Jan Zizka and the Tank
Englishmen know that tanks were invented by Swinton during the First World War with far-sighted support from Winston Churchill. Germans know that it was Guderian who perfected tank tactics and put them into practice, with stunning effect, on the field of battle. If you are French, you are proud that your country set up the world’s first armoured divisions in the 1930s.
But we are all wrong.
It was Jan Zizka who first had the idea of a ‘tank’, who dreamed up tank strategy and tactics, and who used armoured formations to win battle after battle. This was six hundred years ago.
Zizka’s army moved across the landscape in parallel columns anchored on hundreds of large, strongly-built wagons which were chained together in a ‘wagenburg’ once a suitable defensive position had been found. Horses, oxen and non-combatants were protected in the centre of this ‘wagon-fortress’ while artillery was positioned between the wagons and on earth mounds behind them.
Zizka had hit on the core ideas of armoured warfare half a millennium before the rest of the world caught up: rapid penetration into the enemy’s rear areas and the creation of an impervious local zone defended by massed gun-power.
What’s remarkable about this is Zizka’s sheer originality. He didn’t just come up with the notion of mobile fortresses, he figured out a way to use them to offset the advantages of his numerically superior enemies: he overturned all known military doctrine, and was, for years, unbeatable.
Curiously, Zizka’s revolutionary thinking died with him. How could military leaders ignore his tactics when they had so obviously proved superior? Nothing of the kind was seen or even talked about until the First World War.
It is widely-believed, and may be true, that military leaders are innately conservative. ‘Generals always try to fight the previous war.’ Yet even a quick look at the rate of innovation in weapons and tactics between the Middle Ages and the Twentieth Century shows a constant stream of new ideas replacing conventional practices. The British Army was possibly the most reactionary in Europe (Britain was a naval power and its land forces were supplementary) but, in the 19th century alone, Wellington embraced the notion of sharp-shooting light infantry and Britain’s ‘draw’ in the Boer War provoked a radical re-thinking of The Thin Red Line, using ideas copied from the Dutch.
It’s possible that Zizka’s innovations were disregarded because the military leaders of the fifteenth to twentieth centuries were simply vain. They liked the idea of open warfare because it gave them a chance to shine. There is certainly something glorious, if perhaps not quite sane, about exploits such as the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. But there is also something ludicrous about the masses of cavalry, consuming train-loads of fodder every week, which Haig kept ready and waiting in the First World War for an opportunity that never happened. He was, of course, a cavalryman.
He also misunderstood tank tactics: perhaps he had never studied Zizka. Haig insisted on sharing out his tanks in penny-packets among the infantry. At Cambrai – the sole occasion when a large force of tanks broke through into the Germans’ rear areas – there were no infantry to support them, so they retired as soon as the Germans launched a counter-attack. At least, some of them retired: the rest were marooned and destroyed by German artillery.
The allies’ caricature of the Prussian Officer – thick-skinned, thick-skulled, thick – gave rise to a belief that German armies were incapable of innovation or flexibility. In fact, the reverse was the case. But it was not just the Germans who thought hard about armoured warfare in the twenties and thirties: the French and British were equally keen to develop radical new alternatives to the horrors of the trenches. You might say that the spirit of Zizka walked abroad, although I have seen no references to his ideas in military writing of this period.
As World War Two began both the British and the French had far more tanks than the Germans. As it happens, 20 per cent of the tanks used to invade France were Czech, commandeered by the OKH after Czechoslovakia had been abandoned by its guarantors. The difference, which left the roads to Dunkirk choked with British and French armoured vehicles, was in the way in which the Germans used their limited supplies of machinery. Their tactics were better.
Britain was so well-provided with tanks and fast military vehicles that Churchill could afford to send hundreds to North Africa at a time when an invasion of the British Isles was seriously anticipated. It was much later that American factories began to tip the balance even further, both for Britain and the USSR. Between 1939 and 1943 Britain out-produced Germany in tanks by a wide margin; it was not until 1944, with Speer’s re-organisation of German military production, that Germany built more tanks than the United Kingdom. Even so, throughout the war, Germany’s armies depended more on horses than on the internal combustion engine.
There is a popular view that German tanks were superior to those of the allied armies. This is not so: the Sherman Firefly, for instance, which landed in Normandy and accompanied the advance to Germany’s borders in ever-increasing numbers, could destroy any German tank – even the feared Tiger – at equal range. There was an unfortunate tendency in British political circles, during and after the war, to blame the tools for the time and trouble it took to defeat the Wehrmacht.
It was clear to Stalin and his military advisors that land warfare was all about tanks supported by fast-moving infantry. Hence the vast tank-battles, on a scale unimaginable to the British or the Americans, which gradually pushed the invader out of Soviet territory. Hence also the tens of thousands of tanks which formed the bastion of the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War. They were never called upon to fight, thank goodness: it’s anyone’s guess what would have happened, but it’s very unlikely that the British and American forces in Germany could have held out for long.
As Czechs know only too well, it was as an instrument of civilian repression that the tank reached its nadir. Who can forget the faces of the crowds in Prague as – yet again – tanks lumbered over their cobbled streets to extinguish the brief flowering of ‘communism with a human face’. This was a humiliating destiny for a battlefield weapon with – if one can say this – a noble history behind it. What would Zizka have thought?