The Origins of the Tank: From the Siege Engine to the Somme

From Wood and Leather to Gunpowder: The First Armored Vehicles

Today we’re going to look at the origins of the tank and of armored vehicles, from their earliest roots through to the First World War. The idea of armoring vehicles built for combat is not a twentieth-century invention. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, armies used wood-and-leather structures mounted on wheels to bring troops up to enemy walls with some protection against projectiles. These siege engines were never meant for engagement in open battle, but rather to solve a specific problem: crossing the ground swept by the defenders during the approach to the walls. The more elaborate versions incorporated battering rams, assault towers with folding ramps, or mechanisms for breaking down gates and stretches of wall. For millennia, this function — wheeled cover for siege operations — remained essentially unchanged.

The arrival of gunpowder radically upset this balance. The cannon proved to be the most effective weapon for demolishing castles and cities, and from the Renaissance onward military engineers began conceiving machines that combined armor, propulsion, and firepower for use on open ground. The best-known example is the combat vehicle designed by Leonardo da Vinci around 1487 for Ludovico Sforza: a reinforced wooden conical platform, propelled by its own crew through a system of gears, with cannon arranged to fire in every direction. The idea was brilliant; its mechanical feasibility, scant. Later studies of his plans also revealed a design flaw in the transmission system that would have prevented the vehicle from moving at all, leading some historians to speculate that Leonardo built in the flaw deliberately so the weapon could never actually be built.

(photo of the da Vinci / Sforza diorama)

The Hussite War Wagons: Jan Žižka and the War of Mobile Positions

The fifteenth-century Hussite war wagons deserve special attention, as they are the most direct precedent for the tactical use of an armored vehicle in open battle. The Czech general Jan Žižka —who spent much of his military campaign completely blind, without this diminishing his effectiveness in the slightest— developed a tactic known as the wagenburg, or wagon fort: reinforced wooden vehicles, equipped with crossbows and small cannon, arranged in a tight formation to create a mobile defensive line capable of stopping heavy cavalry.

The key lay not in the individual armor of each wagon, but in the synergy between the mobility of the whole formation, concentrated firepower, and the ability to reconfigure quickly according to the terrain. During the Hussite Wars (1419–1434), this system proved extraordinarily effective against numerically superior armies of the Crown of Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire. Žižka never lost a battle. His tactical legacy —the vehicle as a simultaneous platform for firepower and cover, maneuverable on the field— foreshadows the doctrine of the modern tank in many respects.

The Industrial Revolution and the First Armored Cars

The Industrial Revolution transformed the scale and violence of war, but also its means of propulsion. The internal combustion engine, developed in the second half of the nineteenth century, opened up the possibility of building self-propelled vehicles without relying on animal or human traction. From the earliest years of the automobile, around 1900, European armies began exploring its military use: at first, by armoring existing commercial cars; later, by designing combat vehicles from scratch.

These wheeled armored cars, without tracks, proved useful on firm ground, but their mobility was severely limited on a battlefield churned up by shellfire. The caterpillar track, which spreads the vehicle’s weight over a much larger surface, was the technological component needed to operate on soft ground or over obstacles. Tracked agricultural tractors, widespread across Europe and North America in the early twentieth century, provided the mechanical foundation on which military engineers would build in the years that followed.

Britain and the Birth of the Tank: From the Landship Committee to the Mark I

In 1914 Europe entered a conflict without precedent. The Western Front, which began as a war of movement, turned within a few weeks into a war of static positions. No man’s land —that stretch of mud, barbed wire, and machine-gun fire separating the trenches— seemed impossible to cross. No existing weapon could get through it without massive losses.

The solution came from the Admiralty. Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, pushed for the creation of the Landship Committee in February 1915, funding the development of a vehicle capable of crossing trenches, cutting through barbed wire, withstanding machine-gun fire, and covering the advance of the infantry.

The prototyping process went through two phases. The first produced Little Willie (September 1915), a 14-ton prototype designed by William Tritton and Lieutenant Colonel Walter Wilson that could cross a trench a metre and a half wide but could not clear larger obstacles. Its immediate successor was Big Willie —later christened Mother—, demonstrated to military authorities in February 1916. With its now-iconic rhomboid silhouette and all-round tracks, this second prototype weighed 28 tons and was powered by a six-cylinder in-line Daimler engine producing 105 horsepower, capable of crossing trenches more than three metres wide and climbing slopes that would have stopped any armored car in its tracks.

The project’s code name —«tank»— was a security measure: the workers building the first examples were told they were manufacturing water tanks destined for Mesopotamia or Petrograd. The name stuck forever.

The first mass-produced tank was the Mark I, of which roughly 150 units were built between 1916 and early 1917. It made its combat debut on 15 September 1916, at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette, during the Somme offensive. Of the 49 tanks sent to the front, only 32 reached their starting positions, and barely 9 advanced alongside the infantry as planned. The results were mixed, but the panic they caused in the German lines confirmed the potential of the new weapon and accelerated production.

The Mark IV: Cambrai and the First Tank-versus-Tank Combat

The design evolved through several production series, culminating in the Mark IV, the most numerous and effective tank fielded by Britain during the Great War, with more than 1,200 units built. It retained the rhomboid profile and unsprung all-round tracks, but incorporated improvements in armor and armament. It came in two versions: the «female», armed with six Lewis machine guns, and the «male», with four machine guns and two six-pounder cannon, all mounted in side sponsons.

Its limitations were considerable. It was slow —about 6 km/h on favorable ground— and mechanically unreliable. The engine, mounted in the middle of the crew compartment, spewed out toxic fumes; the heat inside was stifling; visibility was almost nil. The eight-man crew —four for driving, four for the weapons— worked in a cramped space with no direct communication between them. The armor could withstand machine-gun fire but was vulnerable to German anti-tank rifles (Tank-Gewehr M1918) and to direct artillery fire.

Its most notable action was the Battle of Cambrai (November 1917), where the coordinated deployment of nearly 400 tanks —the largest ever assembled up to that point— demonstrated the weapon’s ability to break through trench lines in depth, advancing several kilometres in just a few hours. The breakthrough could not be exploited for lack of reserves, but Cambrai established the doctrine of the massed tank attack.

The Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux (24 April 1918) deserves particular mention: there, three Mark IVs —one male and two females— engaged several German A7Vs in what became the first tank-versus-tank combat in history. The male Mark IV damaged at least one A7V; the two females, armed only with machine guns, could not pierce the German armor and suffered heavy losses. The episode revealed the need for better-balanced armor and armament in future tanks.

The Whippet: Speed in the Service of the Breakthrough

The Mark IV’s sluggishness —it had been designed to keep pace with the infantry— spurred the development of a nimbler model. The Medium Mark A, nicknamed the Whippet, was designed by William Tritton starting in 1916, with production approved in 1917. It could reach 13 km/h —more than double the Mark IV’s speed— and was armed with four machine guns. It was not a breakthrough tank but an exploitation one: its mission was to slip through the gaps opened by the heavy tanks and infantry, taking on roles until then reserved for cavalry.

It entered combat on 26 March 1918, during the German spring offensive (the Kaiserschlacht), and proved remarkably effective as a platform for harassment and pursuit. A single Whippet —the Musical Box, crewed by Lieutenant C. B. Arnold— operated alone for nine hours on 8 August 1918, destroying artillery and vehicles and causing hundreds of casualties before finally being set ablaze.

The French Tanks: The Schneider and the Saint-Chamond

France began developing armored vehicles in parallel with Britain, though with disappointing initial results.

The Schneider CA1 was the first French tank. Completed in 1916 and deployed in combat on 16 April 1917, on the Chemin des Dames, it had the shape of an upturned ship’s hull and was armed with a short 75 mm gun and two machine guns, operated by a crew of six on tracks derived from an American agricultural tractor. As in the early British Marks, the engine and crew shared the same compartment, causing fume poisoning and extreme heat. Its most serious flaw was the position of the fuel tank at the front —the part most exposed to enemy fire— which meant that most of this model’s casualties resulted from fires and ammunition explosions. Only 400 units were built.

The Saint-Chamond was even more troublesome. Its huge forward overhang, designed to house the 75 mm Mle 1897 gun, tended to sink into the mud and get stuck in trenches, defeating the very purpose it had been built for. The machine was disproportionately long relative to the surface area of its tracks, with weight distribution so poor that crews refused to maneuver it even on the training grounds. Both models were technical and operational failures that consumed time and resources without delivering any meaningful tactical advantage.

The Renault FT-17: The Tank That Invented the Modern Tank

Both failures were amply offset by the Renault FT-17, the most innovative and influential tank of the First World War and, quite possibly, of the weapon’s entire history.

At barely 7 tons, the FT-17 established the design principles that would define the tank for the rest of the twentieth century: a fully rotating 360° turret, armed with a machine gun or a 37 mm gun; a sealed-off separation between the crew compartment —driver and commander-gunner— and the engine, eliminating the problem of fumes and heat; and 22 mm of frontal armor that did not compromise mobility, thanks to the vehicle’s small size and low weight.

The combination of speed, protection, and low production cost meant it could be deployed in assault waves to great effect. More than 3,000 units were built, equipping not only the French army but also the American Expeditionary Force and numerous armies around the world. The FT-17 remained in active service in multiple countries throughout the interwar period and saw combat in the Second World War, on both sides of the front, in settings as different as France, North Africa, and Finland.

The Dysfunctions of the French System and the FT-17’s Belated Triumph

The tortuous path that led to the FT-17 illustrates the dysfunctions of the French military procurement system. France began developing armored vehicles at the same time as Britain, but the process was repeatedly blocked by industrial rivalries, political maneuvering, and changes in command.

General Mourret had commissioned the development of a tank from the firm FCM (Forges et Chantiers de la Méditerranée), which largely ignored the project. Once the Mark I became known, public pressure demanded a national response, and the government turned to Louis Renault, who agreed to help while also developing his own light tank. The struggle between the advocates of the heavy tank —backed by the political establishment— and General Estienne, a champion of the light, mobile tank, repeatedly paralyzed production. Joffre’s replacement by Nivelle, the cancellation of all tank programs decreed by Minister Albert Thomas, and Mourret’s clandestine resumption of the work —for which he was removed from his post— all illustrate the scale of the institutional chaos.

The logjam broke with the entry of the United States into the war in April 1917. General Pershing, an advocate of mobile warfare, demanded light, fast tanks. The appointment of Pétain as commander-in-chief finally gave General Estienne the authority he needed to push large-scale production of the FT-17. The heavy super-tank projects went on accumulating delays until the armistice of 11 November 1918 rendered them definitively irrelevant. The FT-17, designed against all odds, outlived every one of its detractors. Armored vehicles went on evolving and came to dominate the battlefields of the Second World War, right up to today, when drones now threaten their supremacy; and that has been the story of the origins of the tank and of armored vehicles, from their beginnings through to the First World War. You can see several of these vehicles in the 20th and 21st century hall of Museo L’Iber!