Tankette

A tankette is a tracked armoured fighting vehicle resembling a small tank roughly the size of a car, mainly intended for light infantry support and scouting. Colloquially it may also simply mean a small tank.

Tankettes were designed and built by several states between the 1920s and 1940s, and saw some limited combat in the early phases of World War II. The vulnerability of their light armor, however, eventually caused the concept to be abandoned.

Characteristics

Tankettes were made both in one- and two-man models. Some were so low that the occupant had to lie prone. Some models were not equipped with turrets (and together with the tracked mobility, this is often seen as defining the concept), or just a very simple one that was traversed by hand or leg. They were significantly smaller than light tanks and did not have a tank gun, instead their main weapon tended to be one or two machine guns or, rarely, a 20mm gun or grenade launcher.

History

The genesis of the tankette concept was the armoured warfare of World War I. On the Western Front in the later stage of the war, Allied tanks could break through the enemy trench lines but the infantry (needed to take and hold the ground gained) following the tanks were easily stopped or delayed by small arms fire and artillery. The breakthrough tanks were then isolated and destroyed and reinforcements plugged the hole in the trench line. The tankette was originally conceived in the early interwar period to solve this problem. The first designs were a sort of mobile, one-man machine gun nest protected against small arms fire and shell fragments. This idea was abandoned and the two man-model, mainly intended for reconnaissance, was produced instead. The moving up of infantry while protecting them was solved with the armoured personnel carrier.