Tanks in World War I

Although vehicles that incorporated the basic principles of the tank (armour, firepower, and all-terrain mobility) had been projected in the decade or so before the War, it was the alarmingly heavy casualties of the start of its trench warfare that stimulated development.

The heavily shelled terrain was impassable to conventional vehicles, and only highly mobile tanks such as the Renault FTs and Mark IV performed reasonably well.

The conceptual roots of the tank go back to ancient times, with siege engines that were able to provide protection for troops moving up against stone walls or other fortifications.

At one point in 1908, Major William E. Donohue of the Mechanical Transport Committee remarked to Roberts that he should design a new machine with armour that could carry its own gun.

In 1912, Lancelot De Mole, of South Australia, submitted a proposal to the British War Office for a "chain-rail vehicle which could be easily steered and carry heavy loads over rough ground and trenches".

Inquiries to the government of Australia after the war yielded polite responses that Mr. De Mole's ideas had unfortunately been too advanced for the time to be properly recognised at their just value.

On 23 August 1914 the French Colonel Jean Baptiste Eugène Estienne, later a major proponent of tanks, declared, "Gentlemen, victory will belong in this war to the one of the two belligerents that will manage to be the first to succeed in putting a 75 mm cannon on a vehicle that can move on all types of terrain."

Churchill, in turn, wrote a note on 5 January to Prime Minister H. H. Asquith and warned that the Germans might any moment introduce a comparable system.

A similar proposal was working its way through the Army GHQ in France, and in June, the Landships Committee was made a joint service venture between the War Office and the Admiralty.

Surprisingly, until the end of the war, most experimentation on heavy land vehicles was conducted by the Royal Naval Air Service Squadron 20.

However, adapting the existing Holt Company caterpillar designs, the only robust tracked tractors available in 1915 into a fighting machine, which France and Germany did, was decided against.

To resolve the threatened dissipation of effort, it was ordered in late July that a contract was to be placed with William Foster & Co. Ltd, a company having done some prewar design work on heavy tractors and known to Churchill from an earlier experiment with a trench-crossing supply vehicle, to produce a proof-of-concept vehicle with two tracks, based on a lengthened Bullock tractor chassis.

A rotating top turret was planned with a 40 mm gun but abandoned due to weight problems, leaving the final vehicle unarmed and little more than a test-bed for the difficult track system.

The next design by Lieutenant Walter Gordon Wilson RNAS, a pre-war motor engineer, added a larger track frame to the hull of "Little Willie".

To keep a low centre of gravity the rotating turret design was dropped in favour of sponsons on the sides of the hull fitted with naval 6-pounder (57 mm) guns.

In fact, the tanks were never shipped in crates: the inscription in Russian was applied on the hull for their transport from the factory to the first training centre at Thetford.

The tanks were capable of, at best, 6 km/h (3.7 mph), matching the speed of marching infantry with whom they were to be integrated to aid in the destruction of enemy machine guns.

Fosters returned to manufacturing Traction engines and steam lorries, but incorporated a small trademark outline image of a tank on the front smokebox door of their postwar road locomotives.

However, Lincoln City erected a full-size outline Mk 1 as a memorial to the invention of the tank in 2015, and placed it on the Tritton Road roundabout.

Tank crews who had read press reports depicting the new weapon driving through buildings and trees, and crossing wide rivers, were disappointed.

Fragments were not as dangerous as fire, because of explosive fumes and the large amount of fuel aboard; smoking was prohibited inside and within 20 yards outside tanks.

The side armour of 8 mm initially made them largely immune to small arms fire, but could be penetrated by the recently developed armour-piercing K bullets.

Despite these supposed views of Haig, he made an order for 1,000 tanks shortly after the failure at the Somme and always remained firmly in favour of further production.

In France, on the other hand, there were multiple and conflicting lines of development which were badly integrated, resulting in three major and quite disparate production types.

A major arms producer, Schneider, took the lead in January 1915 and tried to build a first armoured vehicle based on the Baby Holt tractor but initially the development process was slow until in July they received political, even presidential, support by combining their project with that of a mechanical wire cutter devised by engineer and politician Jean-Louis Bréton.

In December 1915, the influential Colonel Estienne made the Supreme Command very enthusiastic about the idea of creating an armoured force based on these vehicles; strong Army support for tanks was a constant during the decades that followed.

Then industrial rivalry began to play a detrimental role: it created the heavy Char St Chamond, a parallel development not ordered by the Army but approved by government through industrial lobbying, which mounted much more impressive weaponry—its 75mm was the most powerful gun fielded by any operational tank up until 1941—but also combined many of the Schneider CA's faults with an even larger overhanging body.

The FT was in many respects the first truly 'modern' tank, having a layout that has been followed by almost all designs ever since: driver at the front; main armament in a fully rotating turret on top; engine at the rear.

Previous models had been "box tanks", with a single crowded space combining the role of engine room, fighting compartment, ammunition stock and driver's cabin.

The Whippet was faster than most other tanks, although it carried only machine gun armament, meaning it was not suited to combat with armoured vehicles but instead with infantry.