Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

CHAPTER TEN
Tanks and Anti-Tank
Weapons
While the British pioneered the use of armoured fighting vehicles in 1916, by 1939 the
baton had passed to Germany, where men such as Guderian showed that they could
win a war of movement, as British theorists had always promised. Then Hitler took a
personal hand in the German tank programme, and his insistence that size mattered
above all things was to send the entire effort off on a wild goose chase from which it
never fully recovered, even though saner counsel did eventually prevail.
Properly speaking, the tank ceased to be a secret
weapon on the morning of 15 September 1916,
when the British Tank Mark 1, or 'Mother', went into
action on the Somme battlefield. Its appearance came
as a complete surprise to the German infantry, secrecy
having been maintained throughout. Even the
Above: The Panzerjäger Tiger was based on the vehicle
Ferdinand Porsche put forward for the Tiger project.
Left: The 'Panzerschreck' fired a rocket-propelled grenade
with a hollow-charge warhead.
name 'tank' was deliberately misleading, though it
stuck. More of a secret than the existence of tanks in
the German Army was the way in which they would
be employed. In any event, their use came as a complete
surprise to the Poles in 1939 and to the French
the following year. However, that was not to say that
new models would be developed in full view.
THE TIGER TANK
When the 58-tonne (57-ton) Sonderkraftfahrzeug
(SdKfz) 181 Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger first went
into action on the Leningrad front, 26 years ancf 1 day
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