Tanks are armored vehicles designed to withstand heavy fire, travel quickly over rough terrain, and attack enemy soldiers with a cannon, machine gun, or flamethrower. The word "tank" was actually a secret code word for what military developers were calling a "land ship."

The stalemate of trench warfare on the western front of World War I was the main reason tanks were invented in the first place. The military leaders of Britain and France needed a way to cross No Man's Land. The tank could move on German trenches, crush the barbed wire and other blockades in its way, and most importantly, survive the rapid fire from machine guns. In the beginning, however, tanks weren't especially helpful. They could only move at a walking pace, and like the earliest machine guns, they were constantly breaking down. The German armies quickly learned how defend against tanks using mines and other explosive or fiery weapons. It was toward the end of the war that coordinated tank attacks started breaching German defenses.

Tanks were mostly developed by Britain and France in World War I, and Germany was relatively behind in its development of the same technology. During World War II, however, it was Germany that took the lead in tank technology and tactics.

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