How the tank changed war forever

It is 5:15 a.m. on 15 September 1916, somewhere on the Somme. A 23-year-old captain named Harold Mortimore guides a 28-ton steel box across no man's land. No soldier on either side has ever seen anything like it.

For three days and nights, British guns have pounded the German positions around Flers. The Germans are hunkered down, just trying to stay alive. Then a strange, uneven rumble drifts over from the British lines. Through all the smoke they can't see a thing, but it sounds like an engine.

For two years, hundreds of thousands of men had died trying to cross a few hundred metres of mud. The British answer was a machine that could crawl over trenches, flatten wire and shrug off bullets. They called it a tank.

"Mother" and a cover story

Winston Churchill, then in charge of Britain's navy, backed a committee to build armoured vehicles for land warfare. Engineer William Tritton and Lieutenant Walter Wilson turned the idea into a working design, and their prototype was nicknamed "Mother".

The name "tank" was a cover story. Workers were told they were building water tanks, so nobody would guess what was really coming off the line.

The Mark I that followed was nothing like a modern tank. It was a giant rhombus, with tracks running all the way around the hull so it could climb out of trenches. It carried a crew of eight and weighed 28 tons in the "Male" version and 27 in the "Female". Males carried two 6-pounder naval guns inside bulges called sponsons; Females carried only machine guns, to deal with enemy infantry.

Life inside was brutal. The engine sat in the middle of the crew compartment, so the air filled with heat, fumes and noise. Crews often communicated by hand signals because nobody could hear a thing.

Flers, 15 September 1916

The Mark I's first battle was Flers–Courcelette, the third phase of the Battle of the Somme. Of 49 tanks earmarked for the attack, only 32 made it to the start line. The rest broke down or got stuck. Only 18 actually went into action. Those 18 still made history.

The tank everyone copied

France's Renault FT, which first went into battle in May 1918, was tiny next to the Mark I, but it introduced something every tank since has copied. It was the first production tank with its gun in a fully rotating turret, with the driver at the front and the engine at the back. Look at any tank today and you are looking at the FT's descendant, not the Mark I's.

From Blitzkrieg to the main battle tank

In World War II, tanks stopped being slow trench-crossers and became the spearhead of lightning-fast attacks. Germany's Blitzkrieg paired tanks with radios, aircraft and motorised infantry.

After the war, armies stopped building separate light, medium and heavy tanks and settled on a single "main battle tank". It picked up upgrade after upgrade: guns stabilised to stay on target while moving, thermal sights for fighting in the dark, layered composite armour, explosive reactive armour that blasts outward, and autoloaders that replaced the human loader, which the Soviet Union was first to put into a main battle tank with the T-64.

The drone problem

Then came Ukraine. The biggest threat to tanks there isn't another tank. It's a small FPV (first-person-view) drone. Analysts estimate these drones now cause around 65% of Russian armoured losses, and a drone costing as little as $500 can destroy a tank worth millions.

Crews responded with "cope cages", metal grilles welded over the turret.

The tank is adapting rather than disappearing. The UK think tank RUSI found that a properly modified armoured vehicle can survive 10 to 15 drone hits with repairable damage.

So is the tank dead now?

The tank has been declared dead before. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when guided missiles wrecked Israeli tanks by the dozen, headlines asked the same question. Armies answered with better armour and kept building tanks.

Today the drone is the new obituary writer, and the answer looks the same. The tank isn't dying. It's changing shape again.

In 110 years, it has gone from the Mark I, a rattling steel box that usually broke down before reaching the enemy, to machines with automatic loaders, night vision and anti-drone defences. Armies will always need something that can take a hit, move forward and hold ground. The only question is what that something will look like by the tank's 150th birthday.

What do you think: will we still call it a tank?