The First World War’s deadliest battle was stalling, but everything changed when Little Willie arrived

By late 1915, the First World War had entered an entirely new phase of combat.

What had been expected to be a short, decisive conflict had hardened into a grinding stalemate. On the Western Front, opposing armies were locked into trench systems stretching from the Channel coast to the Swiss border. What little advances were made were measured in yards; the loss of life to claim those yards was measured in the tens of thousands.

The First World War had become one of endless attrition, dominated by artillery barrages and machine-gun fire. Both sides understood that while their troops could reach enemy trenches, they couldn’t cross the killing ground in between without being cut down. Traditional solutions were no longer working. Cavalry couldn’t operate in cratered terrain, and infantry couldn’t survive sustained fire.

But a new weapon of war was designed to solve this deadlock: the tank.

As historian and journalist Mark Urban explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, the tank began as a practical experiment – an attempt to answer this specific battlefield problem.

Why the Western Front needed something new

What armies needed was something that could move forward under fire, protect its crew, crush barbed wire and cross trenches. The idea of an armoured vehicle wasn’t new (an armoured warhorse served a not-too-distant function), but only recent technological developments made it feasible. Internal combustion engines, steel armour plates and continuous tracks finally made the machines possible.

The first of these was Little Willie.

Built by Foster & Co in Lincoln, Little Willie wasn’t intended to see combat. Instead, it was an idea that was designed to answer one crucial question: could a tracked vehicle move across shattered ground and trenches without breaking down?

• Read more | Life in the trenches during WWI

“That is the first tank. It’s a prototype,” Urban says.

Little Willie had obvious shortcomings. It struggled to cross wide trenches, had no turret, and had numerous mechanical weaknesses. But it proved that a tracked, armoured vehicle could operate on a modern battlefield.

From that experiment emerged a completely redesigned machine with a distinctive rhomboid shape, long tracks running around its body. This would become Mark I – the first tank actively used in combat.

Rushed into battle

The Mark I was slow, mechanically fragile and, resultantly, hazardous. Crews received minimal training and breakdowns on the battlefield were the norm.

But despite its many flaws, the Mark I represented something genuinely new to warfare: a mobile armoured platform capable of advancing with infantry through no man’s land.

By September 1916, the battle of the Somme had been raging for months. While casualties were enormous, gains were painfully small. And new offensives weren’t making any progress.

“General Haig [of the British Army] had launched his offensive a few weeks before,” Urban explains. “It had gone pretty disastrously, as we know. And at the end of it, he was looking for something to try and improve the result very late in the battle.”

Britain had only a few dozen machines available and, once revealed, the Germans would adapt quickly. Haig was warned of these concerns but, as Urban says, he
“didn’t listen”.

49 tanks were committed, scattered along the front in small groups. Many broke down before reaching the enemy. Others were hit by artillery or bogged down in mud so deep that even tracks could not cope.

“And the result was pretty unimpressive. The whole thing was, to be honest, a damp squib.”

• Read more | What caused the First World War?

Learning from failure

The disappointing debut prompted serious reassessment of how to use these new weapons.

Engineers worked to improve reliability, while crews gained experience. Most importantly, planners began to understand that tanks needed to be used in a more coordinated way.

By late 1917, the British were ready to deploy them properly.

In November 1917, at the battle of Cambrai, tanks were used on an unprecedented scale. More than 476 were concentrated along a narrow sector, supported by artillery and infantry.

But the Germans weren’t complacent. They had studied earlier tank attacks and redesigned their trenches, widening them beyond the known crossing ability of British machines.

“They thought this would stop the tanks,” Urban explains. “But the British had an answer.”

Each tank carried a massive bundle of brushwood – a fascine – which could be dropped into a trench to create a temporary bridge. When the attack began, tanks rolled forward, fascines were deployed, and trenches were crossed.

“When the German soldiers realised what was happening, there was mass panic,” Urban explains. “They were shooting rifles, machine guns, and everything at these big metal machines. The bullets were bouncing off.”

For the first time since 1914, a significant breakthrough was achieved without catastrophic loss.

What tanks really changed

“This was the thing that, through all the suffering of those first three years of the war in France, everyone had been longing for and waiting for,” Urban says: proof that stalemate could be broken. It was a psychological turning point, as much as a military one.

From this point on, tanks became a permanent feature of modern warfare, integrated with infantry, artillery and aircraft.

Little Willie itself never left Britain and never fired a shot. But it provided an idea that helped to end a devastating war.

Mark Urban was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.