To keep the project secret from enemies, production workers were reportedly told the vehicles they were building would be used to carry water on the battlefield (alternate theories suggest the shells of the new vehicles resembled water tanks). The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill, who believed in the concept of a "land boat" and organised a Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype.
In 1914, a British army colonel named Ernest Swinton and William Hankey, Secretary of the Committee for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armoured vehicle with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory. The British developed the tank in response to the pre-existing trench warfare of World War I. However, improvements were made to the original prototype and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields around the world. It weighed 14 tonnes, got stuck in trenches and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour. Little Willie was far from an overnight success. On this day in 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie rolls off the assembly line in England.
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