The greatest tank battles are in the past?

Tanks are not created in order to fight with tanks. They have a different task, and it is concluded (depending on the class of the machine) or in rapid advance along the enemy's rear in order to cover defensive areas, or in direct hacking of enemy fortifications. In the first case light tanks are used, in the second - medium and heavy.

The greatest tank fights in the history of this kind of troops occurred in the XX century, during the Second World War. Each of these battles was the result of erroneous actions of the General Staffs, which necessitated the adoption of emergency measures to prevent the breakthrough of the front. However, such situations arose in the last century repeatedly.

If we evaluate the greatest tank battles in terms of the number of combat vehicles that took part in them, then in such superbits one can consider several historical episodes in which hundreds of armored vehicles fought simultaneously.

The small North African village of El Alamein became world famous due to the fact that in 1944 in the desert near it six hundred German and Italian tanks met with the British, the number of which was 1200 cars.

There were other great tank battles on the Western Front and in Africa, but they are far in scale before the Kursk operation, which was a gigantic counterattack, when each side tried to break the enemy's defense, breaking it and going into a decisive attack.

In the same year, the large-scale counter-offensive of the Americans in the Ardennes was a response to an attempt by the Germans to smash the Allied Expeditionary Corps in Europe by sending SS troop divisions to it.

The real picture of this great battle is different from the one with which the Soviet cinema-goer is familiar on the film "Liberation". The advantages of the "thirty-foursquare" in maneuverability were partly offset by the fact that the Germans, when it was possible, realized the main plus of the newly appeared "royal tigers" and "panthers", that is, a long range of aimed fire. " Like many other great tank battles, Prokhorovka did not become a place of final triumph for either side, each of which suffered heavy losses. Hundreds of cars were burned, the victims of the Germans turned out to be less significant, but they became fatal for the Wehrmacht because of the lower capacity to reproduce destroyed equipment.

In the second half of the XX century, there were also the greatest tank battles in which the armored vehicles that participated on both sides were calculated in four-digit numbers. In the "Yom Kippur War", the steel fist of Syria fell on the position of the Israeli army. It happened in early October 1973. Arab troops had a sevenfold advantage, their cars were equipped with night vision devices, which gave undoubted advantages during the battles in the dark, but they could not succeed.

Modern anti-tank weapons, including ATGMs, mines, cumulative missiles, assault aircraft and much more, made the tanks extremely vulnerable. Despite this, production and continuous improvement of armored vehicles continues, because there are simply no other ways to occupy territories. Changing tactical methods of using machines, which are increasingly attacked "on the forehead." On the counter battles have not been heard for a long time, and, most likely, the greatest tank battles will remain on the pages of military history textbooks.