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53-497: Big Willy or Big Willie may refer to: Big Willie (tank) , a prototype of the first British tank Big Willie Style , the debut studio album by Will Smith Destroy All Humans! Big Willy Unleashed , a game for the Wii Bigwilly , a draenei death knight tank, who can spin those mfcker bosses See also [ edit ] Big Bill (disambiguation) Topics referred to by

106-533: A Rolls-Royce engine was tested on 11 November, the day of the Armistice . From parts already produced a further 24 vehicles were completed after the war. Five were sent to the training centre at Bovington in Dorset, and the others went straight to the scrap dealer. During 1918, the then prevalent preoccupation with trench crossing capabilities led to preparations being made for the production of an even longer tank:

159-698: A delegation to the United States immediately, to convince the new ally to start production of a British tank design. After some reflection they decided it was best to leave the initiative to the Americans. Stern did contact the American Military Attaché in London immediately after war was declared. In June 1917 the first American approaches were made, but not by the US Army as they had expected. The US Navy wanted

212-500: A large ammunition locker in the centre which formed a platform on which the commander stood behind the driver observing the battlefield through a cupola with four vision slits. Later the side superstructure guns were removed on US tanks. The twelfth crew member was the mechanic, seated next to the 300 hp Liberty V-12 (or in British tanks Ricardo V-12) petrol engine) cooled by a large horizontal radiator. Three armoured fuel tanks at

265-407: A large ammunition store with 800 rounds. Stern suggested to Tritton that the gun could be made to slide forward on rails, giving a better field of fire, but in the event the turret idea was abandoned and the aperture for the crew plated over. In the front of the vehicle two men sat on a narrow bench; one controlling the steering wheel, the clutch, the primary gear box and the throttle; the other holding

318-470: A large superstructure on top directly beneath the front of which the driver was seated. An innovative feature was the departure from the concept of the box tank with its single space into which all accessories were crammed. The Mark VIII was compartimentalised with a separate engine room at the back. This vastly improved fighting conditions as a bulkhead protected the crew against the deafening engine noise, noxious fumes and heat. There were no machine guns in

371-461: A trench the track sagged and then would not fit the wheels again and jammed. The tracks were also not up to carrying the weight of the vehicle (about 16 tons). Tritton and Lieutenant Walter Gordon Wilson tried several types of alternative track design, including balatá belting and flat wire ropes . Tritton, on 22 September, devised a robust but outwardly crude system using pressed steel plates riveted to cast links and incorporated guides to engage on

424-531: A wheeled tail to assist in steering. On 9 September the Number 1 Lincoln Machine, as the prototype was then known, made its first test run in the yard of the Wellington Foundry. It soon became clear that the track profiles were so flat that ground resistance during a turn was excessive. To solve this, the suspension was changed so that the bottom profile was more curved. Then the next problem showed up: when crossing

477-561: Is damage to the hull plating around the right–hand vision slit, possibly caused by an attempt at some point to tow the vehicle by passing a cable through the slit. This would have torn the tank's comparatively thin steel plating. Background: History of the tank , Tank classification , Tanks in World War I Background: History of the tank , Tanks in the British Army Mark VIII (tank) The Mark VIII tank also known as

530-518: Is different from Wikidata All article disambiguation pages All disambiguation pages Big Willie (tank) Little Willie was a prototype in the development of the British Mark I tank . Constructed in the autumn of 1915 at the behest of the Landship Committee , it was the first completed tank prototype in history. Little Willie is the oldest surviving individual tank, and

583-543: Is preserved as one of the most famous pieces in the collection of The Tank Museum , Bovington, England. Work on Little Willie's predecessor began in July 1915 by the Landship Committee to meet The United Kingdom's requirement in World War I for an armoured combat vehicle able to cross an 8-foot (2.4 m) trench. After several other projects where single and triple tracks had failed, on 22 July William Ashbee Tritton , director of

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636-657: The Liberty or The International was a British-American tank design of the First World War intended to overcome the limitations of the earlier British designs and be a collaborative effort to equip France, the UK and the US with a single heavy tank design. Production at a site in France was expected to take advantage of US industrial capacity to produce the automotive elements, with the UK producing

689-522: The Mark VIII , although it limited speed. The vehicle's 13 litre 105 bhp (78 kW) Daimler-Knight engine, gravity fed by two petrol tanks, was at the back, leaving just enough room beneath the turret. The prototype was fitted with a non-rotatable dummy turret mounting a machine gun; a Vickers 2-pounder (40 mm) Maxim gun ("Pom-pom") was to have been fitted, with as many as six Madsen machine guns to supplement it. The main gun would have had

742-456: The Mark VIII* ( Star ). The hull was to be lengthened a full three meters: four feet (1.2 m) at the front and six feet (1.8 m) at the back. This way it should be able to cross a trench 18 feet (5.5 m) wide. To ensure that the tank could turn at all, despite its critically high length-width ratio, the bottom profile of the tracks would be more strongly curved, so that a smaller part of

795-630: The Royal Tank Regiment adopted a folk song called My Boy Willie as its regimental march. Little Willie was preserved for posterity after the war, having been saved from being scrapped in 1940. During the Second World War it may have been positioned to act as a pill box to defend the camp at Bovington. It is today displayed at The Tank Museum at Bovington. It is essentially an empty hull, without an engine, but still with some internal fittings. The rear steering wheels are not fitted and there

848-593: The US Army until more advanced designs replaced them in 1932. A few tanks which had not been scrapped by the start of World War II were offered to Canada for training purposes. As the First World War progressed, the industrial production capacity of the Entente was taxed to the limit. Of the Allies, only Great Britain and France had been major industrial nations in 1914 and the latter had lost 70% of its heavy industry when

901-525: The Americans decided to build a brand new assembly factory at Neuvy-Pailloux 200 miles south of Paris, contracting a British company. Far from producing its first tank in April, the factory was not even finished by June. In August they contracted another British firm. It finished the factory in November, by which point the war had already ended; not a single tank would be built there. There were also serious delays in

954-587: The Americans to participate and contribute as much as they would like to its design. The Navy was on the brink of sending a team of engineers to Britain when the American Department of War was informed of developments by the US Military Attaché in London. It ordered the project to be shifted to the Army and selected Major H. W. Alden – in peacetime he had been an industrial expert – to go to the UK to work with

1007-408: The Americans. He submitted this to Churchill on the 11 November. Its main points included (using the original terminology): The plan already contained a specification: the tank should have a 300 hp (220 kW) engine, weigh 38.8 tons (39.5 tonnes) and have a trench crossing capacity of 14 feet (4.3 m). The 11 November briefing included the first use of the word "Liberty" for the tank which

1060-609: The British government had decided to start their own production in Britain. One thousand, four hundred and fifty vehicles were ordered from the North British Locomotive Company , William Beardmore and Company and Metropolitan , to use a 300 hp (220 kW) V12 Ricardo engine instead of the Liberty. Only the first managed to produce anything by the end of the war with seven vehicles built. The mild steel prototype with

1113-544: The British government. It now seemed that American involvement in the war would mean a lesser number of tanks available for the British forces. Also on 4 February 1917 binding agreements had been made with the French about tank production. These had to be renegotiated. Winston Churchill , the new Minister of Munitions , had just been forced to fire Stern as director of the Mechanical Supply Department (Controller of

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1166-525: The French Minister of Munitions, Louis Loucheur and the American commander-in-chief, John Pershing . Loucheur made it clear from the beginning that France had nothing to offer in terms of existing production facilities. This came as no surprise to Stern who had already prepared an "International Plan" of ten points (in fact a bilateral agreement between the US and Britain) that he now managed to get accepted by

1219-583: The Germans overran that part of Lorraine that they had not already occupied in 1871. The output in Britain was limited by labour shortages due to the manpower demand of the armed forces and a rocketing national debt . When the United States of America declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917, many in Britain hoped this event would solve all these problems. The two men directly responsible for British tank production, Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt and Lieutenant-Colonel Albert Gerald Stern , initially considered sending

1272-730: The Mechanical Warfare Department design team at Dollis Hill on the first drawings of the new tank. He arrived in London on the 3 October, to discover that a lot of design work had already been done by Lieutenant G J Rackham, who had been sent to the Front to see for himself how the current designs performed in the dismal conditions then encountered at the battlefield in Flanders . The US Army had set up headquarters in France. In September it decided to form its own tank corps with 25 tank battalions including five heavy tank battalions. To equip

1325-615: The Mechanical Warfare Department) because of his mistakes in handling the Mark IV project, leading to enormous production delays. In pushing production through in the early days he had upset civil and military authorities. Stern was appointed in September to the new position of "Commissioner for Mechanical Warfare (Overseas and Allies Branch)" in order to coordinate tank production with the US and France. Stern went to France to meet

1378-574: The agricultural machinery company William Foster & Company of Lincoln , was given the contract to develop a "Tritton Machine" with two tracks. It had to make use of the track assemblies – lengthened tracks and suspension elements (seven road wheels instead of four) – purchased as fully built units from the Bullock Creeping Grip Tractor Company in Chicago . On 11 August actual construction began; on 16 August Tritton decided to fit

1431-422: The armament, the crew could not have been smaller than six. The maximum speed was indicated by Tritton as being no more than two miles per hour. The vehicle used no real armour steel, just boiler plate; it was intended to use 10 mm plating for production. Wilson was unhappy with the basic concept of the Number 1 Lincoln Machine, and on 17 August suggested to Tritton the idea of using tracks that ran all around

1484-505: The armoured hulls and armament. The planned production levels would have equipped the Allied armies with a very large tank force that would have broken through the German defensive positions in the planned offensive for 1919 . In practice, manufacture was slow and only a few vehicles were produced before the end of the war in November 1918. After the war, 100 vehicles assembled in the US were used by

1537-503: The brakes. Overall length of the final version with the lengthened tracks and rear steering wheels in place was 8.08 m (26 ft 6 in). The length of the main unit without the rear steering wheels installed is 5.87 m (19 ft 3 in). Most mechanical components, including the radiator, had been adapted from those of the Foster-Daimler heavy artillery tractor . As at least four men would have been required to operate

1590-786: The end of the year and the factory should be capable of expansion to 1,200 a month. Both goals were very ambitious given the fact there was neither a completed design nor a factory and that British tank production would in fact be 150 a month during 1918. The United States would supply: the engine; radiator; fan; piping; silencer; lighting; dynamo; battery; propeller shaft; transmission, including gearbox; brakes; roller sprockets; gear shift and brake control; track links and pins; rear track sprockets, hub and shafts; front idler hub and shafts; track roller, track spindles and bushings. Britain would supply: bullet and bomb-proof plates; structural members; track shoes and rollers; guns, machine guns and mountings; ammunition racks and ammunition. The agreed price

1643-556: The extra production was to be in France as well. The British finished the prototype hull, made of unhardened steel, in July and sent it to the United States. On arrival it transpired that no mass-produced parts were ready to finish the prototype, so the Locomobile Automobile Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut made these all by hand, completing the first vehicle on the 28 September. Testing began on 31 October. Only then

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1696-449: The front—left and right next to the driver—and one on each of the other sides. As there was no machine gun position covering the back of the tank there was a dead angle vulnerable to infantry attack. To solve this problem a triangular steel deflector plate was attached. The rear superstructure machine gunner could use it to deflect his fire down into that area behind the tank. The tank carried 208 shells and 13,848 machine gun rounds, mostly in

1749-588: The heavy units, Major James A. Drain – a staff officer to General Pershing and responsible for initial planning of the tank force – provisionally ordered 600 Mark VI tanks (then under development) from the British in October 1917. The Army tried to convince the Department of War to divert all available tanks to the Army, leading to a conflict with the Navy (the first of many to come over this issue). This posed serious problems for

1802-412: The hull width was an impressive nominal 3.76 m, the actual length-width ratio of the tracks was very poor as that width included the sponsons. Combined with wide tracks it proved difficult to turn the tank. During testing many tracks twisted and broke in a turn and it was decided to use longer, stronger 13.25-inch (337 mm) links made of hardened cast armour plate, stiffened by webs formed by recesses in

1855-424: The inside of the track frame. The track frames as a whole were connected to the main body by large spindles. New arrival by Tritton out of pressed plate. Light in weight but very strong. All doing well, Thank you. Proud Parents This system was unsprung, as the tracks were held firmly in place, able to move in only one plane. This was a successful design and was used on all First World War British tanks up to

1908-567: The main armament placed in side sponsons . Number 1 Lincoln Machine was rebuilt with an extended (90 centimetres longer) track up to 6 December 1915, but merely to test the new tracks in Burton Park, near Lincoln; the second prototype was seen as much more promising. The first was renamed Little Willie, the scabrous name then commonly used by the British yellow press to mock the German Imperial Crown Prince Wilhelm ; Mother

1961-554: The most modern tanks for its US Marine Corps . At that moment the current British tank project was the Mark VI . It was designed with existing British industrial capacity in mind, posing limits that might be overcome by larger American production facilities. Stern therefore pretended that an even more advanced project had already been in existence which he called the Mark VIII (there was also a much more conventional Mark VII project). He invited

2014-404: The production of the components. The Liberty aero engine with its expensive drawn-steel cylinders was redesigned with cheaper cast iron cylinders. These redesigned engines were only produced in October. In spite of these delays, there were plans to produce a further 1,500 tanks in the United States on top of the shared production in France. This was not possible due to lack of armour and guns so

2067-408: The rear held 200 Imperial gallons (240 US gallons, or 909 litres) of fuel giving a range of 89 km. The transmission used a planetary gearbox giving two speeds in either forward or reverse. Top speed was 5.25 mph (8.45 km/h). To improve its trench crossing ability to 4.88 m the vehicle had a very elongated shape. The track length was 34 ft 2 in (10.41 m) but even though

2120-415: The same term [REDACTED] This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the title Big Willy . If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article. Retrieved from " https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Big_Willy&oldid=1245383087 " Category : Disambiguation pages Hidden categories: Short description

2173-415: The sponsons, only the 6-pounders each manned by a gunner and loader. The side machine guns were to the rear of the sponsons mounted in the hull doors. Major Alden had designed the sponsons to be retractable (they could be swung in at the rear by the crew, being pivoted at the front), to reduce the width of the vehicle if enemy obstacles were encountered. Five more machine guns were in the superstructure: two at

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2226-507: The tank very vulnerable to mortar shells and landmines . The French government hoped to receive 700 Mark VIIIs for free, as the French superheavy tank, the Char 2C , could not be produced in sufficient numbers, if at all. However, suffering from a lack of manpower and raw materials the French were not forthcoming in providing any facilities for the production of the International Tank. Soon

2279-405: The track plate. Another effect of the narrow hull was that the fighting compartment was also very narrow. This was made worse by the fact that now the gap between the double track frames at each side was very wide; earlier types had only the tracks themselves widened. Nevertheless, the tank was supposed to accommodate another twenty infantry men in full gear if necessary. In absolute terms the vehicle

2332-462: The track would touch the ground. Ground pressure would have increased however, as total weight reached 42.5 tons (43.2 tonnes). If the tank had sunk into soft ground somewhat, it's questionable whether it would have been able to make a turn. No prototype was built. The American Liberty tanks equipped a single unit: the 67th Infantry Regiment (Tank), based in Aberdeen, Maryland . The curious designation of

2385-462: The unit had its origin in the fact that since 1920, by law, all tanks had to be part of the Infantry branch. The two machine gun positions at the sides of the superstructure were eliminated, so the crew could be reduced to ten. Water-cooled M1917 Browning machine guns were used. Despite many modifications, the vehicles suffered from overheating and poor reliability, causing a prejudice in the Army against

2438-516: The use of heavy tanks. From 1932 onward they were phased out; all were in storage by 1934. In 1940, Canada had a lack of training tanks and were offered the remaining tanks at scrap value, but the Canadians instead opted to purchase M1917 light tanks . The tank appearing in the 1989 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade movie was a replica vehicle made from an excavator , following the hull shape of

2491-413: The vehicle. With d'Eyncourt's approval construction of an improved prototype began on 17 September. For this second prototype (later known as " HMLS [His Majesty's Land Ship] Centipede ", and, later still, "Mother"), a rhomboid track frame was fitted, taking the tracks up and over the top of the vehicle. The rear steering wheels were retained in an improved form, but the idea of a turret was abandoned and

2544-452: Was for a time known as Big Willie, after his father Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany. That same year the cartoonist William Kerridge Haselden had made a popular comic anti-German propaganda movie: The Adventures of Big and Little Willie . Although Little Willie was demonstrated alongside Mother in January 1916, it was by then peripheral to the development of British tanks. In June 1916 the tank

2597-559: Was taken from the engine chosen. The first design conference took place on 4 December at GHQ in France and Churchill approved the plan soon afterwards. It was made into a formal treaty signed by the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour and the US Ambassador Walter Hines Page on 19 January 1918. The treaty specified the programme in great detail. The first 1,500 tanks had to be made by

2650-508: Was the armament shipped from Britain, and two guns and ten Hotchkiss machine guns were fitted. Testing was finished after the war and it was decided to build 100 vehicles in the USA; these were constructed in 1919 and 1920 by the Rock Island Arsenal for $ 35,000 each. The US bought 100 complete sets of parts for the hull from the British, the whole amount that had been completed. Meanwhile,

2703-620: Was to be £5,000 per vehicle. In December 1917 the Mark VI order was cancelled ensuring that the Mark VIII would be the new standard Allied weapon. The Mark VIII kept many of the general features of the Mark I-V series: it had their typical high track run and no revolving turret but two sponsons , one on each side of the tank, armed with a 6-pounder (57 mm) gun . But it also resembled the Mark VI-project in that it had more rounded and wider tracks and

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2756-522: Was transferred to the tank training area near Elveden . After a period at the training area it sent back to its original manufactures who may have used it for tests relating to the development of the whippet tank. By 1925 it was at Bovington. Though it never saw combat, Little Willie was a major step forward in military technology, being the first tank prototype to be finished. During the remainder of World War I, some tank crews continued to informally refer to their vehicles as "Willies" or "buses". In 1922

2809-515: Was very large: at 10 ft 3 in (3.12 m) tall the Mark VIII was the second largest operational tank in history, after the Char 2C . However its weight was only 38.3 long tons (38.9 t) fitted for battle as the armour plate was thin with a thickness of 16 mm on the front and sides—a slight improvement over the Mark V but very thin by later standards. The roof and bottom of the hull were protected by only 6 mm thick armour plate, leaving

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