Type 94 tankette 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 development of the
armoured personnel carrier concept in the 1930s. Carro Leggero 3/35 (L3/35) light tank In 1925
British tank pioneer
Giffard Le Quesne Martel built a one-man tank in his garage and showed it to the
War Office, who agreed to production of a few (known as the
Morris-Martel) for testing. The publicity caused
John Carden and
Vivian Loyd to produce their own. Both types were developed further, but the two-man
Carden Loyd tankette was considered the classic and most successful design, In 1928, the
British Army Council objected to the use of the word "tankette," noting that the "mechanization of the Army" was still in its infancy. The
Italian Royal Army (
Regio Esercito) equipped three armoured divisions and three "fast" (
celere) divisions with
L3/33 and
L3/35 tankettes. The L3s were used in large numbers during the
Italian invasion of Ethiopia, the
Spanish Civil War, and almost every place Italian soldiers fought during
World War II. Some L3s went with the
Italian Expeditionary Corps in Russia (
Corpo di Spedizione Italiano, CSIR) as late as
Operation Barbarossa. The
French armoured reconnaissance type (
automitrailleuses de reconnaissance, "machine-gun scout") of the 1930s was essentially a tankette in form, specifically intended for scouting ahead of the main force. In 1935, the Soviets experimented with transporting
T-27s by air, suspending one under the fuselage of a
Tupolev TB-3 heavy bomber. and
jungle warfare. However, by the time of the Second World War, many were already obsolete and some were proven unsuccessful in their appointed task. Many were relegated to
tractor duties for artillery or logistics units. Due to their limited utility and vulnerability to
anti-tank weapons (even machine guns), the tankette concept was abandoned, and their role largely taken over by
armoured cars. However, in
Vietnam, the
US Marines employed the similar, somewhat larger,
M50 Ontos tank destroyer with some success. The 1980s saw the renaissance of a similar concept in the
German Wiesel AWC, introduced to provide airborne troops with armoured reconnaissance capability; while these are called "armoured weapons carriers", they fit the definition of a tankette. ==Examples==