A corrected blast from the past....

Many thanks to Ordika for the link.

via Popular Science.

Seventy-four years ago, Russia accomplished what no country had before, or has since—it sent armed ground robots into battle. These remote-controlled Teletanks took the field during one of WWII’s earliest and most obscure clashes, as Soviet forces pushed into Eastern Finland for roughly three and a half months, from 1939 to 1940. The Finns, by all accounts, were vastly outnumbered and outgunned, with exponentially fewer aircraft and tanks. But the Winter War, as it was later called (it began in late November, and ended in mid-March), wasn’t a swift, one-sided victory. As the more experienced Finnish troops dug in their heels, Russian advancement was proving slow and costly. So the Red Army sent in the robots.
Specifically, the Soviets deployed two battalions of Teletanks, most of them existing T-26 light tanks stuffed with hydraulics and wired for radio control. Operators could pilot the unmanned vehicle from more than a kilometer away, punching at rows of dedicated buttons (no thumbsticks or D-pads to be found) to steer the tank or fire on targets with a machine gun or flame thrower. And the Teletank had the barest minimum of autonomous functionality: if it wandered out of radio range, the tank would come to a stop after a half-minute, and sit, engine idling, until contact was reestablished.
Notably missing, though, was any sort of remote sensing capability—the Teletank couldn’t relay sound or audio back to its human driver, most often located in a fully-crewed T-26 trailing behind the mechanized one. This was robotic teleoperation at its most crude, and made for halting, imprecise maneuvering across uneven terrain.

Robotic ground vehicles.

One of the fantasy future technologies that DARPA and the Pentagon are pursuing.

The IDF made the claim that they had accomplished a first by using an unmanned M113 to deliver supplies to troops in Gaza.  That may be true, but the first to use unmanned armored vehicles as a combat and not logistical vehicle appears to be the Russians during WW2.

Is this the end of the debate?  Probably not.  Parallel development happened during this time and I'm sure the Brits or Germans will also make claims...but I need to see the historical evidence to not declare that this was the first combat use of unmanned armored vehicles in combat. 

Sidenote:  Ordika also provided this blog source for more information on Russian Security Forces, White Russian Underground Movement and of course WW2 developments.  A MUST READ!