This digital edition first published in 2012
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Copyright 2012 Amber Books Ltd
ISBN: 978 190 869601 4
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CHAPTER 1
A DIFFICULT
BIRTH
In September of 1916, as the first British tanks lurched ponderously towards the German trenches, a new chapter in the history of warfare was opened. Few could have imagined the impact these ungainly machines were destined to have on twentieth-century warfare.
There seemed no way to break the deadlock. The terrain between the opposing armies facing one another and across the battlefields of eastern and northern France was often virtually impassable, even to men on foot; and even before the rusting thickets of barbed wire and the defensive fire from machine guns were taken into consideration. Unprotected men tried to cross this desolate nomansland, stopped, stuck and died. No vehicle stood a chance of crossing, even if by some miracle it could be made immune to the machine gun rounds and the howitzer shells that turned mudbaths into charnel houses. And still World War I ground on...
When war broke out in August 1914, there was very little in the way of mechanical transport to be found on either side. Draught horses, in huge numbers, provided most of the motive power, all the way from the rear echelons almost to the fighting fronts themselves and horses stood even less chance in no- mansland than men did. But there were motorised tractors, both with internal combustion engines and with steam engines, to pull very heavy loads, such as the biggest artillery pieces. Some of the former type were fitted with continuous tracks in place of wheels. They didnt often come within 10 miles of the actual fighting, but the presence of these tractors in the rear echelons, where conditions underfoot were often little better than at the front, set some people thinking.
SWINTONS VEHICLES
In 1912, an Australian engineer and professional inventor named Lancelot de Mole had sent a design for an armoured tracked vehicle to the British War Office. He was ignored. Now, with the world at war, a serving British officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton, put forward something similar. Instead of a design starting from scratch, though, Swinton suggested utilising the Holt caterpillar tractor, then just coming into service as a prime mover with the artillery. Suitably armoured and armed with guns, such a vehicle could act as a mobile machine gun destroyer. Swinton at the time Deputy Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence had seen at first hand what armoured fighting vehicles (AFVs) could do. He had been briefly with Commander Charles Samsons Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) squadron in France in the role of official eyewitness, the only form of war correspondent then permitted to visit the war zone. Samsons squadron rescued downed airmen and carried out ground reconnaissance missions, at first using touring cars they had armoured themselves, and later in vehicles armed and armoured by the Admiralty. Swinton had also worked alongside Sir Ian Hamilton on the official report on the Russo-Japanese War and thus had seen exactly what machine guns could achieve against massed infantry.
Swinton made his suggestion in the form of a memorandum to Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Hankey, the committees secretary. Hankey passed it up to the Imperial General Staff and to its unenthusiastic chief, Lord Kitchener. There, for the moment at least, the suggestion stalled. Hankey, however, had been convinced. He next wrote a long memorandum to Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty had been in favour of sending armoured cars to France and Belgium and had been impressed by the vehicles success. Churchill responded by convincing Prime Minister Asquith to put heavy pressure on the War Office to reconsider. The War Office decided to give the Holt tractor a trial before senior officials over a prepared obstacle course on the artillery ranges at Shoeburyness. The day of the trial 17 February 1915 it was raining heavily and the ground was sodden. It was a fair test, in fact, except that the unarmoured and unarmed Holt tractor was called upon to negotiate the course towing a truck laden with 2.5 tonnes of sandbags. The load was supposed to represent the weight the vehicle would have to carry when armed and armoured, and the tractor found it impossible to pull this burden over trenches. There is a great deal of difference between a load aboard a vehicle and one being towed behind, especially under such conditions, but that counted for nothing. In the opinion of the War Office committee, the vehicle had failed the trial and the idea was impractical and worthy of no further consideration.
The committee counted without Churchills determination, however. So much the better if the Army was not interested he would make sure that the Navy retained the initiative. Churchill convened what he called the Admiralty Landships Committee to look once again at mechanisation on the battlefield. Chairmanship of the committee was given to an undeniable expert of his own, Sir Eustace Tennyson dEyncourt, Director of Naval Construction. The committees secretary was to be an enthusiastic amateur, a City banker named Albert Stern.
THE LINCOLN MACHINE
After a series of false starts and unsuccessful attempts to employ commercially available tracked vehicles, a small design team was formed. It was placed under the leadership of the managing director of traction engine manufacturers Fowlers of Lincoln, Sir William Tritton, with naval engineer turned car maker Walter Wilson as his deputy. At the same time, sensible new performance criteria, developed by Swinton and based realistically on conditions at the fighting front, were adopted. Any new vehicle would now have to prove itself capable of climbing a 1.5m (5ft) parapet with a 45-degree slope and crossing a 2.5m (8ft) trench.
Construction of the No 1 Lincoln Machine or the Tritton Machine, as it was sometimes called commenced on 11 August 1915, and the vehicle was first tested on 10 September. This was no mean engineering feat, but it soon became clear that the track system used, from a Bullock tractor imported from the United States, was entirely inadequate, in terms of both endurance and performance, for a vehicle of this size and weight. The designers went back to the drawing board, and it was Tritton who came up with the answer. He suggested a system of articulated metal shoes riveted to links that had an internal lip to engage runners in the track frame. This arrangement would prevent the tracks dropping away from the guide rollers when unsupported, as they were when crossing a trench. The system was fitted to a rebuilt No 1 Lincoln Machine known as Little Willie, which could then span a 1.5m (5ft) trench and scale a 1.4m (4ft 6in) parapet.
