Defense Focus: Betting on tanks -- Part 3

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28 (UPI) -- The effectiveness of IEDs against tanks in Iraq has been claimed as proof that they have become obsolescent. But it's not true.

For more than 70 years, there have been specific battles or types of conflict that tanks were not suited for -- but none of that ever detracted from their continuing importance in their primary task.

Tanks were claimed to be useless from the first time they were deployed in significant numbers on the Western Front during World War II. The first generation produced enormous machines, slow-moving land leviathans that repeatedly broke down, with huge crews of 10 or 11 men. They were a classic example of a new, immature technology that had to go through a long research and development period before they could become decisive war-winners.

Even after the Nazi blitzkrieg victories that conquered all of Europe and swept to the suburbs of Moscow and Leningrad from September 1939 to December 1941, the correct use of tanks was still poorly understood by the British and Soviet militaries. It was only in late 1942 that Gen. Bernard Montgomery commanding the British 8th Army in the Western Desert became the first Allied commander to successfully integrate the use of tanks with artillery and screening infantry to protect them during breakthroughs, as the German blitzkrieg generals like Erich von Manstein and "Hurrying" Heinz Guderian had done.

Previously, British generals had tried to use tanks as independent, "land cavalry" forces, without integrating them with ground forces. As a result, large numbers of British tanks fell victim to excellent German 88mm guns that were dug in. The Afrika Korps gun crews enjoyed repeated turkey shoots of the British armored formations recklessly thrown against hem.

The year after Montgomery's successful use of tanks with his new integrated tactics at the Battle of Alamein in November 1942, the Soviets finally learned the same lesson. It was only following the enormous battle of Kursk in 1943 -- itself being decided by the largest armored clashes in the history of war -- that the Soviet tank armies came into their formidable prime.

German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's nearly two-year run of success in North Africa until he came up against Montgomery revealed that even in its World War II "golden age" the tank was not invincible and could destroyed in large numbers and its attacks halted if it was up against sufficiently strong defenses, or if it was used in large numbers unwisely in hostile environments.

A classic example of the disastrous misuse of tanks was what happened to Herman Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army at Stalingrad -- the biggest, longest and bloodiest single battle of all time -- in the fall and winter of 1942.

Large numbers of Hoth's previously invincible tanks were destroyed by Soviet troops of Gen. Vassily Chuikov's 62nd Army in close quarters fighting in the pulverized ruins of the Soviet city, even though the German panzers were supported at close range by large numbers of excellent infantry forces from Gen. Friedrich von Paulus' 6th Army.

However, Chuikov was the world's leading expert in the complexities of urban war and the Germans lacked any adequate tactical doctrine at all in that field. German tanks that had swept across dozens of miles a day and conquered major nations in a few weeks with numbing regularity over the previous three years found their daily progress reduced to dozens of yards or meters at enormous cost.

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Next: Anti-tank weapons and how to defeat them