Meet the Little Willie, the first tank: The battle tank has been a mainstay of warfare for several decades, and it remains so today. The tank is integral to warfighting tactics in the 21st century, whether those wars are waged by American forces in the Middle East, or Russian forces in Ukraine. Images of the tank firing and being fired upon are transcendent: They are among the depictions the general public most closely associates with war.
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The uniquely foreboding landscapes of the World War One battlefield were the impetus that drove the development of the tank. Entrenched European armies needed a method for scaling trenches and barbed wire – for traversing no man’s land. The movements and the environment were completely unsuitable for infantry. Watching successive waves of young men “go over the top,” against the current of machine-gun fire, inspired war planners to model a solution. Something fully armored. Something mobile. And something with firepower. The French, British, Russians, and Germans all set about designing a solution.
Rhomboids, Tractors, and “Landships”
The earliest prototypes were an eclectic mix of odd designs. The electric Aubriot-Gabet “Fortress” was a rotating turret mounted on a tractor chassis. The Boirault machine was a rhomboid-shaped skeleton, without armor, featuring a single overhead track. The Killen-Strait tractor was fitted onto an armored car body. And the Frot-Laffly armored roller was a so-called landship; only one was ever made.
Weighing ten tons, the Frot-Laffly was clearly ancestral to the tank. It was a rolling fortress with two cannons and six machine guns, powered by a 20 horsepower engine and only capable of moving between 3 and 5 kilometers per hour. The Frot-Laffly was abandoned because “trials…demonstrated that it would not be possible to obtain practically satisfying results from it,” a French colonel wrote in 1915.
All of these early design prototypes were conceptually similar, if functionally divorced, from the modern tank. But they were not true tanks. The first true tank ever built was the “Little Willie,” a British design unveiled in September 1915.
Little Willie, a Big Idea
Supposedly named as a slight against German Kaiser Wilhelm II, the inceptive tank was in large part an adaptation of the Foster-Daimler heavy artillery tractor. At 20 feet long and weighing 16 tons, Little Willie had dual tracks and a fixed, non-rotatable dummy turret. The first tank also carried a Vickers 2-pounder (40mm) Maxim gun, plus as many as six Madsen machine guns. A crew of six was required to operate Little Willie. Two drivers sat up front on a narrow bench. One controlled the steering wheel, clutch, gearbox, and throttle. The other controlled the brakes. Just the brakes.
Little Willie was slow. It maxed out at just 2 miles per hour. Despite operating at glacial speeds, it overheated. Most damning, the tank couldn’t cross trenches – a necessity on World War One battlefields. And the prototype didn’t have real steel armor, just a boilerplate. Clearly, Little Willie was not fit for battle. In fact, by the time it was built, its designers, William Tritton and Walter Wilson, had already blueprinted an improved model, making Little Willie redundant from the moment it was born.
All Quiet on the Western Front Tank Scene. Image Credit: Netflix Screenshot.
Nevertheless, Little Willie is the first working tank ever built. The second prototype, known as “Big Willie,” represented one step closer to the Mark I, which was the first tank ever used in battle.
Today, Little Willie sits on display at The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, a proud ancestor of the tanks that still dominate the modern battlefield.
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Harrison Kass is a Senior Defense Editor at 19FortyFive. An attorney, pilot, guitarist, and minor pro hockey player, he joined the US Air Force as a Pilot Trainee but was medically discharged. Harrison has degrees from Lake Forest College, the University of Oregon, and New York University. He lives in Oregon and regularly listens to Dokken.
