Sophisticated defense positions, protected by barbed wire and machine gun nests, posed seemingly insurmountable problems for the infantry of all armies during World War I. When the first armored vehicles, under the code name "Tank," were deployed by the British in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 to overcome trench warfare, it marked a revolution in future warfare. Wolfgang Fleischer describes in this volume the development of the world's first tanks from all nations, which was accompanied by much skepticism and technical challenges.