted like giant bullets.

When tanks were first used in the battlefield, they were armed with the British
six pounder, very useful against trenches and against dugouts.

What we get developed is a shell, which was designed to simply punch a hole
through the armor and then bounce around on the interior.

As armor got thicker, a smarter weapon was needed.

Weaponologists started to adopt the ammunition used by a new generation of
infantry anti-tank weapons.

The most celebrated anti-tank weapons of the Second World War were the German
made handheld Panzer Faust and Panzer Schreck.

Tank designers stole the shape charge technology for use in their own guns.

The shape charge is a metal cone, typically copper.

When the high explosive detonates, it collapses the cone into a very, very
narrow arrow of metal particles that move at very, very high speeds and can
penetrate an enormous amount of armor.

Advances in composite armor in the 1960s could defeat the shape charge.

The next generation of projectiles returned to simple science, brute force.

Super thin sabot rounds travel at nearly six and a half thousand feet per
second.

They use this awesome kinetic energy to puncture a tiny but lethal hole in any
known armor.

By the late 1960s, 1970s, other types of tank ammunition were much more favored,
especially the new generation of rounds called APFSDS, armor piercing, fin
stabilized, discarding sabot.

A round that's narrower than the actual bore of the cannon, but made of a very,
very hard material.

The problem faced by weaponologists was how to get a great big tank gun to fire
a very thin projectile.

The answer lies in a shoe or sabot that temporarily increases the diameter of
the round.

Once in flight, the sabot is discarded.

You take a sabot, a shoe that fits around the awkwardly shaped projectile and
you fire it out of the gun.

The sabot falls off of the projectile and allows the cleverly shaped kinetic
energy around inside to smash into and destroy the armor.

Sabots were christened silver bullet by Abrams crews for their effectiveness
against Iraqi armor.

Big gun and high tech rounds are all very well, as long as you can hit your
target.

That's why weaponologists have always made the tank gun as precise as possible.

Generations of tank designers have improved accuracy with a whole family of
gadgets.

In World War I, tank gunners used a combination of naval telescopic sights and
good old trial and error.

Sighting barely improved in the second World War.

The first optical sights on tanks were designed to allow the tank to be fired
without exposing the gunners to fire.

So the first sights on a tank were essentially simple periscopes.

The eyes of a tank are its periscope and vision steps.

The periscope will show yardage on it, so if you point it right on the belly of
the tank, if you miss you can tell how far to the left or right or behind or in
front of the enemy tank you were, and you would adjust the fire by ordering the
gunner accordingly.

Up on the way.

The Sherman tank had decent sights and great cruise, but what really made it
stand out from the pack was the ability to fire accurately on the move.

Gyro stabilizers are crucial to a vehicle designed to tackle rugged terrain.

This gun had what we called a gyro stabilizer, so the tank may be bouncing back
and forth and up and down, but the gun stays steady.

The gun stays steady because the gyro stabilizer keeps the gun where the gunner
wants it pointed where the enemy is.

It's a remarkable instrument.

The gyroscopic effect was first noted by German scientist Johann Bonenberger in
1817.

Gyro stabilizing forces help to keep this gyroscope upright.

A gyroscopic mount uses the same forces to keep the M1's gun level with the
horizon and on target, no matter how rough the terrain.

Throughout history, tank guns have got bigger and the technology has got better.

The Abrams has a 120 millimeter cannon and the latest in thermal imaging, but
not everybody thinks that the main gun is the main man.

General Patton said the most important, the primary armament of the tank is the
machine gun.

The cannon is the secondary armament.

Perhaps the greatest general of the Second World War, Patton knew a thing or two
about armored warfare.

Faced with a man in a ditch with shoulder mounted rocket propelled grenades, you
need a machine gun.

The infantrymen had what we called, the Germans called a Panzerfaust at close
range, 30 or 40 yards.

They could blow up this tank without any trouble at all.

My favorite sergeant saved my life by seeing a German rising up on the Rhine
River, rising up out of his foxhole and pointing his Panzerfaust at my tank at
about 30 or 40 yards.

I didn't see the German at all.

He did and he saved my life by firing his machine gun at him.

And I killed him with my.45. And that's the kind of close range thing that you
have to do to survive.

Fast forward 60 years to Iraq and the biggest threat to the Abrams is still a
determined infantryman armed with a rocket propelled grenade.

The humble machine gun remains the first in the world to be used in the war.

The rocket propelled grenade, the humble machine gun remains the first line of
defense on the most sophisticated tank in the world.

Machine guns clear ditches, main guns take out tanks, but some tanks are so
specialized they have no guns at all.

Tanks are designed for one thing, killing other tanks, right?

Wrong. No job is too tough for this hardware heavyweight. No river is too wide,
no defense too high.

The tank is much more than just a muscle-bound killer. Problem solver and
battlefield engineer, the tank has brains as well as brawn.

The original land battleship was designed to cross obstacles and there was no
more deadly obstacle than no man's land.

Tanks need to be able to cross wire, cross trenches and the people who run the
gun and drive the tank have got to stay alive.

Three decades later and the D-Day assault faced the same set of problems.

The Germans were dug in behind their Atlantic wall.

14,000 heavy concrete bunkers formed a continuous chain of fortification from
Sweden to the Spanish border.

Once again, weaponologists turned to the tank to breach this obstacle.

The British had just the man for the job, Percy Hobart.

Percy Hobart was a very innovative theorist of armor. He was given a very
special assignment.

If you know in advance that you are going to conduct a huge operation against
very well dug in opposition, you've got the opportunity to purpose-build
equipment to breach exactly that defensive system.

And this is what Hobart does.

You're a smart cookie. No, I mean it.

Hobart was put in charge of a new specialist unit, 79th Experimental Armored
Division.

All Hobart's tanks were specialists, combat engineers designed to overcome
obstacles.

The Misfit Unit soon became better known as Hobart's Funnies.

General Hobart got the idea of adapting tanks to do some of the tasks that would
usually be done by engineers, but allowing it to be done from within the
protective armor of the tank.

German infantry and artillery defended the D-Day beaches in Normandy.

Panzer divisions were in the reserve waiting to rush to the aid of the
defenders.

The Allied invasion force would need to get their own armor ashore quickly to
reinforce the fragile beach heads.

So Hobart made some adaptations to the Sherman to make it swim.

These have a canvas frame around them, which means they turn into a boat fitted
with two propellers.

Hence they're called duplex drive, the duplex being one in water, one on land.

It meant that they could be launched from landing craft and under their own
power swim ashore to appear before an unsuspecting enemy.

The tanks in their nine-foot high canvas skirts had mixed success on the
beaches.

Those that swam ashore made an instant impact on German forces, not expecting
35-ton tanks doing breaststroke.

They are purpose-built tanks for one battle only for the landings on the beaches
of Normandy.

Once ashore, the Allies stormed Fortress Europe and Hobart's famous menagerie
was at the forefront.

7,000 specialist tanks were thrown at the Nazi stronghold.

Flame-throwing crocodiles attacked German bunkers.

Kraben-Bulldozer tanks cleared minefields.

For every German defense, Percy Hobart had a tank-based animal-name solution.

Hobart's Fonies are designed, instead of a gun barrel, often to have a breaching
charge attached to them to get through concrete emplacements,

or a flame-thrower attached to them, a crocodile tank, in order to destroy or
force the Germans to evacuate particular bunkers or trenches.

Flame-throwers made their battlefield debut in World War I. The crocodile had
about seven times the range of a man-portable flame-thrower,

and a 400-gallon fuel trailer could fire 80 devastating bursts of flame.

Another of Hobart's inventions was designed to harvest a deadly crop.

The Nazis sowed six million mines in northern France.

Kraben tanks beat a path through the minefields, pounding the buried bombs with
fist-sized steel balls on five-foot chains.

One of the more common mine-clearing vehicles of World War II was the Sherman
Kraben.

Our friend, the British tankman, invented this one.

It's called a flail. It clears all mines from a path wide enough for a tank
column to keep going.

That was basically the idea of the German tank.

It was a system using chains to beat the path in front of the tank.

Bulldozer tanks in Hobart's division were the jack of all trades, clearing
rubble, destroying hedgerows and building defenses.

All classic combat engineer roles, all designed to keep the tanks moving,
crossing obstacles or even burying enemy soldiers in their foxholes.

The German tank was designed to be a

A blade had a lot of useful properties, one of which was to do that kind of
extraordinarily devilish, terrible thing.

But that's war.

But its main job was to dig at nighttime holes so that our tanks could come down
into the hole at what we call hole-defolate,

which means that only the gas tank can get through the holes.

at what we call Hall Defile which means that only the gun was above the ground
which would

protect the tank at night against enemy tanks.

Skip forward 60 years and a specialist tank recalls the glory days of Percy
Hobart's funnies.

Today's battlefield engineers are as good, as fast and as well armored as the
main battle

tank.

The M104 Wolverine Heavy Assault Bridge Tank is built on the same chassis and
powered by

the same gas turbine that makes the M1 Abrams the best tank in the world.

They are designed to keep up with a modern tank and enable them to get across
obstacles.

They carry facines, they carry breaching charges, they carry dozer blades to cut
through minefields

and these specialist tanks like the Combat Engineer Tractor are designed to help
the

tank get where it's got to go and perform the missions it's got to perform.

A massed and mobile tank force has the power to shock.

Since they first appeared on the battlefield, tanks have been specifically built
to scare

the enemy into submission.

It's kind of terrifying to have a tank coming on you.

You get an opportunity and you're a small company enemy infantry, you're going
to find

a foxhole or dig one awful fast.

The main battle tank is the most frightening piece of hardware on the modern
battlefield.

Imagine you're an enemy combatant on the streets of Baghdad and you catch sight
of this monster

filling your rear view mirror.

The enemy fears the tank because of its crushing power.

It's kind of terrifying.

Even when tanks first limped onto the battlefield, grizzled infantrymen turned
and fled.

The most important effect of a tank is psychological.

A lot of infantry cut and ran when they saw their first tank.

They were very successful because they frightened the German infantry so badly.

These huge machines appearing unexpectedly and crushing people underneath them,
they

were compared to monsters that appeared out of the mist.

The Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 was the first big strategic success for
tanks.

476 Mark IV tanks poured through German lines on a front only five miles wide.

Warfare would never be the same again.

There were a few brilliant thinkers who saw that the Battle of Cambrai was
mostly because

of the massing of the tanks and the shock effect, the psychological effect.

The most radical thinkers were Brits Basil Littleheart and J.F.C. Fuller, the
architects

of Cambrai.

Both advocated a cavalry style approach.

Cavalry had been the fast moving shock weapon of previous centuries.

J.F.C. Fuller and Littleheart were the two who became the real champions for
tank use.

A fuller for saw day in which entire armies would consist entirely of tanks,
sailing across

the battlefields and right into the enemy capital, decapitating the regime
without hardly

any bloodshed at all.

The work of Littleheart and Fuller was ignored in their home country.

A massive force of super fast tanks was considered too radical and too
expensive.

Not everyone ignored it though.

In the 1930s, Nazi Germany was preparing for war.

Our British cousins wrote the book on how to do this.

Properly put it on the shelf because they didn't have the money.

Germans read it and guess what?

They picked it up and ran with it.

At the outbreak of war, only the Germans understood the importance of
concentrating all their

mechanized forces in one fast moving push for the enemy's weak points.

The architect of this blitzkrieg was Heinz Guderian.

His belief in tank power is summed up by his catchphrase, Nicked Kleckern
Klotzer, don't

tickle, smash.

Germans used tanks in concentration.

They were used as the point of a spear instead of being spread out along the
front.

Guderian was aware that tanks on their own would be vulnerable to allied
counterattack.

They needed close support.

The key to the blitzkrieg was the combination of armor, infantry, artillery and
the Luftwaffe

with the Stuttgart Dive Bomb.

U.S. forces absorbed the lessons of 1940 and used blitzkrieg tactics in the
liberation

of Europe.

Fast moving tanks had to be supported by fast moving infantry.

Only infantry could deal with infantry threats.

Tanks themselves carried the infantry crucial to the tank's survival.

You could get infantry that could move as fast as the tanks.

The infantry could protect the tanks from the very dangerous infantry threats
that you

have lining every ditch.

They loved the tank for other purposes.

They rode on the tanks all the way through dangerous areas and then would get
off if

their artillery fire came in, which was attracted by the tank.

We learned that when both worked together, the tank got the benefit of the
infantry's

ability to maneuver and the infantry got the benefit of the tanks armored
firepower.

The new cavalry style tactics would only be possible with good communication.

Tank forces racing through enemy defenses would have to talk to each other to
keep their

shape.

Communication between tanks in the 20s and 30s harked back to the 19th century.

Some of the more ludicrous attempts were for example to use carrier pigeons
between tanks.

Obviously that didn't work very well and it wasn't used very long.

One of the standard old battlefield methods being battlefield flags or
semaphores, where

one of the tank crewmen would try to signal to the other tanks using flags.

Communication by flags and hand signals had problems, most of them obvious.

How can you get coordinated, fast moving, shock action type tactics when you're
waving

flags to tell people what to do?

The problem is, you know, if you expose yourself, you're dead.

Something better was going to be needed for complete coordination of tank
forces.

Nazi weaponologists planned to use the fuller tactical blueprint in their
conquest of Europe.

Glitzkrieg or lightning war would need the best tactics and the best
communications.

They knew that.

Tactics are much more important than whether the tank has armor this thick or
that thick

or whether the machine gun has, you know, that caliber or that caliber.

Those are all minor details compared to making the right decisions and have the
right skills.

Guderian's solution to the problem of coordination was the new technology of FM
radio.

And it's no big surprise that the main German advocate of tank warfare, Heinz
Guderian,

was a signals officer.

He was a radio officer.

Probably the most important feature on German tanks which made them so effective
in Glitzkrieg

was not their armor, not their mobility, not their firepower, it was their
radios.

Ironically, it was an American army officer who invented the FM radio in 1934.

Major Edwin Armstrong's FM sets were small enough to slip in a tank and gave a
whole

division multiple use of the same frequency.

By the time you get to the interwar period, you have people attempting to make
them smaller,

but it's not really until the mid to late 30s that they become small enough to
install

in tanks.

In May 1940, German forces invaded France.

Within six weeks, French and British resistance had collapsed and Nazi divisions
were in Paris.

Amazingly, the French had more tanks, bigger guns and thicker armor.

The French Char 35 was widely considered the best tank in the world.

But what it didn't have was FM radio sets.

The Germans with inferior numbers, inferior armor, and everything carved through
them

like a hot knife through butter.

Soon, all countries caught on to the importance of radio communication between
tanks and commanders.

Everyone got better FM radios into their tanks.

Incidentally, these tanks had intercommunication with each other, of course, so
that the platoon

leader could instruct a tank on his left, enemy tank approaching on your left
flank,

give him help.

The lives depended on the ability of commanders to communicate directly with
their crews,

even over the noise of a 35-ton monster and the boom of tank-on-tank combat.

Combat is a very, very complex situation.

Tank commander is so busy with his binoculars trying to check the enemy out.

He's trying to hold on when the tank is rocking back and forth or across a
ditch.

And when you get a command from the battalion commander saying, Lieutenant,
you're going

to lose your stripes or whatever it is, your bars, if you don't get your tank
out of there

now, and they don't want to end up in a ditch.

They don't want to end up with their belly full of lid.

So that the throat mic and the earplugs that each of the crew members had was
pretty good

and could overcome the noise.

Communication between tanks and their support has come on leaps and bounds.

The M1 Abrams is a supercomputer on tracks, a fully digital tank with a
futuristic communication

system that would blow Heinz Guderian's mind.

The latest variant of the M1 has built into it things like GPS and a lot of
electronic

gear.

So the logistics officer knows how many rounds the gun has fired and can then
push forward

to that particular tank ammunition, fuel, things that the crew needs.

So the vehicle is much more interactive.

Tank tactics have changed little since the end of the Second World War.

American commander Tommy Franks led a blitzkrieg style combined arms assault on
Baghdad in

2003.

The Abrams was the spearhead.

Combined arms is a way of combining armor, mobility, firepower, protection and
combat

power to create extraordinary battlefield effect.

The modern tank is still the ultimate battlefield enforcer.

It has super tough armor, can speed across the roughest terrain and fire a
massive cannon

with pinpoint accuracy.

The Abrams technological achievements and hitting power make it the leader of
this new

generation of armored beasts.

It really is the toughest tank in town.

Drawn together the branches on its family tree reflect its unique genesis.

Riveted land battleships lumbering across no man's land.

The vision of inventor J. Walter Christie and the tactical genius of Heinz
Guderian.

The end result?

The Abrams tank.

Epineologically it's top of the tree.