page_title: Tanks in the British Army
section_title: Between the wars
hierarchical_section_title: Tanks in the British Army / Operational use / Between the wars
caption_attribution_description: A Light Tank Mk.VIA of the 3rd King's Own Hussars.
context_section_description: After the Great War, General Erich Ludendorff of the German High Command praised the Allied tanks as being a principal factor in Germany's defeat. The Germans had been too late in recognizing their value to consider them in their own plans.
  At a time when most soldiers regarded the tank as a specialized infantry-support weapon for crossing trenches, a significant number of officers in the Royal Tank Corps had gone on to envision much broader roles for mechanized organizations. In May 1918, Colonel J.F.C. Fuller, the acknowledged father of tank doctrine, had used the example of German infiltration tactics to refine what he called "Plan 1919". This was an elaborate concept for a large-scale armoured offensive in 1919.
  An outstanding achievement of the British Army was the creation of the Experimental Mechanised Force in the late 1920s. This was a small Brigade-sized unit developed to field-test the use of tanks and other vehicles. The Experimental Mechanized Force formed by the British demonstrated a mobile force with its own motor transport infantry and self-propelled guns. The unit pioneered the extensive use of radio to control widely separated small units. The unit was short-lived, however.
  In 1920 the Infantry had plans to acquire a Light Infantry Tank. Colonel Johnson of the Tank Design Department derived such a type from the Medium Mark D. In competition Vickers built the Vickers Light Tank. but the project was abandoned in 1922 in favour of a generally more conventional design: the Vickers Light Tank Mark I, that would be renamed to Vickers Medium Tank Mark I in 1924 . The first prototypes were sent to Bovington for trial in 1923.
  The Medium Mark I replaced some of the Mark V heavy tanks; and served in the Royal Tank Regiments, being the first type of in total 200 tanks to be phased out in 1938.
  The Medium Mark I was the first tank to see "mass" production since the last of the ten Char 2C's had been finished in 1921. As of the next tank, the Renault NC27, only about thirty were built, the British Mediums represented most of the world tank production during the Twenties.
  The Medium Mark I successor, the Vickers Medium Mk II combined some of the best traits of WWI tanks into a much faster tank. It was derived from the Vickers Medium Mark I, and was developed to replace the last of the Medium Mark Cs still in use. It had a fully rotating turret on top like the FT, but mounted a dual-use 3-pounder gun (that could fire both high-explosive and anti-tank shells) with a coaxial machine gun.
  The Medium Mark III was ordered in 1928 and  was reliable and provided a good gun platform.  However, it suffered from a bad suspension design: even though road speed increased to thirty miles per hour, during cross-country rides the bogies were often overloaded. Three Mark IIIs were built, one by Vickers and two by the Royal Ordnance Factory at Woolwich: Medium III E1, E2 and E3. The third had an improved suspension and the vehicles were in 1934 taken into use by the HQ of the Tank Brigade. One of the Mark IIIs was fitted as a command vehicle with an extra radio aerial around the turret. This was used by Brigadier Percy Hobart for the Salisbury Plain exercises during 1934.
  Both the cavalry and the Royal Tank Corps wanted fast, lightly armoured, mobile vehicles for reconnaissance and raiding—the light and medium (or "cruiser") tanks. In practice the "light tanks" were often small armoured personnel carriers. On the other hand, the "army tank battalions" performing the traditional infantry-support role required extremely heavy armoured protection. As a consequence of these two doctrinal roles, firepower was neglected in tank design.
  After World War I, the British began to produce a series of similar light tanks and developed them right up to World War II; the Light Tanks Mk II through to the Mk V. Eventually, by the 1930s, British experiments and their strategic situation led to a tank development programme with three main types of tank: light, cruiser, and infantry. The Infantry tanks were tasked with the support of dismounted infantry
caption: Light Tank Mk.VIA of the 3rd King's Own Hussars.
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