Tank Trivia
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117 free Tank trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Tank trivia that runs from the Landship Committee to today's main battle tanks. The quiz covers why the machine was ever called a "tank", the first one to go into action on the Somme, the first tank-versus-tank fight, the Renault FT layout every tank still copies, and the interwar theorists who dreamed up blitzkrieg. Then it moves through the Second World War (the T-34, the Sherman and its Firefly cousin, Tiger 131, Kursk, Hobart's Funnies, the 188-tonne Maus and the 1,000-tonne Ratte that never was) into the Cold War and beyond: Chobham and reactive armour, the Abrams and its turbine, the Leopard 2, the turretless Swedish S-tank, the Merkava's front engine, the T-14's unmanned turret, tank biathlon, and the lone man in front of a column of Type 59s in Beijing. About a third of the questions are easy for anyone who has watched a war film, a third are for regular readers of military history, and the rest are for people who know which duke the Churchill tank was really named after. Every answer is checked against the reference pages for each vehicle and battle.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Why were the first British armoured vehicles called "tanks"?
To keep their purpose secret
To keep their purpose secret, the hulls were described to factory workers as mobile water tanks bound for Mesopotamia, and the Landships Committee adopted the word 'tank' in December 1915.
Q 02Which British commander-in-chief first sent tanks into battle?
Douglas Haig
Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, committed all 49 tanks that were ready on 15 September 1916 despite their small number and hastily trained crews; several broke down before reaching the start.
Q 03Vehicle 131 at Bovington, captured in Tunisia in 1943 and restored to running order, is which German heavy tank?
Tiger I
Tiger I number 131 was disabled in Tunisia in April 1943 when a 6-pounder shot jammed its turret; restored to running order at Bovington, it played the German tank in the 2014 film Fury.
Q 04Which Soviet medium tank, famed for its sloped armour, was WWII's most-produced tank?
T-34
The T-34's sloped armour and 76 mm gun outmatched German tanks in 1941, and Germany designed the Panther as a direct answer; more than 80,000 T-34s were built, including post-war T-34-85s.
Q 05The M4 Sherman was named by the British after a general from which war?
The American Civil War
The American Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, who marched through Georgia in 1864, gave his name to the M4; the British named their Lend-Lease American tanks after US generals.
Q 06In which city did the lone "Tank Man" halt a column of tanks in June 1989?
Beijing
Beijing's Chang'an Avenue, beside Tiananmen Square, was the scene on 5 June 1989: the man with the shopping bags then climbed onto the lead tank to speak to its crew before two men pulled him away; he has never been identified.
Q 07What does the German word "blitzkrieg" literally mean?
Lightning war
Blitz means lightning and Krieg means war, so blitzkrieg is literally 'Lightning war'; Germany's 1939-40 campaigns massed tanks with motorised infantry and aircraft to punch through and collapse enemy fronts.
Q 08Which future prime minister created the Landships Committee in 1915 to develop the first tanks?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill created the Landships Committee in February 1915, backing trench-crossing machines when the War Office showed little interest; its first prototype was running before the end of 1915.
Q 09Which country developed the Leclerc main battle tank and has fielded it since 1992?
France
France fields the Leclerc, named for Marshal Philippe Leclerc de Hauteclocque, whose 2nd Armoured Division liberated Paris in August 1944; it entered French service in 1992 to replace the AMX-30.
Q 10The Type 99 is the first mass-produced third-generation main battle tank of which country?
China
China unveiled the prototype, the Type 98, at its 1999 National Day parade, then put an improved version into army service in 2001 as the Type 99.
Q 11The "tank biathlon", a military sport, was launched in 2013 by which country's armed forces?
Russia
Russia's armed forces staged the first contest at the Alabino range near Moscow: as in ski biathlon, crews race laps over rough ground, firing at targets on each lap, and a miss costs a penalty loop.
Q 12The Soviet IS heavy tanks, including the IS-2 that spearheaded the assault on Berlin, were named after whom?
Joseph Stalin
IS stands for Iosif Stalin, Joseph Stalin in English; the series was designed in 1943 as breakthrough tanks after a Tiger was captured near Leningrad, and the line ended with the T-10.
Q 13The American M48 tank carries the name of which Second World War general?
Patton
Q 21Heinz Guderian's influential 1937 book on armoured warfare was titled what?
Achtung – Panzer!
Achtung – Panzer! (1937) argued for concentrating tanks in independent armoured divisions; Guderian then led XIX Corps' thrust through the Ardennes and across the Meuse at Sedan in May 1940.
Q 22The Soviet 5th Guards Tank Army charged an SS panzer corps on 12 July 1943 in a clash named after which place?
Prokhorovka
Prokhorovka cost Pavel Rotmistrov's army hundreds of tanks in a single day's charge, far more than the Germans lost, yet the SS advance stalled there and the offensive was soon called off.
Q 23Which Soviet tank series, with up to 100,000 built, is history's most-produced tank?
T-54/T-55
The M48 Patton honours General George S. Patton, who set up the US Army's first tank school in 1917 and was wounded leading its light tanks into battle on the Western Front in September 1918.
Q 14Which Renaissance figure sketched a never-built armoured vehicle often called the first tank design?
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci promised Milan's ruler Ludovico Sforza armoured wagons in a letter seeking work around 1482, then sketched the cone-shaped, cannon-ringed vehicle, to be cranked along by men inside.
Q 15What was the nickname of the first completed tank prototype in history, built in 1915?
Little Willie
Little Willie is said to borrow the British press's irreverent nickname for Germany's Crown Prince Wilhelm; first run in September 1915, it survives at Bovington as the oldest tank in existence.
Q 16The prototype that became the pattern for Britain's First World War tanks was nicknamed what?
Mother
Mother, officially His Majesty's Land Ship Centipede, was run over a mock battlefield of trenches and wire for ministers and generals in February 1916; the trial won an order for 100 tanks, the Mark I.
Q 17British Mark I 'Male' tanks carried cannon, while 'Female' tanks carried only what?
Machine guns
Machine guns alone armed the Female: half of the 150 Mark Is got Vickers guns instead of 6-pounders, whether for want of cannon or, as Ernest Swinton urged, so that pairs could shield each other from infantry.
Q 18The first tank-versus-tank action, in April 1918, pitted British Mark IVs against which German tank?
A7V
The A7V was the only German-built tank to fight in the war, with just 20 completed; Germany fielded more captured British Mark IVs, around 50, than A7Vs of its own.
Q 19Which November 1917 battle opened with more than 400 British tanks attacking without a long preliminary bombardment?
Cambrai
Cambrai, launched on 20 November 1917, sent 476 tanks through the Hindenburg Line for gains of up to 8 km in a day; about 180 of them were out of action by nightfall, though only 65 had been destroyed.
Q 20Which French light tank of 1917-18 was the first production tank with a fully rotating turret?
Renault FT
The Renault FT put the crew in front, the engine behind and the gun in a turret that turned full circle, a layout tanks still follow; over 3,000 were built, most of them in 1918.
The T-54/T-55 line was built in the USSR, Poland and Czechoslovakia into the 1980s; after Hungarians drove a captured T-54 into the British embassy in Budapest in 1956, a look at its armour prompted Britain's L7 gun.
Q 24What is the British-developed ceramic composite armour of the M1 Abrams and Challenger tanks commonly called?
Chobham armour
Chobham armour was developed in the 1960s at a British tank research centre in Surrey; the first tank to carry it was America's M1 Abrams, and its exact make-up is still secret.
Q 25Tandem warheads, with a small precursor charge ahead of the main one, were developed to defeat what tank protection?
Reactive armour
Reactive armour sandwiches explosive between steel plates that fly apart to break up a shaped-charge jet; a tandem warhead's precursor sets the brick off early so the main charge meets bare steel.
Q 26What is the lightweight shell around a kinetic-energy tank round's dart, discarded after leaving the barrel, called?
A sabot
A sabot is the lightweight carrier that fills the bore around the narrow penetrator so propellant gas can push it, then falls away at the muzzle; the dense tungsten or depleted-uranium dart flies on alone.
Q 27Soviet tanks since the T-64 need only three crew because a machine replaced which crewman?
Loader
The loader gave way to a carousel autoloader in the T-64, which let designers make the tank smaller and lighter; the T-72, T-80 and T-90 followed, while the Abrams and Challenger 2 keep a fourth man to load.
Q 28Which country built the turretless Stridsvagn 103, a tank aimed by steering and tilting its whole hull?
Sweden
Sweden's Strv 103, the 'S-tank', swung on its tracks to traverse the fixed gun and pitched on its suspension to elevate it, which gave it a very low profile; it served from 1967 to 1997.
Q 29What headline feature sets the T-14 Armata apart from earlier main battle tanks?
An unmanned turret
An unmanned turret is the T-14 Armata's headline feature, with the crew sealed in an armoured capsule ahead of it; at a rehearsal for its 2015 Moscow parade debut, one stopped dead on Red Square and resisted a tow before driving off.
Q 30The Israeli Merkava breaks with most tank designs by placing its engine where?
At the front
At the front: the Merkava's engine and transmission sit ahead of the crew compartment as extra protection against frontal hits, which frees a rear hatch through which the tank can carry a few infantry or evacuate casualties.