Flying Elephant
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The Flying Elephant was a proposed super-heavy tank, planned but never built by the British during World War I.
After the last order for the Mark I, an additional fifty vehicles in April 1916, it was far from certain that any more tanks were to be produced. Everything would depend on the success of the new weapon. William Tritton, co-designer and co-producer of the first tank, thought he had already understood what would prove to be its main deficiency. A direct hit by a shell would destroy the vehicle, a major drawback on a battlefield saturated with artillery. Tritton decided in April to design a tank that would be immune to medium artillery fire.
Tritton was unsure however of what this would entail exactly. How thick should the armour be to ensure complete protection? The same month a certain Lieutenant Symes began to test two-inch (fifty-one millimetre) armour plate by firing at it with various captured German guns. In June, this programme was expanded by testing several types of plate at Shoeburyness, delivered by armour producer William Beardmore and Company. Tritton had changed his designs twice by the time the final plan was presented to the Tank Supply Committee, which approved the production of a prototype on 19 June 1916.
[edit] Description
The drawings have partially survived, and show a vehicle 8.36 metres long and about three metres tall and wide, not that much larger overall than the Mark I; the huge increase in weight came from the enormously thick (for the time) armour (three inches at the front, two inches on the sides). The hull roof consisted of a horizontal half-cylinder, apparently also with a uniform armour-thickness of two inches. The front was a vertical half-cylinder, the transition between the two being a half-dome.
Most sources claim that the main armament, a nose-mounted cannon, was a standard fifty-seven-millimetre six-pounder gun. However, John Glanfield, in his history The Devil's Chariots, states that it was a seventy-five-millimetre, or twelve/thirteen-pounder gun. This certainly makes more sense, especially as it seems odd for such a heavy machine to have had half the main armament of conventional vehicles, and in view of the fact that the preliminary design, of which the blueprints survive in the Albert Stern archive at King's College London, featured two six-pounders in sponsons either side of a bulbous nose equipped with no fewer than five machine guns. Each side had two machine-gun positions on the flanks, with two more at the rear (the original Foster's drawings make this quite clear; the reproduction of the drawings in David Fletcher's book British Tanks 1915–19 is, for some reason, cropped in such a way as to make the rear guns ambiguous in nature). Originally, the shell-proof tank was referred to simply as the Heavy Tank, then Foster's Battle Tank. Where the nickname 'Flying Elephant' came from no-one knows for sure, though doubtless it was merely the result of the trunk-like nose gun, domed front, and enormous bulk combining with a certain traditional British lightheartedness.
The caterpillar tracks resembled those of the Mark I, but were flatter and sixty-one centimetres wide. The weight was estimated at roughly a hundred tons; as this might well cause the vehicle to get stuck in somewhat softer ground, the underside was equipped with two additional narrower tracks. All four tracks could be simultaneously driven, the inner tracks being connected to the main units via dog clutches, by two Daimler 105 horsepower (seventy-eight kilowatt) engines, positioned at the centre-line. Each engine had its primary gearbox, both of which drove into one single differential; this differential again powered two secondary gearboxes, one for each main track. This differs from the solution chosen for the later Whippet, to let each engine drive its own track.
[edit] Results
It is certain that actual construction was started at some point, but that it did not result in a completed prototype. Albert Gerald Stern, then head of the Tank Supply Department, wrote that the War Office ordered the end of the project late in 1916, because it deemed mobility more important than protection. Historian David Fletcher speculated that the project ran into trouble because the vehicle was grossly underpowered; top speed was estimated at two miles-per-hour, and it seems unlikely that it could have worked itself free when stuck in mud. The mere fact that the Mark I series turned out to be a success removed one of Tritton's main motives for building the heavier tank. However, John Glanfield writes that Tritton, in an effort to lighten the machine and make it more practicable, halved the thickness of the armour, reducing the overall weight to a still hefty 50-60 tons. Its appearance would have remained unchanged. Furthermore, the role of the Flying Elephant was changed from a rather vague 'attack' role to that of a 'tank-buster' when it was feared that the Germans were developing their own AFVs. Apparently, Stern planned to build twenty of the machines, before the project was cancelled for the tactical reasons given above.
| World War I tanks |
| British tanks |
| Mark I - Mark V series - Mark VIII - Mark IX Medium Mk A Whippet - Medium Mark B - Medium Mark C |
| French tanks |
| Renault FT-17 - St. Chamond - Schneider CA1 - Char 2C |
| German tanks |
| A7V |
| Experimental designs |
| Flying Elephant - Tsar Tank - Mark VI - Mark VII - K-Wagen - Holt Gas-Electric Tank - Steam Tank (Tracked) |
