Technology during World War I

Mobility

Mors-Minerva armoured car of the Belgian Expeditionary Corps in Russia, c. January 1916

In the early days of the war, armoured cars armed with machine guns were organized into combat units, along with cyclist infantry and machine guns mounted on motor cycle sidecars. Though not able to assault entrenched positions, they provided mobile fire support to infantry, and performed scouting, reconnaissance, and other roles similar to cavalry. After trench warfare took hold of major battle-lines, opportunities for such vehicles greatly diminished, though they continued to see use in the more open campaigns in Russia and the Middle East.

Between late 1914 and early 1918, the Western Front hardly moved. When the Russian Empire surrendered after the October Revolution in 1917, Germany was able to move many troops to the Western Front. With new stormtrooper infantry trained in infiltration tactics to exploit enemy weak points and penetrate into rear areas, they launched a series of offensives in the spring of 1918.

In the largest of these, Operation Michael, General Oskar von Hutier pushed forward 60 kilometers, gaining in a couple weeks what France and Britain had spent years to achieve. Although initially successful tactically, these offensives stalled after outrunning their horse-drawn supply, artillery, and reserves, leaving German forces weakened and exhausted.

In the Battle of Amiens of August 1918, the Triple Entente forces began a counterattack that would be called the "Hundred Days Offensive". The Australian and Canadian divisions that spearheaded the attack managed to advance 13 kilometers on the first day alone. These battles marked the end of trench warfare on the Western Front and a return to mobile warfare.

The mobile personnel shield was a less successful attempt at restoring mobility.

After the war, the defeated Germans would seek to combine their infantry-based mobile warfare of 1918 with vehicles, eventually leading to blitzkrieg, or 'lightning warfare'.

Tanks

Renault FTs in U.S. service, Juvigny, France

Although the concept of the tank had been suggested as early as the 1890s, authorities showed little more than a passing interest in them until the trench stalemate of World War I caused reconsideration. In early 1915, the British Royal Navy and French industrialists both started dedicated development of tanks.

Basic tank design combined several existing technologies. It included armour plating thick enough to be proof against all standard infantry arms, caterpillar track for mobility over the shell-torn battlefield, the four-stroke gasoline powered internal combustion engine (refined in the 1870s), and heavy firepower, provided by the same machine guns which had recently become so dominant in warfare, or even light artillery guns.

In Britain, a committee was formed to work out a practical tank design. The outcome was large tanks with a rhomboidal shape, to allow crossing of an 8-foot-wide (2.4 m) trench: the Mark I tank, with the "male" versions mounting small naval guns and machine guns, and the "female" carrying only machine guns.

In France, several competing arms industry organizations each proposed radically different designs. Smaller tanks became favored, leading to the Renault FT tank, in part by being able to leverage the engines and manufacturing techniques of commercial tractors and automobiles.

Although the tanks' initial appearance on the battlefield in 1916 terrified some German troops, such engagements provided more opportunities for development than battle successes. Early tanks were unreliable, breaking down often.

Germans learned they were vulnerable to direct hits from field artillery and heavy mortars, their trenches were widened and other obstacles devised to halt them, and special anti-tank rifles were rapidly developed. Also, both Britain and France found new tactics and training were required to make effective use of their tanks, such as larger coordinated formations of tanks and close support with infantry. Once tanks could be organized in the hundreds, as in the opening assault of the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917, they began to have notable impact.

Throughout the remainder of the war, new tank designs often revealed flaws in battle, to be addressed in later designs, but reliability remained the primary weakness of tanks. In the Battle of Amiens, a major Entente counteroffensive near the end of the war, British forces went to field with 532 tanks; after several days, only a few were still in commission, with those that suffered mechanical difficulties outnumbering those disabled by enemy fire.

Germany utilized many captured enemy tanks, and made a few of their own late in the war.

In the last year of the war, despite rapidly increasing production (especially by France) and improving designs, tank technology struggled to make more than a modest impact on the war's overall progress. Plan 1919 proposed the future use of massive tank formations in great offensives combined with ground attack aircraft.

Even without achieving the decisive results hoped for during World War I, tank technology and mechanized warfare had been launched and would grow increasingly sophisticated in the years following the war. By World War II, the tank would evolve into a fearsome weapon critical to restoring mobility to land warfare.