Mark Urban

What would happen then?

And, of course, the first thing they need to do is buy machines that can actually do that, that have sufficiently good engines and enough fuel in them to keep going.

And, of course, you know, I'm afraid it's one of those bitter RAs of history that the two armies where they realize that are the Soviet Army, which from the mid-1930s on, the Red Army –

is buying tanks by the thousand and have been inspired by those ideas of people like Boney Fuller and Basil Littleheart and other British writer on military affairs.

And they're thinking, yes, we see what you're saying.

You know, if a tank motors for 100 kilometers into the enemy rear and shoots up all their supply dumps and airfields and command posts, they could just collapse.

You know, it's the beginnings of what we might call Blitzkrieg.

And so they invest.

And the Germans, late on in the late 30s, they finally get it.

And then they start investing big time as well.

But the British are sort of hobbling on with a trial armoured brigade.

Fighting over resources, you know, these kind of rather bitter battles between cavalry generals who are still insisting that the horse is the queen of the battlefield and the tankies, you know, oily rags, so-called, who are saying, no, no, no, this is the machine age.

And the person who dominates the landscape with mobility, highly mobile tracked vehicles can achieve untold victories for far less cost than the terrible slaughter we've just witnessed in the First World War.

I mean, a lot of people, when they look at tanks and the way they're designed and the principles behind them, they talk about this kind of eternal triangle, which is firepower, protection, mobility.

So you make adjustments around these design compromises.

If you make it better protected by hanging more armour on it, maybe the mobility suffers.

If you make it faster and maybe the gun has to become lighter.

This constant compromise in engineering terms.

Now, some people argue...

that a fourth element came into the picture with communications, that once you had reliable radio communications between tanks, you could employ them in a radically different way.