The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill, who believed in the concept of a “land boat” and organized a Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype. In 1914, a British army colonel named Ernest Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armored vehicle with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory. The British developed the tank in response to the trench warfare of World War I. However, improvements were made to the original prototype and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields. It weighed 14 tons, got stuck in trenches and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour. Little Willie was far from an overnight success. Thus, ‘Little Willie’ was redundant almost as soon as it was built.On September 6, 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie rolls off the assembly line in England.
This would become the classic British tank design of the Great War. Its designers, William Tritton and Walter Wilson came up with a set of workable tracks which were fitted to the ‘Landship’ now known as ‘Little Willie,’ said to be an irreverent nickname for the German Crown Prince, Kaiser Wilhelm.īy the time ‘Little Willie’ was built, Wilson and Tritton had already come up with an improved idea of a machine with tracks running all the way around the vehicle, which would be able to cross trenches. of Lincoln, was contracted to build a prototype machine. After many experiments and false starts an agricultural firm, William Foster & Co.
In 1915 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, created a Landships Committee to tackle the problems of trench warfare. It proved that a vehicle encompassing armoured protection, an internal combustion engine, and tracks was a possibility for the battlefield. Little Willie was the first working tank in the world.
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