RE: Why Btonze Age?
July 3, 2016 at 4:03 pm
(This post was last modified: July 3, 2016 at 4:17 pm by Anomalocaris.)
The sort of thing you are talking about is a tankette, which is a tiny, car sized, barely armored tracked vehicle equipped with 1-2 machine guns (although the polish had one with a real machine cannon), and usually has a crew of 2 men, and were often open topped rather than fully enclosed. Tankette were quite popular in the 1930s. Most countries experimented with a few. The reason for its popularity was tankette a were really cheap, and in theory can be built in enormous numbers. So tankette allowed tacticians to directly convert the traditional individual infantryman into conceptually a motorized equivalent on an almost one to one basis in field maneuvers.
However, experience during the Spanish civil war showed tankette said were worthless when confronted with real tanks armed with real cannons. Furthermore, although tankette said were somewhat armored, the light weight of the armor means they were not securely proof against rifle caliber ammunition, and were completely vulnerable to heavy supporting machine guns. So anyone who had the industrial capacity to replace them did so by start of WWII.
The French, AFAIK, never deployed tankettes. But they did toy with the idea. Also, they had some vehicles which in design came close, but those vehicle were for a completely different purpose.
Also, one should not be too hard on the French army. The French army had many problems, but they also had many strengths. For example, the French army was more highly mechanized than the German army, even though the French army relied more on static defense.
Also, the German style of armored warfare is not as invincible against the French style of warfare as one might
Think. The main thing that allowed the Germans to achieve the swift victory was still the fact that the Germans found a pass around the French army where the French were confident there was an impenetrable natural barrier. Had the Germans not found the pass, and then gambled everything, literally at the last moment, on using this pass, the attack against the Low Countries and France would likely ended up much like the operation citedel in Ukraine in 1943, with German panzers bashing their own heads in against strong layered defenses, failing to achieve any sort of break through on a scale that can overwhelm French reserves.
However, experience during the Spanish civil war showed tankette said were worthless when confronted with real tanks armed with real cannons. Furthermore, although tankette said were somewhat armored, the light weight of the armor means they were not securely proof against rifle caliber ammunition, and were completely vulnerable to heavy supporting machine guns. So anyone who had the industrial capacity to replace them did so by start of WWII.
The French, AFAIK, never deployed tankettes. But they did toy with the idea. Also, they had some vehicles which in design came close, but those vehicle were for a completely different purpose.
Also, one should not be too hard on the French army. The French army had many problems, but they also had many strengths. For example, the French army was more highly mechanized than the German army, even though the French army relied more on static defense.
Also, the German style of armored warfare is not as invincible against the French style of warfare as one might
Think. The main thing that allowed the Germans to achieve the swift victory was still the fact that the Germans found a pass around the French army where the French were confident there was an impenetrable natural barrier. Had the Germans not found the pass, and then gambled everything, literally at the last moment, on using this pass, the attack against the Low Countries and France would likely ended up much like the operation citedel in Ukraine in 1943, with German panzers bashing their own heads in against strong layered defenses, failing to achieve any sort of break through on a scale that can overwhelm French reserves.
