Infantry Tank - Comparisons To Other Tank Types

Comparisons To Other Tank Types

Using later terminology, the infantry tank has been compared to a heavy tank, while the cruisers were compared to mediums, lights, or even armoured cars. This comparison can be misleading though: particularly as the infantry tank was never intended to have the same anti-tank capabilities as a heavy tank.

The infantry tank was distinctly different from either the "heavy tank" or "breakthrough tank" concepts, although some pre-war multi-turreted heavy tanks such as the Soviet T-35 and German Neubaufahrzeug (both taking some of their inspiration from the Vickers A1E1 Independent tank prototype - an idea which was abandoned by the War office in the late 1920s for lack of funding) were similar, and with similar doctrines for their use. The Neubaufahrzeug was considered too slow for Blitzkrieg tactics and fell from favour. German (and to some extent Soviet) wartime doctrine shifted towards faster medium and heavy tanks fighting large multi-tank battles, with the role of the infantry tank in assaults taken by simpler self-propelled artillery.

An important difference, however, was that heavy tanks were generally very well armed, while infantry tanks were not necessarily better-armed than other tanks. For example, the Soviet KV-1 heavy tank and British Matilda II infantry tank were deployed at about the same time in 1940. These two tanks had similar levels of armour protection and mobility, but the KV was far more heavily armed than the Matilda.

In British practice, the main armament of the infantry tank went in three phases. The pre-Dunkirk British Army Matilda I had only a single heavy Vickers machine gun, a compromise forced by the lightness of its chassis and the price it was built to. The Matilda II gained a capable anti-tank capacity for its time, with the 40mm 2 pounder, but these were only issued with solid-shot (i.e. non-explosive) for anti-tank use and was of little use for artillery close-support of infantry. The ultimate evolution of the British infantry tank concept began with the Churchill MkI, where a hull-mounted 3 inch howitzer could support infantry assaults with HE shells while the turret had a 2 pdr. As the increasing size of tanks, and their turret ring diameters, allowed such a howitzer to be turret-mounted in vehicles such as the Crusader Close Support (CS) and Centaur CS.