The World's Great Tanks by Roger Ford

Author:Roger Ford [Ford, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality, Philosophy, Religious
ISBN: 9781438449593
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

TANKS IN

TRANSITION,

FROM POTSDAM

TO VIETNAM

The tank’s achievements during World War II ensured armour’s role in future strategic plans. The conflicts which spanned the subsequent Cold War period, plus advances in technology, ensured that the tank became one of the most decisive weapons on the battlefield.

One of the immediate results of World War II’s coming to a close, halfway through 1945, was the downsizing of the western Allies’ armies and the consequent withdrawal, either into storage or for disposal, of huge numbers of vehicles and weapons. Some of what remained of the weapons and equipment of the defeated German Army and the Waffen-SS went for scrap, but some was appropriated by the Allies (particularly France), and some found its way into the ‘second user’ market. Redundant Soviet equipment, what there was of it, went to equip the USSR’s client states. All this was to be expected. The same armies had, by and large, gone through the same process a quarter of a century before, but there was one big difference between the circumstances in 1945 and those of 1919. This time, there was to be no reconstitution of small independent states on the dissolution of powerful empires. Instead, exactly the reverse was to take place, as the Red Army, far from marching out of the countries it had overrun in its pursuit of the Nazis, dug itself in to stay. Winston Churchill warned of Soviet expansionism in a speech he made in Fulton, Missouri, on 5 March 1946, in which he said; ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent [of Europel.’ The western Allies’ response to the Soviets was to set up the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in 1949, with the United States in a pre-eminent role. The ‘Cold War’ that ensued was to last for some 40 years and ensured that progress in weapons technology and in the development of new ways and means of waging war hardly slowed at all.

AGEING AMERICANS

Had it come to immediate all-out war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, as the eastern bloc became known, there is little doubt who would have won, for, to misquote Belloc’s paen to an earlier weapon that changed the world, ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The atom bomb, and they have not’; in other words, NATO had nuclear weapons, the Russians did not. However, that state of affairs was not to last, and once parity had been reached at the top of the weapons tree, a struggle began for supremacy lower down. And nowhere was this battle for the upper hand more bitterly fought than in the area of tanks. The vast majority of the tanks in US Army service at the war’s end were M4 Shermans of one variety or another. The Sherman was a tank designed in 1940 according to principles established during the previous decade, and it was very clearly obsolescent by this time and badly in need of replacement. In the short term,

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