![]() The vehicle was suspended upon a conventional track system that incorporated a front-mounted drive sprocket and a rear-mounted track idler along with four road wheels on two bogies. It sported a one-man turret and its armament consisted of a single 0.50 caliber heavy machine gun. As a light tank, the T2E1 was rather compact by modern standards and relatively lightweight. The T2E1 was the culmination of several previous attempts - the "T1" and "T2" prototypes in particular - and these were more akin to further evolutions of the British Vickers 6-Ton series. In 1935, the US Army charged the Rock Island Arsenal with development of a new light tank prototype which came to be known as the "Light Tank T2E1". The two tanks went on to influence several light tanks designs around the world including those beginning to appear in Italy, the Soviet Union and the United States. While the French found international success with their wartime Renault FT-17s, the British employed their popular Vickers 6-Ton systems. In the interwar years following World War 1 and prior to World War 2, the tank underwent an evolution that saw the demise of these lozenge-shaped beasts of old. It was the British that truly brought about the armored fighting machine and other national armies soon followed suit. ![]() Back then, they were known as "landships" and few truly realized their vast warfare potential. ![]() ![]() The "tank" received its baptism of fire in World War 1 as large, cumbersome lozenge-shaped tracked vehicles lumbering about the pock-marked battlefields. ![]()
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