Germany built only twenty tanks in the First World War
Tanks were invented to break the deadlock of trench warfare, and their debut at the Somme in 1916 largely failed. Britain and France kept investing anyway, fielding thousands by 1918, while Germany managed just twenty of its A7Vs. The theory of fast, deep armoured thrusts was written in the decade that followed.
On the Western Front, machine guns behind barbed wire made attacks slow and costly. The tank's answer was simple in concept: put machine guns on caterpillar tracks and wrap them in armour so they could cross trenches under fire. Britain and France both developed tanks in 1915. British Mark I tanks first fought at the Somme on 15 September 1916 without breaking the stalemate, and France's Schneider CA disappointed in April 1917. At Cambrai in late 1917, massed British tanks did pierce the Hindenburg Line, though no armoured force was ready to exploit the gap.
By the war's end France alone had turned out more than 4,400 tanks and Britain more than 2,500. The first tank-against-tank fight came by accident at Villers-Bretonneux in April 1918, when three German A7Vs met three British Mark IVs. Mass tank attacks at Soissons and Amiens in the summer of 1918 helped end the trench deadlock. Most wartime thinking still saw tanks as helpers for infantry, crushing wire and machine-gun nests, partly because early machines were unreliable and partly because cavalry retained its prestige. J. F. C. Fuller's Plan 1919, never used, imagined tanks, lorried infantry and aircraft striking deep to paralyse enemy command.
Between the wars, Fuller, B. H. Liddell Hart and France's Jean-Baptiste Estienne theorised about independent armoured forces. Britain formed the Experimental Mechanized Force on 1 May 1927, with Vickers Medium tanks, armoured cars and self-propelled guns, exercising on Salisbury Plain while other powers watched. The historian Kendrick Kuo argued in 2022 that an overstretched British army bet too heavily on tanks operating with little infantry or artillery, contributing to early setbacks in North Africa.
Other nations followed their own paths. Germany, barred from armour by the Treaty of Versailles, quietly worked with the Soviet Union on tank doctrine before 1933. The Soviets, industrialising through Five-Year Plans, soon owned more tanks than the rest of the world combined, guided by Mikhail Tukhachevsky's deep-battle ideas. France, short of manpower after its wartime birth-rate collapse, mechanised heavily and in 1934 formed two mechanised corps of 430 tanks each.
Source: Armoured warfare
