Burstyn Motorgeschütz
In 1911, the imperial officer Gunther Burstyn presented to the Ministry of War the draft of an armored vehicle of disconcertingly modern appearance. The design was rejected and the Motorgeschütz ["motor gun"] never built. Possibly a momentous wrong decision, because the concept of the armored, caterpillar-driven vehicle with a cannon in a turret first brought to paper by Burstyn formed the basis of tank designs to this day. Or so it seemed to some.
Gunther Burstyn, a first lieutenant of the KUK Eisenbahn-Genietruppe (Pioneer Group), presented in 1911 to the KUK Ministry of War the draft of a "motor gun" before: an armored and caterpillar all-terrain combat vehicle with turret. The design, which anticipated the modern battle tank in its construction and its components, but was rejected. In the following year, Prussia - as short-sighted as it was - rejected this invention, which undoubtedly still required some development efforts.
Apart from colonial wars and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), which was primarily a naval warfare, no direct confrontation between technologically leading powers took place at the beginning of the 20th century. Already in the Russo-Japanese War, however, the effect of the heavy artillery and the machine gun, which even quickly brought down cavalry attacks collapsed showed. Thus, a battlefield, littered with grenade funnels, divided by barbed wire obstacles and traversed by trenches - and associated with a positional warfare.
in 1892, the American inventor Benjamin Leroy Holt developed and launched a tractor at the Holt Manufacturing Company company with a tracked tractor designed for use in agriculture on soft soils. In 1909, Holt changed the name of the company to Holt Caterpillar Company, which in 1911 became a trademark. The Entente constructed - as a result of stalled positional warfare in the West - sometimes bizarre-looking "tanks" with casemates (side gun or machine gun core), which had considerable disadvantages compared to Burstyns concept. Nonetheless, the use of these tanks was surprising and devastating for the Central Powers.
Gunther Burstyn - officer, technician, inventor and author - was born July 16, 1879 in Bad Aussee as the son of the imperial commissioner of the General Inspectorate of the Austrian State Railways Adolf Burstyn and the journalist Julia (Hofmann). The father of the future military engineer was a Jew, who had been converted to Catholicism, and came from Lvov. In 1904 he completed the Egineering Course at the Polytechnic in Vienna, and in 1906 received an appointment as Lieutenant in the Geniestab of the Railway and Telegraph Regiment in Trent.
Gunther Burstyn was a versatile, creative and independent officer, organizer and troop leader who received high honors in both World Wars. He wrote writings on tanks, anti-tank, Schwimmpanzer and tank ferries, but also dealt with historical issues. As a military man, he recognized the problem of the position war early, as a technician, he was looking for funds against it. From him come the first concrete design and model of an armored caterpillar with a cannon in the turret. Some claim that made him undoubtedly the inventor of the main battle tank.
In October 1911, Burstyn sent his "motor-gun" design on the Service to the Ministry of War, which passed it on to the Technical Military Committee. The design showed a "slip bands" (Caterpillars) All-terrain, armored, armored assault vehicle. Burstyn had taken over the rapid-fire cannon and turret from the navy, and perhaps the Austro-Daimler tanker car inspired him. The officials of the Ministry of War did not see in Burstyn's concept a weapon system, but a car design - they declined on December 22, 1911 because of "novelty and unmarked" of the chain drive (although its functionality due to the Holt-Caterpillar patent in the Ministry already known should have been). The Imperial and Royal General Staff was not aware of this, because both the Minister of War, General Moritz von Auffenberg, and General Conrad von Hötzendorf probably recognized the value of the invention thanks to their open-mindedness.
Burstyn filed a patent for the override of trenches and obstructions on his motor gun - pivoting slide rails that are movably mounted on both ends of the vehicle and have metal rollers at their ends. Austrian Patent No. 53,248 of April 25, 1912, filed on March 1, 1911, and German Reich Patent No. 252,815 of February 28, 1912, describe a "device for translating terrain obstacles, particularly for armored, gun-armed motor vehicles." With the article "The Motor Gun" in the "Streffleurschen Military Journal" (today "Austrian Military Journal" - ÖMZ), Issue 1/1912, Burstyn drew attention again to his invention. The German military journalist and specialist author Colonel Blümner also published Burstyn's idea in the "Kriegstechnische Zeitschrift".
In 1915, four years after Burstyn, Winston Churchill, the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, propagated a landship as a breakthrough vehicle, and after 1915/16, the fronts on the trenches full of barbed wire, machine guns and mines froze in Flanders, their crews often had to endure days of barrage of artillery, emerged in England and France, the first "tanks".
Basic elements of modern battle tank
- The armored hull holds the crew, the propulsion and steering units, the ammunition and the fuel tank.
- The drive consists of idler and drive wheels, sprung rollers and crawler tracks of moving plates with guide elements.
- The engine is a built in the rear of the hull internal combustion engine. (However, the gearbox of the "motor gun" is still mechanical.) Steering takes place via one-sided chain movement or chain braking.
- The armored turret contains the main armament and a machine gun as well as sight and target equipment. Sitting in the turret or stand (unlike in the usual until about 1935 one-man turrets), the tank commander and the gunner.
- The armament consists of a long fast-firing cannon (30 mm to 40 mm in the "motor gun") and two machine guns (one of which looked backwards at the "motor gun", the other was next to the cannon in the turret).
It is claimed that all these basic elements of modern battle tanks were first found in Burstyn's design drawings over a hundred years ago. Its "motor-gun" as carrier of the attack - under own armored armor - should be able to fight the opponent fast, surprisingly and effectively with a precise, far-reaching cannon - possibly even from out of range of the opposing weapons. This would have required, inter alia, a corresponding armament, speed, a sufficiently large driving range, off-road capability and a certain stability in the opposing fire - so a combination of fire, movement and protection. The Burstyn tank should therefore hand out blows and be able to plug in a limited extent while being mobile.
But the main know-how in the development of Burstyn in the 1911 patent was the retractable sled with wheels, which, in his opinion, were supposed to help the “tank” overcome trenches and deep ditches. The proposal did not contain any details, and was far from the project of the tank. Burstyn initially failed in his patent application in the Austrian Empire because it infringed the patent of Benjamin Holt. The second attempt was made in Germany. As can be seen from the drawing attached to the patent, the “stuffing” of the car was practically absent with the exception of the seats for the crew and the remaining very conventional image of the gun. Judging by the figure, there was no talk of a mobile gun turret. All attention was paid to slideways, which could rise and fall, and, apparently, upon overcoming the ditch. It was little more than happenstance that the vehicle itself looked more like a modern tank than the various contraptions which population the battlefields of the Great War.
In the late 1920s, the Austrian researcher Fritz Hagel published several reference books on the development of armored weapons in various countries of the world. It was there, based on the German patent of Burstyn, that Hagel advanced the claim that the "first tank" was invented in Germany. Subsequently, the "legend of the first German tank" greatly helped the inventor and his relatives. When in 1938 the Austrian Republic was annexed to the Third Reich, half-Jew Gunter Burstyn personally from Hitler received the title of honorary Aryan (Ehrenarier) as an innovator in the development of German military power.
Looking back on 1911, Burstyn said resignedly in March 1943: "... the conditions and the time for the construction of the new weapon were given, and we would probably have been spared the present war." Due to his eyelid suffering, the death of his son, his lifelong disappointment and his depression at the end of the war, he died on 14 April 1945 - when the Red Army invaded - in suicide. On April 20, under unexplained circumstances, his wife also died. The Austrian Armed Forces named in his honor the barracks in Zwölfaxing, which also housed the Panzertruppenschule, Burstyn-Kaserne.
In German-language literature, the story of the “inventor of the first medium tank in the world”, Gunter Burstyn, is very popular. Creating a legend about the “inventor of the first medium tank” in the mid-1970s was continued by the German researcher Walter Albrecht, who published a book dedicated to Burstyn and his activities. In it, for the first time, the project had a rotating turret (moreover, indicating the sector of shelling), elevation angles, dimensions and speed. The original design envisioned a fixed gun, as was later found in assault guns, not the rotating turret of a tank. However, nowadays details about the invention of Burstyn are limited only by the imagination of the authors.
