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As a result of the involvement of inexperienced army officers ordered to devise a new tank based on the larger 75 hp Holt chassis in a very short period of time, the first French tanks were poorly designed with respect to the need to cross trenches and did not take the sponson-mounting route of the British tanks.
They were developed to break through barbed wire and destroy enemy machine gun posts. The British and the French were the major users of tanks during the war; tanks were a lower priority for Germany as it assumed a defensive strategy. The few tanks that Germany built were outnumbered by the number of French and British tanks captured and reused.
Prototype-World War I Tanks that entered service after, but as designed in World War I Name Country Year Planned prod./actual total Crew Armament [ammo (rds.)] Armour thickness (front/side/top) Weight Engine Speed Range FCM Char 2C: France 1918 300+/10 12 Canon de 75 modèle 1897, 4× 7.92 mm MG 45/22/10 mm 70 t Petrol 2×200/250 hp
The tank continues to be vulnerable to many kinds of anti-tank weapons and is more logistically demanding than lighter vehicles, but these were traits that were true for the first tanks as well. In direct fire combat they offer an unmatched combination of higher survivability and firepower among ground-based warfare systems.
Tanks were initially deployed in World War I, engineered to overcome the deadlock of trench warfare.Between the two world wars, tanks were further developed.Although they had demonstrated their battlefield effectiveness, only a few nations had the industrial resources to design and build them.
In 1917, during the First World War, the armies on the Western Front continued to change their fighting methods, due to the consequences of increased firepower, more automatic weapons, decentralisation of authority and the integration of specialised branches, equipment and techniques into the traditional structures of infantry, artillery and cavalry.
They were much too short in relation to the vehicle's length and weight (23 tons). Later models attempted to rectify some of the tank's original flaws by installing wider and stronger track shoes, thicker frontal armour and the more effective 75mm Mle 1897 field gun. Altogether 400 Saint-Chamond tanks were built, including 48 unarmed caisson tanks.
When first deployed, British tanks were painted with a four-colour camouflage scheme devised by the artist Solomon Joseph Solomon. It was found that they quickly got covered with mud, rendering elaborate camouflage paint schemes superfluous. In late 1916, the Solomon scheme was abandoned and tanks were painted with a single shade of dark brown ...