Tanks of World War I

¶ … Tanks of World War I

The First World War was marked by many manifestations of a new, modern type of warfare: aircraft, machine guns, submarine warfare, barbed wire, telephone communication, mass conscription. One of the most dramatic expressions of new technological warfare to make its debut in the course of this war was the armored fighting vehicle - the tank.

The tank is based upon an old idea, that of a protected mobile carrier for men and weapons on the battlefield. Predecessors of the modern tank can be found in the designs of Leonardo da Vinci, and the line of descent of the tank can be traced to the war chariots of the Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians and Romans, and even the armored fighting elephants of the Carthaginian and Indian armies (Reid 37), while a "modern steam war chariot" had been proposed by a British engineer in 1838 (Wright 23). The armored car, a conventional motor vehicle chassis with added armor and armament, was already established in many armies before 1914, but did not possess the cross-country abilities that were to be central to the concept of the tank (Harris 9). The modern armored cross-country fighting vehicle developed directly from British military initiatives in the early stages of the First World War and rapidly left the armored car idea behind. In some ways the vehicles that resulted were rudimentary in conception and performance, but in others they anticipated all the essential features of the modern tank and its employment in warfare.

The technological concepts that were to come together in the development of the tank were in existence some time before the First World War (firstworldwar.com): the machine gun (1884), the internal combustion engine (1885), the armored car (1899), the caterpillar track system (1905), and the tracked agricultural tractor (1909), were all highly significant as the British military began, in 1914-15, to look seriously at the possibilities for mechanized mobile warfare. Development work was initially in the hands of the service that had shown most interest in the technology of armored warfare, the Royal Navy, and took place under the direction of the Admiralty Landships Committee, established partly at the initiative of Winston Churchill, which held its first meeting in February 1915 (Harris 19-21). By the summer of 1915 experimentation was focusing on two concepts: a "big wheel" vehicle which, as its name suggests, would cross trenches and rough ground by using wheels big enough to overcome any obstacle, and an "articulated landship" which used a "creeping grip" system that was a form of caterpillar track (Harris 21). Both ideas were based upon the idea of infantry transport rather than direct assault, used articulation and tractor-trailer systems, were rather large, cumbersome and inflexible, and ultimately led to technological dead-ends as a result. It was not until the caterpillar track idea was applied to a smaller, unarticulated vehicle in the late summer and early autumn of 1915 that "the design of a true fighting vehicle" (Harris 28) began to emerge in the form of the vehicle known as Lincoln No. 1 Machine. By this stage the War Office was jointly, if reluctantly, involved with the Admiralty in the Landships Committee. The original, American, tracks fitted proved unsatisfactory, and it was not until these were replaced by a new system in November 1915 that Lincoln No. 1 Machine worked perfectly. The successful design was christened "Little Willie" (tankmuseum.co.uk). In the meantime, the War Office had specified that a military landship should be capable of mounting a trench parapet 4 feet 6 inches high and crossing an 8-foot trench - more than twice the performance of which Lincoln No. 1 was capable (Harris 29). Once the principle was established, however, and the vital tracks were working well, meeting this demanding specification was only a matter of time.

The next development was to enlarge the frames supporting the tracks until they were larger than the hull of the vehicle, producing a rhomboidal shape suited to crossing rough ground and trenches; this prototype (known as "Mother") was tested in January 1916 in front of an audience including the Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, the First Lord of the Admiralty a.J. Balfour, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the War Minister, Lord Kitchener (Wright 29). The latter was skeptical, referring to the device as "a pretty mechanical toy" (Harris 31) but everybody else was favorably impressed and the War Office continued enthusiastically to support tank development. "Mother" became the basis for the Mark I tank, the first mass-produced tracked armored fighting vehicle in history. The Mark I, powered by two diesel engines, was built in two versions, "male" which mounted four machine guns and two 6-pounder naval guns in protruding barbettes, and "female" which carried machine guns only. The male version was intended as an assault weapon; the female tanks were designed to protect their male counterparts and each other by using machine guns to mow down attacking infantry who might otherwise swamp and overcome the tanks (Harris 31-2). This huge, heavy, lozenge-shaped monster became the pattern for the classic First World War tank, through to the Mark VIII of 1918.