Germany's Light Tank—the LK-II Prototype

 

The Leichter Kampfwagen LK-II

By Robert Beckhusen

When the German Army’s first domestic-built tanks rolled into combat in March 1918 at St. Quentin Canal, the armored beasts looked considerably different from British and French designs—and most postwar tanks to follow.

The A7V was a monster, stuffed with 18 crew members and brimming with six machine guns and a 57-millimeter cannon. While certainly terrifying to Allied troops, it was expensive, slow, mechanically troubled, and too limited in number to affect the outcome of the war. It was not the worst tank ever but not exactly good, either. There’s a reason why the bulk of Germany’s World War I tank force was comprised of captured—and superior—French and British designs.

Perhaps worst of all, the A7V's armored overhang and top-heavy design could get it easily entangled in the broken maze of trenches across the Western Front. Tanks need numbers and decent mobility to be effective, but the German high command envisioned them as glorified, lumbering pillboxes. There was another way. German tank designers had better plans that, while neglected at the time, were an improvement over the clunky A7V.

As the A7Vs headed to war, the tank’s designer, Joseph Vollmer, worked a light, three-crewed design called the Leichter Kampfwagen or light combat car. Basically, it was an armored tractor with a single, 7.92mm machine gun. The Germans only built two of them, and they never saw combat.

But combat wasn’t the point, as the design served as a prototype for the follow-up Leichter Kampfwagen II—or LK-II. This upgraded version weighed nearly nine tons due to its additional armor, around two tons more than its predecessor. A rearward, four-cylinder, 60-horsepower engine allowed speeds of ten miles per hour. There were few outward differences between the two tanks. The biggest change in the LK II was the addition of a model equipped with 37mm cannon in a rotating turret rather than the machine gun.

Postwar Service with the Swedish Army

Conceptually, the LK prototypes were similar in kind to the French Renault FT, arguably the most successful tank of World War I. As with the the Renault, the Germans planned to manufacture hundreds of LK IIs. In any case, Vollmer's lean designs came too little, too late. The Central Powers' few battlefield experiments with tanks, while at times successful in isolated cases, were strategically useless. Allied advances and a cascading collapse of German morale forced an end to the conflict in November 1918.

Yet, the LK II had a life after World War I and influenced a key thinker of how the next war would be fought. Following the Treaty of Versailles, which banned Germany from building tanks, Berlin secretly sold ten LK-IIs to neutral Sweden, shipping them in pieces for later assembly. Sweden rechristened the machines as Stridsvagn m/21s, gave them machine guns, upgraded their engines and components, and handed them over to the army.

During the interwar period, Heinz Guderian—one of the 20th century's most influential military theorists—spent years studying and refining his ideas regarding tank warfare, which erupted on a terrifying scale in 1939. Ten years before the outbreak of World War II, Guderian traveled to Sweden to inspect and drive the LK-II. He was so impressed that Germany subsequently purchased the Swedish company and brought back Joseph Vollmer as their chief designer.

Sources: The National Interest, 6 November 2016