Golden Journal No. 44:
Imperial & Royal Panzers
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
October 2022

Gunther Burstyn, Austrian Landwehr engineer and despiser of the umlaut, created a tank. Perhaps the world’s first tank design, a handsome little machine with a turret and wheeled extensions to help it cross trenches. That was one of several early concepts for an armored fighting vehicle from the dawn of motor technology, and that’s the theme of Golden Journal No. 44: Imperial and Royal Panzers.

It was always inevitable, that Infantry Attacks would come to include tanks, too. There are four types of proposed tank in Imperial and Royal Panzers, two versions of Burstyn’s little panzer, and two different Russian proposals. So of course, they get to fight each other.

The first of the Austro-Hungarian tanks is Burstyn’s Motorgeschütz, a small vehicle that looked very much like the real tanks of a generation later. Burstyn first drafted his design in 1911 and sent his plans and a scale model to the War Ministry, which showed enough interest to answer him but not enough to provide funding. Without a patron, or connections to private industry where a prototype might be built on speculation, Burstyn had no easy path to continue his project and let it drop; his status as a Landwehr (the regular army of the Austrian half of the Dual Monarchy, which had less prestige than the Common Army) rather than Imperial and Royal officer probably didn’t help. He would go on to become an accomplished engineer, and is best remembered today as the inventor of the Dragon’s Teeth anti-tank obstacles deployed by the Germans before and during World War Two.

The original Burstyn design featured a 37mm quick-firing gun and a machine gun. We’ve also included an improved model; surely had his proposal been adopted a larger and more powerful version would have eventually followed. The 1918 Model has a Skoda 66mm gun and two machine guns, and a more powerful engine.

Imperial Russia also had its mad inventors, and we have their proto-panzers, too. In August 1914, Russian aircraft designer Alexander Porokhovschikov drafted a cute little tracked vehicle he called the Vezdekhod, or “all-terrain vehicle.” It had a single, wide track under its body, and carried one person. Its 10-horsepower engine could not bear the additional weight of armor plating, and the Imperial Army abandoned the project after a single prototype had been built and tested.

Later Soviet propaganda would claim the Vezdekhod as the world’s first tank, a boast echoed by its inventor. That doesn’t seem to have been his intention; he had set out to build an all-terrain vehicle and that’s what was tested. Later Soviet publications showed artist’s renderings that added a small turret housing a single machine gun that the driver could fire, but this is not present in the surviving photos and drawings of the prototype and appears to be purely fiction.

That didn’t stop us from including it anyway. We have the Vezdekhod as a tank, a tiny one-man tank. Which isn’t much, but when your enemy doesn’t have tanks or anti-tank guns, it still has its uses. Porokhovschikov would go on to design the Land Battleship, a massive vehicle with a crew of 72 and a pair of turrets housing 152mm naval cannon – we’ll add that one to our Land Cruisers alt.history at some point.

We do have a somewhat less gigantic early Russian tank concept. The Mendeleev tank weighed in at 173 tons with a crew of “only” eight. In effect it was a gigantic, wallowing assault gun with a 120mm naval cannon pointing out of its snout and a tiny turret with a single machine gun to ward off attacking infantry. Vasili Dmitrievich Mendeelev, chief submarine designer at the Kronstadt Naval Shipyard (and the son of Dmitri Mendeleev, the “Father of the Periodic Table”), drafted the monster in 1915. It was of course never built, but Mendeleev designed it to be no more difficult to construct than a submarine and therefore it could have been produced. So we’ve produced it.

The Vezdekhod would have been rather annoying to its enemies, but easily destroyed by enemy field guns. The Mendeleev tank, assuming it didn’t collapse under its own weight on the way to the battlefield, would have been difficult to penetrate but fantastically vulnerable to enemy infantry hiding in the “dead zone” close to its steel walls and setting it on fire.

We can’t give you all of these weird new tanks and not let you play with them. Imperial and Royal Panzers also includes a half-dozen new scenarios for Infantry Attacks: Fall of Empires letting you play with all four of the new tank types, both springing them on unsuspecting infantry and letting them fight each other.

Infantry Attacks, the game series, as yet has no rules for tanks or other armored vehicles. The Gold Club gets the first view of them, in Imperial and Royal Panzers. As with the Second Edition of the Infantry Attacks series rules, I tried to keep them as close to Panzer Grenadier’s Fourth Edition as possible, to make it easy for players to transition from one rules set to the other. There are still a good many concepts from Panzer Grenadier left out of the Infantry Attacks version seen in the Journal, because they just don’t apply to these early tanks. But the basic interactions between armor and gun-power and movement and the need for leaders, they’re all in there, too.

Sharp-eyed players of Panzer Grenadier will have noticed that, in doing that, we’ve also made the Infantry Attacks tank pieces fully compatible with Panzer Grenadier. They’re actually more destructive in Infantry Attacks, thanks to better modifiers and such on the charts, but you can use them very same pieces in Panzer Grenadier scenarios of your own devising (actually, you can do it with Panzer Grenadier (Modern), too).

Tanks make minor appearances in Devil Dogs and Palestine Campaign 1917, but they’re not the theme of either game and only show up in a handful of scenarios. Imperial and Royal Panzers is the first appearance of tanks in Infantry Attacks, and your chance to use them in some numbers. But we’ll most definitely bring them back to tell the story of the actual tanks that saw combat on the Western Front in the last year of the Great War. For now, you can have a taste of early tank action – if you’re a Gold Club member.

The best part of the Golden Journal is that it’s free – that’s right, free – to the Gold Club, at least when we first offer it. After that, you have to pay for it.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.

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