The Great War - WW1
Enter the Tank
In October 1914 the official British war correspondent Colonel Ernest Swinton approached General Headquarters (GHQ) with a proposal to use the pre-war Holt agricultural steam tractor as a means of overcoming barbed wire and broken ground.
GHQ was not interested but Swinton's scheme eventually found a backer in Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty. In the autumn of 1914 armoured cars operated in northern France by the Royal Navel Air Service (RNAS) had enjoyed some success but had been hampered by trenches which the Germans had dug across the roads. The Admiralty's work on a solution to this problem coincided with Swinton's proposal and led to the establishment of an Admiralty Landships Committee in February 1915.u
A series of trials led to a prototype armoured vehicle known as 'Big Willie' which was successfully tested at Hatfield Park at the beginning of 1916. Kitchener dismissed 'Big Willie' as a 'pretty mechanical toy' but Haig was keen to use the machines - codenamed 'tanks' - in France as soon as possible. They were first employed in significant numbers on the 15th of September 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, but were thrown forward in uncoordinated fashion. It was not until November 1917 that the tanks were successfully employed unified in Cambrai.