![]() War games held in New York to test the Army’s capability were not encouraging unable to find enough tanks or armored cars to supply the games, the Army was forced to substitute Good Humor trucks as decoys. In 1939, before America entered World War II, the United States Army was poorly equipped to fight a major war. The Soviets similarly produced an entire series of heavy breakthrough tanks. The British persisted for much of the war on a dual track of development, remaining heavy tanks to support the infantry and lighter, more mobile tanks for independent armored formations. The German, Soviet, and American armies therefore developed a number of tank surrogates such as tank destroyers and assault guns to perform these functions in cooperation with the infantry.Īrmor experts in most armies, however, were determined to avoid being tied to the infantry, and in any event a tank was an extremely complicated, expensive, and therefore scarce weapon. This concentration of mechanized forces in a small nuaber of mobile divisions left the ordinary infantry unit deficient in both antitank weapons for the defense and armor to accompany the deliberate attack. ![]() By 1943, the same armies had evolved armored divisions that were a balance of different arms and services, each of which had to be as mobile and almost as protected as the tanks they accompanied. In 1939, most armies still thought of an armored division as a mass of tanks with relatively limited support from the other arms. The mechanized combined arms force came of age in this war. World War II did more than force armies to integrate all the available arms at every level into a mobile, flexible team.
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