Whippet: Inside the Fastest Tank of WWI

World War One sees the birth of the tank. Devised as a solution to machine guns and barbed wire, the British heavy tank made its first appearance in small numbers on the Somme in September 1916. It's one of a number of innovations, along with walking barrage, improved artillery and infantry tactics, and the use of aircraft that make the Western Front a transition zone between 19th and 20th century warfare. But it's not there yet. Heavy tanks are a long way from the fast-moving weapons of breakthrough and aggressive exploitation that we know today. At Cambrai in November 1917, in the first mass use of armour, 479 tanks smash a hole in the Hindenburg Line, six miles wide and four miles deep. Despite this, the British Army is unable to exploit the breach. The cavalry corps fail to move forward, and heavy tanks like the Mark IV are slow, moving at two to four miles an hour, and vulnerable to shell fire. By the following day, only about a third of the tanks are still serviceable, the rest being destroyed, broken down, or bellied out. The German Army counterattacks, and most of the games are lost. In contrast to this, at Amiens on the 8th of August 1918, a new and faster design, the Whippet, is also used. Whippet tanks exploit a breach and get behind the enemy lines, disrupting lines of communication and interdicting artillery positions. One in particular carries out a nine-hour rampage behind enemy lines, shooting up infantry formations, transport, a balloon unit. Mobile warfare has returned, and the stalemate is broken. The Whippet shows the way forward, a tank delivering a fast, aggressive punch to the enemy. In this video, we'll look at how the Whippet was developed, how it proved to be effectively one of the first tanks in the modern sense of the word, and the story of one particular vehicle and its crew. At the end of 1917, the Western Front is in stalemate. Faced with artillery, barbed wire, machine guns, and the difficulty of traversing a shell-pot landscape, casualties at Arras, the Somme, and Passchendaele are huge, without any major breakthrough. Much progress has been made in weapons and tactics since 1914. The walking barrage and the accurate use of artillery to interdict enemy assets. Improved infantry tactics, including cooperation with tanks. Light machine guns and grenades. Aircraft, used both to deny the sky to the enemy and for reconnaissance and artillery spotting. The tank. Although tanks like the British Mark IV and the French Saint-Chamond are slow, they can crush the wire and deal with enemy infantry and machine guns. The all-arms action pointed towards a new way of warfighting, and Combré suggested how this might be used to create a breakthrough. But the problem was that Mark IVs, like this one, it's got a cross-country speed of just two miles an hour. Just too slow to exploit the possibilities. A faster, more mobile tank was needed to work with the heavy tanks to punch through and exploit a breach. William Tritton, principal designer of British tanks since the start, had been working on a new design since late 1916. The Tritton Chaser. This was now renamed the Medium Mark A Whippet. Both lighter and faster than the heavy tanks, the Whippet weighed 14 tonnes as opposed to 25 tonnes from Mark IV. This was capable of eight miles an hour. Now, that might not sound very fast, but it's more than double the top speed of one of the heavy tanks. The lower hull and track layout are basically taken from the prototype Little Willie. Right down to the mud chutes which stop the tracks clogging up in muddy conditions. What is entirely new is the upper hull layout with the fighting compartment at the back and the mechanicals. The tank was powered by not one but two 45 horsepower Tyler bus engines. The original Tritton design featured a traversable Austin armoured car turret, but that was rejected for what you see here. A fighting compartment mounted at the rear of the tank with a large rear door and a small top hatch. Armament consisted of four .303 inch Hotchkiss machine guns in ball mounts. So this is the fighting compartment of the Whippet and this is the first time I've actually been in this tank, so this is quite exciting for me. Looking around, you have the ball mounts for the Hotchkiss guns, pistol ports, behind the driver racking for ammunition boxes because of course remember the Hotchkiss was a strict fed weapon. And then looking at driver's controls, this is quite extraordinary because everything just about is doubled up. Now there's a central steering wheel, but apart from that you have got two clutches, two handbrakes and two gear levers. This was really quite a handful to drive. The Whippet was notoriously difficult to drive and only the best drivers were able to handle it. Going in a straight line, both engines, they were connected to the cross shafts by a friction coupling, were locked. In theory, turning the steering wheel closed one throttle and opened the other, producing a wide turn. In practice, that didn't work that well. It was difficult to control the engine speeds and there was a danger of stalling one or other of the engines, in which case the tank might well whip around in a circle and throw a track. To avoid this, the drivers got into the habit of actually stopping the tank, applying a brake to one or other tracks and then using that in the turn. It was slower, but safer. The tank was, quote, lively and irregular at low speeds. At higher speeds, the two engines tended to run in step or key into the ground, making steering using the wheel really very difficult. This video has been made possible by our supporters on Patreon, our YouTube members and our Superthanks donors. Please join them if you can't and support Tank Museum. And thanks for watching. The Whippet had a three-man crew. Commander, driver, gunner. It's not a very large space, so it must have been pretty cramped and hot here in combat. But at least the crew were spared direct exposure to the engine because it's down there behind the bulkhead. There is one other curious fact about this. There are a pair of fans just for the bulkhead which act to cool the brakes. But the effect of air being pushed into the crew compartment meant there was a slight overpressure actually inside. The principal machine gun chosen for tank use was this, the French-designed Hotchkiss. The two alternatives were the Vickers gun or the Lewis. Now, the Vickers gun is a big, heavy, belt-fed weapon. It's a bit of a handful inside a tank. The Lewis was fed by pan magazines, but they were in too great demand as an infantry weapon. So this was chosen. The loading system, it consists of 30-round feeder strips. And the cyclic rate is around about 400 to 600 rounds a minute. Although that does, of course, depend on the efficiency of the loader. At around 12 millimetres thick, the armour was proof against small arms fire. But the crew inside would suffer from splash and spore. Either blobs of molten lead or fragments of the rounds themselves making their way through the gaps between the armour plates. Now, because fire was concentrated on the vision ports, false vision ports were painted on the tank in order to deceive the enemy. At any range, an impact from a shell would render a whippet into flaming scrap iron. The whippet took just over a year to design and build. From Triton's first proposal to the Tank Supply Committee on 3rd October 1916 to its first deployment with F Battalion of the Tank Corps on 14th December 1970. What that meant is the whippet was arriving on the Western Front at a time when it would be best able to demonstrate its attributes of speed and mobility. In March 1918, the German Army launched Kaiserschlacht, a series of offensives directed largely at the British Army that would bring it closer to defeat than at any other time. Depleted units of the British Army were driven backwards, losing all the gains of previous years on the Somme and Arras. The town of Albert, which had been behind our lines the whole war, falls. In fact, the German Army even reached the outskirts of Ypres. The stalemate of trench warfare was ended as the British Army conducted a fighting retreat westwards. First actions fought by the whippets consisted of covering retreating units using speed, firepower and mobility to break up enemy pursuit. These were described by Phil Marshall to Douglas Haig as savage rabbit tactics. The whippets emerging like rabbits from their holes to savage the enemy. In this, they were a lot more effective than the heavy tanks. At times, devastatingly so. At Cachy on the 24th of April, seven whippets of X Company, third battalion of the tank corps, were detailed to break up two enemy battalions massing for attack. The company commander, Captain Reginald Price, carried out a recce and described the countryside as beautifully open and undulating, ideal for tanks. That's a sentence that could have been written by a tank commander in 1944, say. Having ascertained that, he gave the order to advance and the result was an absolute massacre. The charging tanks came upon them over a rise at point-blank range, apparently having a meal as several bodies had laid aside arms. The tanks went straight through them, causing great execution by fire, by running over many who were unable to get away. They turned and came back again through the remnants, utterly dispersing them. Despite losing one tank that advanced too far, too far from an artillery battery, and three that had to be recovered after the action, Captain Price estimated that the whippets had inflicted over 400 casualties on the enemy. In an action lasting less than four hours, they had travelled 10 miles, three and a half into action, three in action, and then three and a half back again. The ability of the whippet to operate at speed and distance to surprise and destroy an enemy marked it out as a very different vehicle from the heavy tanks that had come before. We now come to arguably the greatest tank action of World War One. That fought by the whippet Musical Box of B Company, 6th Battalion, at the Battle of Amiens on the 8th of August 1918. Musical Box, commanded by Lieutenant Clement Arnold, with a crew consisting of Gunner Christopher Ribbons and Driver William Kearney, was one of the whippets detailed to accompany leading troops of the 1st Cavalry Division in an attack south of the Amiens-de-Champs railway. Lieutenant Arnold's count survives, as does that of Gunner Ribbons. Lieutenant Arnold takes up the story. After a few minutes, I found myself to be the leading machine, owing to the others having become ditched. To my immediate front, I could see more tanks from another British tank group being followed very closely by Australian infantry. About this time, we came under direct shell fire from a German gun battery and two tanks on my right were knocked out. I saw clouds of smoke coming out of these machines and the crews evacuated them. The infantry following the heavy machines were suffering casualties from this battery. I turned half left and ran diagonally across the front of the battery at a distance of 600 yards. Both of my guns were able to fire on the battery and were able to knock them out. Having destroyed the battery, Arnold made the decision to press on. A sketch map that is in our possession, drawn by Gunner Ribbons, shows the route of the tank south of Villers-Bretonneux following the course of a railway past the villages of Lamotte and Arbonnieres. This seems to have been a very target-rich environment. Over the top of another bridge on my left, I could see a lorry moving in my direction. I moved out of sight until we topped the ridge and then shot the driver. The lorry ran into a right-hand ditch. The railway had now come out of the cutting which had rested all the while and I could see both sides of it. I could see a long line of men resting on both sides of the railway and fired at these at a range of 400 to 500 yards, inflicting heavy casualties. By now, musical bots had been on the receiving end of a lot of return fire. Petrol tins stored up on the roof had been punctured, so petrol was running down the walls and actually into the crew compartment. The crew donned gas masks against the fumes but the situation was worsening. Petrol was running down the inside of the back door. Heat and fumes combined were very bad. We were still moving forward. I was shouting to driver Carney to turn about as it was impossible to continue the action. When two heavy concussions followed one another and the cab burst into flames. The crew bailed out of the blazing tank, rolling on the ground to put out the flames on their burning uniforms but they were then set on by a group of vengeful soldiers. Driver William Carney was shot dead and Lieutenant Arnold received a bayonet and forearm before his life and that of gunner Christopher Ribbons was saved by a German officer, Major Ernst Ritter von Marovitch. Over the course of nine hours, Musical Box covered almost 15 miles and accounted for an infantry battalion in camp, an observation balloon unit and the 225th Division's supply column plus a number of lesser targets. Musical Box had achieved great things but she had outdistanced cavalry she was supposed to be supporting. In spite of this, Lieutenant Arnold received the Distinguished Service Order and gunner Ribbons the Distinguished Conduct Medal. Driver William Carney did not receive an award although General Hugh Ellers, who commanded the tank corps, did contact the family saying this was under consideration. Musical Box, burnt out on the battlefield, was probably scrapped after the war but five whippets survived in various collections. Our whippet, Caesar II, is rather special. It was commanded by the 23-year-old Lieutenant Cecil Sewell in an action on August the 29th 1918 at Fremiquor, near Bopone. Seeing another whippet overturned in a shell hole with a crew trapped inside, Lieutenant Sewell left his tank with a shovel and dug soil away so that he was able to open the rear door and release them. Going back to tend his injured driver, William Knox, he was shot and killed. For his actions, Lieutenant Sewell was awarded the Victoria Cross. Whippet, as demonstrated by these actions, was the first tank capable of fast aggressive action, able to exploit a breakthrough, effectively approaching the capabilities of later tanks. The French Renault FT was comparable. These are the future of armoured warfare. If you think of the heavy tanks like this one as more akin to a medieval siege tower, whippet is the first of a new generation, faster, more mobile tanks. The heavy tanks would still create the breakthrough, but the whippets would then be able to exploit it. Although arriving late and relatively few in number, 200 were built compared to over 2,000 Mk4s and Mk5s, whippets made a substantial contribution to the latter stages of the war. The fighting withdrawal of spring 1918 and the 100 days as the German army was driven back across the old battlefields and beyond. The problem of how to best employ whippets was the subject of quite a lot of discussion. The cavalry were accused of failing to cooperate with the tanks, as a claim the cavalry denied. But the main issue of fast tanks and slower infantry would be addressed over time. First by mechanised infantry carried in lorries and then armoured personnel carriers, so the infantry were able to keep pace with the tanks. The whippet was designed to exploit a potential breakthrough. A tank designed for a return to mobile warfare. The new design, although revolutionary in some ways, built on existing experience and available technology. The requirement was for a tank able to cope with battlefield conditions, but with a degree of speed and mobility not yet seen. That tank, as we've demonstrated, was the medium Mark A whippet. This tank, along with the Renault FT, would demonstrate the way that tanks were going to be used on the future battlefield. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please like, subscribe, and if you can, support us on Patreon.