1/76 & 1/72 Scale Model AFV Museum: Guided Tour

World War I

We start the tour with World War I tanks. The modern tank was born in "The Great War", designed to break the trench war stalemate that had both armies bogged down. Although armored vehicles had existed before, it wasn't until the appearance of tracked, armored and heavily armed vehicles that the AFV in the modern sense of the word came into being (this is of course debatable; historians may point to Zizka's 15th century battle wagons as the first harbingers of tank warfare).

The first tanks were designed for infantry support; slow moving, they were supposed to breach barbed wire, cross trenches, knock out enemy machine-gun nests, and roll up the opposing army's flanks, with the infantry following close behind. They were plagued by technical difficulties, often more tanks were lost due to mechanical breakdowns than to enemy fire. But in the closing months of the war tanks would come to play a crucial role in almost every major battle.

Most military minds failed to grasp the significance of the new weapon. They did not see tanks fulfilling a role beyond infantry support, and tank tactics involved keeping the vehicles interspersed among the infantry, punching holes in enemy lines but allowing the foot soldiers to exploit the breaks. A few visionaries, however, recognized the potential for tanks to become a separate fighting arm within the military, and the decades to follow would prove these advanced tacticians correct.

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