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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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A British sniper could put a .303 round through your skull if you showed him an inch of helmet above the parapet. The high explosives, shrapnel, machine gun barrages, gas that scorched your eyes, throat and lungs, blinding, suffocating. A bayonet in your guts in a chance meeting on a night patrol in no man's land. A supersonic grenade fragment. A strafing run from a British aircraft.
Disease, trench fever, gangrene from a cut off the rusty barbed wire. The German troops manning the defences around the French village of Fleur in September 1916 on the Somme thought that they had seen it all. But they hadn't. To the ears of German sentries, on the early morning of the 15th of September, came a strange screeching, roaring, grinding noise. They heard them before they saw them.
One witness reports, we heard strange throbbing noises. And then, lumbering slowly towards us, came three huge mechanical monsters, such as we had never seen before. These mechanical monsters were steel-plated lumbering beasts, rhomboid in shape, metal tracks that traced the outline of the outer edge. Barrels of guns bristled on either flank.
One German witness described them as spewing death, unearthly monsters. They were monsters. They were faceless industrial monsters. If any of the German defenders had read their Jules Verne or their H.G. Wells in school, they might have recognized the almost animate machines conjured from the industrial age. A dystopian, crushing beast given life by engineers.
On they came, barbed wire crumpling beneath them, impenetrable tangles of wire which had ripped the flesh of any men who gingerly tried to pick their way through, now crushed to matting. Old shell holes or trenches which infantry had had to work their way around, this monster could just lunge straight across.
It moved freely across Nomad's Land, a place where until now movement had been a novelty. And its armour... The Germans who did have their wits about them, who had not lost their nerve. They manned machine guns and sprayed thousands of rounds at the whatever it was. Their comrades watched in consternation as those rounds bounced off like steel raindrops off a hardened roof. On they came.
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Chapter 2: What were the challenges faced on the Western Front during World War I?
Some defenders, while they made the obvious choice, they ran. Others stayed at their posts and they died in a hail of gunfire as the monstrous invention straddled the trench and its guns enfiladed along the length of the defences. Behind this vehicle, sheltering in its lee like boats moored up behind a seawall taking the brunt of a gale, were files of infantrymen. I couldn't believe their luck.
Their path had been smoothed by the steel beasts, their bodies sheltered by its bulk. A British eyewitness was watching the infantrymen.
He reported, This was one of those rare occasions when they had passed through enemy fire and they were enjoying themselves chasing and rounding up jerrys, collecting thousands of prisoners and sending them back to our lines, escorted only by engineers armed with shovels. These mighty steel machines resembled water tanks, slabs of metal riveted together in a watertight box.
It seems that the need to preserve secrecy resulted in that term being used to describe them. These machines, which probably more accurately could have been described as land ships with engines propelling them across an ocean of mud clad in steel plates, they would instead be known as tanks. It was a new era in warfare, and I think a lot of those present that day knew it.
We're going to be talking all about that moment. We're going to be talking all about tanks on this podcast today. The subsequent history, bringing it right up to the present. Our contributor is one of the best in the business. He's Mark Urban, a brilliant journalist, author, broadcaster. He's with the Sunday Times now, but he was on Newsnight at the BBC for a long time.
He is a great inspiration to me. He always seeks out that sweet spot between history and current affairs and tells stories from the past to enlighten us about what's going on today. His most recent book is Tank. It is out now. We're going to talk all about tanks, past, present, and where they have a future. Enjoy. Mark Urban, what an honour to have you on the podcast.
Well, what an honour to be on it. Great story. Great story of the tank. Remarkable story. And I can't wait to hear your conclusions about where we are in tank history at the moment and the lessons from the most recent conflict. But let's go all the way back.
to a war that was being fought in Europe in 1914 and had descended into stalemate, had gone on much longer than anyone expected with far, far higher casualty figures, with terrible, terrible bloodshed for a few meters of ground gained and lost. And we're not talking about Ukraine. We are talking about the First World War on the Western Front, this particular example.
Explain what challenges were faced by those who sought to win a battle, to move the front line forward, to march towards the enemy.
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Chapter 3: How did the first tanks change the dynamics of warfare?
This is Germany's, people debate this, but sort of often seen to be Germany's last reasonably big, Hitler probably didn't intend to win the war with it, but a reasonably big offensive in the summer of 1943. Do you subscribe? Is it the largest tank battle in history?
Yes, I think so. The Kursk battle took place over a very wide area, involved a million and a half soldiers. But there was this particular clash at Prokhorovka, where in a single day, over several miles of front, I think the Russians lost something like 350 tanks. They claimed the Germans had lost 200 and something, including 55 tigers. In fact, the Germans had lost 14, including one tiger.
But that's a whole story about how historians went back and analysed the true losses there. But yes, I think that is, I mean, you know, it was later claimed by historians. the head of the Israeli Armored Corps, that if you added the two fronts together, the Golan and the Sinai front in the 1973 war, you had more tanks engaged in a sort of smaller geographic area than the Kursk battle.
But I think that's a slightly tendentious... But not to say the 1973 battle wasn't a huge tank fight, but no, I think Prokhorovka is the kind of...
crowning moment in that sense and you've got tanks fighting almost bumper to bumper though just the whole thing is simply mind-blowing tell me a little bit about the german and soviets their different approach to tanks so the germans are hoping to punch through these massive defensive belts they've got the famous tiger tank with its enormous gun that had been an anti-aircraft gun they just put horizontally and stuck on a tank
they've got the panthers people and on the soviet side you've got these t-34s now they're often characterized as sort of over-engineered a lot of technology very expensive fewer numbers against just mass-produced t-34s that their own crews can fix them give them a screwdriver and they can sort of pretty much fix anything would you rather a lot a lot of t-34s or do you rather have these very very highly engineered german tanks
Well, we know that the Red Army buried the Nazis and therefore I think we know who in the end had the last laugh or grimace. The Tiger, I mean, it is an extraordinary creation. And in some ways, an awful lot of the tanks that one looks at and get developed They still have the primary mission, the Sherman, for example. They're basically there to help the infantrymen.
So they're equipped with a gun that fires a high-exposive shell that goes bang and is good for taking out things like machine gun nests and basically helping your infantry to get forward. The Tiger, pretty much as soon as it hits the battlefield, it is sort of self-consciously deployed
with this doctrine that it's only for use at the decisive point and that its primary mission is to destroy other armor and create a sort of panic effect. And of course, you get these reports from the Eastern Front when they go into action with these extraordinary rates of exchange of, you know, 20, 25 T-34s knocked out for each Tiger in sections of the battlefield there. And I think
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