WEAPONS THAT MIGHT HAVE....... by Victor Durrell THE BIG WHEEL LANDSHIP In 1915 the devastation and stagnation of the continuos lines of trenches which stretched from the Alps to the sea forced the western Allies to look for alternative solutions to the problems of achieving a breakthrough. Many applied their minds to the problem and these gradually percolated through the myriad channels of officialdom in Whitehall until they found the ears of Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty via the Admiralty Air Department which organised and ran the Royal Naval Air Service's armoured car squadrons in Belgium and France. Ever willing to seek a way to increase the standing of the senior service he decided to investigate alternative means to achieving a breakthrough of the German lines than by simply throwing more and more men against them. One of the ideas which was considered promising was the creation of "landships" which ultimately became the first tanks. On 22 February 1915, the Admiralty created the Landships Committee to investigate the alternatives offered by the various competing ideas and designs. Two of the major personalities of the Landships Committee were Colonel Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton and William Tritton. Crompton, who had seen brief service as a boy in the trenches before Sebastopol during the Crimean War and had latterly made a name for himself as an expert in mechanical traction and electricity was in his seventies, a tall stooping figure, what Fletcher calls, "the epitome of the Victorian engineer of many parts",1 he was already, by the end of 1914, bombarding the War Office with advice about how to achieve a breakthrough. In February 1915 he submitted what he called his `trench straddling machine', which was a species of giant tractor with a special deck to carry troops behind armour. It was intended to run across no- man's-land and pause astride the enemy trench while the troops came down through a trap door to deal with the opposition. While the War Office rejected the scheme at once, he was invited to join the Landships Committee. The other, William Tritton, was the managing director of a Lincoln based firm of agricultural engineers, William Foster and Co. Ltd. Along with Lieutenant Walter Wilson, an engineer of undoubted genius, once more according to David Fletcher, "they had the facility for invention and the propensity for action which bore fruit in a remarkably short space of time."2 Even so, just as with Colonel Crompton, Tritton was to go down many blind alleyways before finding the solution to the problem. Although with hindsight its possible to see that the use of a track laying (caterpillar) mechanism is perhaps the most efficient way of carrying a heavy armoured vehicle across country, this wasn't evident when the first tanks were being developed. Few really effective track systems existed. All were designed for light weight agricultural type machines. Many still saw the wheel as the most effective method, albeit perhaps requiring something larger than was normally employed for road work to enable it to surmount the obstacles which it might encounter. Foremost amongst these was Squadron-Commander Hetherington of the Royal Naval Air Service. He visualised an enormous machine which ran on three 40 foot diameter wheels. It was to be powered by an 800 hp diesel which operated a generator supplying electricity to the wheels. The two main wheels would each have been 13 feet, 4 inches wide and the third, or steering wheel, 5 feet wide. Amour would have been 3 inches thick, overall height 46 feet, length 100 feet and width 80 feet. Ground clearance would have been an incredible 17 feet and the weight was an estimated 300 tons. There were to be six four-inch guns in twin mounts, probably like destroyer turrets, and a top speed of 8 mph was planned. This was as, David Fletcher points out, "no trench crossing machine, no siege breaker; it was a true leviathan capable of crushing all in its path, of fording the Rhine and driving straight into Germany."3 Such a scheme was of course, pure H.G. Wells and was condemned for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the vulnerability of such a huge target.4 Inspecting the Big Wheel Mockup at Fosters However, the idea of using large wheels still appealed and the Landships Committee was impressed enough to follow up the suggestion by requesting a more practical design. This was provided by Colonel Crompton and was passed to William Tritton of Fosters to translate into a realistic design. Work began in February 1915 under the title "Fosters Trench Tractor". In line with contemporary thinking it was designed to carry a trench storming party. It was to be articulated and carried on four 15 foot diameter wheels. The front part, which was smaller than the rear, was the powered section, containing a Daimler 105 hp engine and transmission from a Foster-Daimler tractor, with the driver in a small cab at the top. The rear half, being much larger, was for the troops, who entered and debussed through two doors at the back, this area being clear except for the rear axle. Dimensions were to have been, length 50 feet; width 9 feet, height 15 feet. No weight is reliably recorded but a ground pressure of 27 lbs per sq.in. was estimated. The turning circle was quoted at about 20 feet and the number of troops carried at about 70.5 Since the tractor half was at the front, any weapons would need to have been mounted at the rear and would have been masked it during the advance. However, it was felt that the vehicle might not operate properly backwards so this limitation had to be accepted. Churchill ordered six prototypes, and work commenced at Fosters on a wooden mockup. As this began to take shape in the workshops it became clear that even this reduced size was going to be far too large.6 In the meantime, William Tritton, produced a second design which he called the "Electric Trencher". It was presumably intended to overcome the problem of having the fighting compartment shielded by the power unit. This was achieved firstly by choosing electricity, instead of a direct mechanical drive, to drive the machine. a 600 volt electric motor was fitted into the hull, which normally ran at 1000 rpm and delivered 75 bhp. This could be increased to 90 bhp for up to three hours and even 100 bhp for a few minute if required. A reel of cable was carried in the hull and this was paid out to the power source as the Trencher advanced. The cable ran down a vertical guide below the hull. On the lower end of the guide was a mole plough which fed the cable into a shallow cut where it was soon buried out of harms way. The hull was more or less `T' shaped. It was to be 36 feet long and 5 foot wide for most of its length, widening to 10 feet at the front (this issue's cover illustration is of an artist's impression of what the "Electric Trencher" could have looked like). It was to be supported in the centre by a pair of 15 foot diameter wheels at the rear by a single 5 foot wheel that provided steering. There seems to have been alternate steering positions at either end and the front driver was flanked by a pair of machine guns although once again the primary role was that of a troop carrier. Electric current was supplied from a Foster-Daimler tractor which had its chassis extended at the rear to mount a dynamo. This vehicle would have been stationed within the British lines, in relative safety, while the armoured half of the machine advanced towards the enemy. It was even suggested that the Trencher could be filled with explosives and send unmanned into the German lines to then be detonated. This project of Tritton's did not even reach the mock-up stage, a further argument against it being that such massive machines making their way forward to the British lines would have seriously disrupted normal road traffic. David Fletcher also suggests that an alternative and perhaps far more important reason for its rejection was that if a break occurred in the power line then the machine would have become immobilised in no-man's land.7 However, the idea of the Big Wheel did not completely die. It resurfaced in Germany during WWII where Krupp built the Raeumer S. While not specifically designed as a "landship" its design was very closely related to that of Cromptons and Tritton's "Foster's Trench Tractor" in that it was large, long, articulated and heavily armoured. Instead of being a fighting vehicle it was designed as a specialist mine exploder, making use of large metal wheels on trailing arms to absorb the explosions from the mines as it drove through a minefield. As the pictures illustrate, its design was considerably more complex than Crompton's while its size was similar.8 Even so, after WWII the idea resurfaced yet again, this time in the USA where it was adopted to slightly different purposes as the "Overland Wagon Train" by the US Army. It consisted of a series of very large, self- powered wagons linked together and which were meant to act as a resupply system for armoured units on the nuclear battlefield. It was the inspiration for the "Wagon Trains" used in Patrick Tilley's otherwise rather forgettable "AMTRAK Wars" series of science fiction books. Each wagon's wheels had an electric motor and they were driven from a central powersource. In the real vehicle it was a gas turbine engine, while in Tilley's it was a small nuclear reactor. While the prototype was never actually seen with the proposed armoured shell with which it was meant to be fitted, it would have made a very impressive vehicle.