The male mounted two 57mm main guns, doubling the A7Vs firepower, and three machine guns. Mark IV’s came in two variants, male and female. The British tank’s armament is… where things get weird.
The Mark IV, however, was the product of several years of development and overcame the failure of earlier models to maneuver across rough terrain. The A7V could not cross trenches, for example. Technically, the German A7V was better armored, mounted two machine guns, and used a main gun similar to the British model, but failed miserably when maneuvering around a battlefield. Shortly after dawn, infantry supported by A7Vs captured the city, which threatened the critical railway junction at Amiens, and the British ordered three of their Mark IV tanks to counter the advancing German Armor. The battle began when roughly 1,200 pieces of German artillery blasted Villers-Bretonneux with mustard gas and high explosive shells throughout the night. On April 24, 1918, the first tank-versus-tank battle got underway when three German A7Vs and three British Mark IVs unexpectedly ran into one another during the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux. Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux (April 24-27, 1918) In 1916, even the armored vehicle’s most ardent proponents could not have envisioned the following events where tanks, soldiers, and government production boards converged, often disastrously, on the battlefield. When the first tank debuted in World War I, however, First Lieutenant Patton was chasing Pancho Villa in Mexico, Oberleutnant Rommel was heading to Romania with the Royal Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion, and the armored hulk’s future was anything but certain.
Nearly three-quarters of a century’s passed since their deaths, yet their names evoke images of fire-belching armored beasts to the most disinterested students of military history. Patton, for example, share a powerful niche in the public’s consciousness. General field Marschall Erwin Rommel and General George S. Designed to survive the crucible of battle while destroying the enemy, the tank is a brutal weapon of war that flourished under the guidance of gifted, and often romanticized, tacticians. The tank epitomizes warfare’s key concepts: combat power and mobility, and no major contemporary military lacks an armored backbone. Few weapons shaped the course of war like the steel-clad behemoths that dominated the 20th-century battlefield.