During the interwar years, the limited role assigned to tanks by U.S. The Americans used mainly Renault tanks in France. In September 1917, the French introduced their Renault FT 17, a smaller (6‐ton), lighter‐armed (one 37mm gun), faster (4.8 mph) tank, with what became the classic tank design of a swivel turret.

Early critics charged they were committed in insufficient numbers to make a difference.

On 15 September 1916, at the Battle of the Somme, after horrific infantry losses, forty‐nine Mark I tanks were sent in to support infantry attack across no‐man's‐land. The first British tank, the Mark I, was a rhomboid‐shaped, tracked heavy vehicle weighing 26 tons, with two 57mm guns and a speed of 3.7 mph. Churchill, then first lord of the Admiralty, also supported the program. The British first developed this mobile, armored war machine in a program initiated by E. Initially, the very name tank was employed as part of a deception to shroud its true nature as a weapon. The machine's raw power, gadgetry, speed, and size, along with the secrecy with which it was developed, created for it a mystique. The tank, invented in World War I out of military necessity, immediately captured the popular imagination.

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