Source: http://worldoftanks.ru/ru/news/pc-browser/12/dreams_of_steel_armada/
Hello everyone,
an interesting article about the background of the armor development by Yuri Bakhurin was published on the Russian portal. Here’s a translation of it (some parts are not literally translated to keep the meaning better). Enjoy.
The tank development is closely tied to the tactics and strategy of the use of armored forces. Unfortunately, few documents describing the use of these forces survived in the archives and each of them is a precious witness of the past. The following documents are the examples from the WW1 and WW2 era both. They show us, how naive (and sometimes even absurd) some of the ideas of that time were, but at the same time, one has to admire the authors for them caring about the fate of their homeland.
Land Squadron Kangro
In July 1917, E.V.Kangro, resident of Petrograd developed a project of a self-propelled artillery battery and presented it to the appropriate committee. His letter did not have any drawings or even sketches of the said battery, so we can only guess how his proposal was to actually look like, but the interesting part about the letter was the tactical use of these vehicles, proposed by the author.
The author stated that his planned SPG’s will be able to move offroad, traversing slopes up to 35 degrees, swimming over bodies of water and overcoming the obstacles in their way. In Kangro’s dreams, a horde of these vehicles was storming the northern front of 1917 along its entire length from Russia all the way to France.
