Tanks in the British Army

To achieve this they were generally heavily armoured compared to the cruiser tanks, to allow them to operate in close concert with infantry even under heavy gun fire.

The British Army designs were forced by the trench warfare in which neither side could achieve more than small incremental gains without heavy loss of soldiers lives, but tanks changed that.

The "Number 1 Lincoln Machine", nicknamed "Little Willie" weighed 14 tons and could carry a crew of three, at speeds of less than 2 mph over rough ground.

Trench-crossing ability was deemed insufficient however, leading to the development of a rhomboidal design,[1] which became known as "HMLS Centipede" and later "Mother",[1] the first of the British heavy tanks.

The maximum speed requirement matched the walking pace of a rifleman, and the armour on these tanks was expected to be heavy enough to provide immunity to towed anti-tank guns.

The main problem with this strategy however, was that the British infantry tanks were just too slow[citation needed] and the cruisers of the time were vulnerable, and often mechanically unreliable.

The pre-Dunkirk British Army Matilda I infantry tank had only a single Vickers machine gun, a compromise forced by the low cost to which they had been built.

It was developed to be able to cross trenches, resist small-arms fire, travel over difficult terrain, carry supplies, and be able to capture fortified enemy positions.

The Mark I was a development of Little Willie, the experimental tank built for the Landships Committee by Lieutenant Walter Wilson and William Tritton in the summer of 1915.

[6] Although many broke down or became stuck, almost a third that attacked made it across no man's land, and their effect on the enemy was noted, leading to a request by the British C-in-C Douglas Haig for a thousand more.

Alongside Mark V and V* tanks, they took part in the Amiens offensive (8 August 1918) where they broke through into the German rear areas causing the loss of the artillery in an entire front sector.

A first offensive using 49 Mark I tanks took place on 15 September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, under Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, with limited success.

The first two, the medium Schneider CA and heavy Saint-Chamond, were not well-conceived, though produced in large numbers and showing technical innovations, as for the latter type a petro-electrical transmission and a long 75 mm gun.

After the Great War, General Erich Ludendorff of OHL, the German High Command, praised the Allied tanks as being a principal factor in Germany's defeat.

The maximum speed requirement matched the walking pace of a rifleman and the armour on these tanks was expected to be thick enough to provide immunity against towed anti-tank guns.

Sir John Carden of Vickers-Armstrong produced this new tank, to General Staff specification A9, which was subsequently accepted as the Cruiser Mk I (A9).

The Matilda 2 totally dominated all Italian armour and could claim title to "Queen of the Desert" until the arrival of German tanks in North Africa.

The British Army were pioneers in tank combat but by 1939 it could be argued they were behind the times in terms of strategy and tactics, their methods based on the trench warfare of the First World War.

The 2-pdr gun was lethal against the primitive Italian tanks encountered first during the North African campaign, but was, at best, a mediocre weapon against the modern German armour of the Afrika Korps.

The heavier Cruiser, Mk II (A10), were part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sent to France in the early stages of the Second World War.

Hence a request was made in 1941 to the Nuffield Organization's subsidiary and Leyland Motors for a new heavy cruiser tank that could achieve battle superiority over German models.

The army had this machine designed to meet a possible need for a tank to operate in a "shelled area" on the Western Front which in 1939 was expected to eventually look like 1918.

The 2 pdr gun was lethal against the primitive Italian tanks encountered during the North African campaign, but was, at best, a mediocre weapon against the modern German armour of the Afrika Korps.

Another issue was that the areas around the front machine gun turrets created a frontal surface that was more vulnerable to enemy fire than it would have been had it been a flat plate, let alone a sloped glacis.

The Cromwell was in most respects the equal of the early model Sherman of the United States or the German Panzer IV, though by the time of its first major deployment in France in the summer of 1944, it was unremarkable compared to many other vehicles being fielded by then, its best advantage being its speed and mobility.

As a stop-gap, the Challenger (A30) Cruiser Tank, mounted a 17 Pounder gun on a lengthened Cromwell chassis with an extra road wheel each side and a widened hull centre section.

Bradley requested 25 flail tanks and 100 Churchill Crocodiles and the British War Office agreed to supply them as well as British-crewed AVREs.

With future combat thought to be dominated by nuclear weapons, rendering armour as ineffective as infantry, development of newer tank designs began to wane.

As recently as the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict the Israel Defense Forces employed modified Centurions as armoured personnel carriers and combat engineering vehicles.

The brigade, led by the 1st Fusiliers Battlegroup, made a rapid advance towards the city and soon reached its outskirts, securing Basra Airport and the bridges across the Shatt al-Arab.