Whippet Mk A

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Medium Mk A Whippet
Whippet Firefly of F Battalion in The Museum of the Army in Brussels (original colours)
General characteristics
Crew	3
Length	6.10 m (20 ft)
Width	2.62 m (8 ft 7 in)
Height	2.75 m (9 ft)
Weight	14 t
Armour and armament
Armour	14 mm
Main armament	4×0.303 mm machine guns
Secondary armament	none
Mobility
Power plant	2×Tylor petrol 90 hp (67 kW)
Suspension	unsprung
Road speed	8.3 mph
Power/weight	6.4 hp/tonne
Range	?

The Medium Mark A Whippet was a British tank of World War I. Intended to complement the slow Mark V tanks by using its relative mobility and speed in exploiting any break in the enemy lines.

1 Description
2 Production history
- 2.1 Variants
3 Combat history
4 External links

[edit] Description

This armoured fighting vehicle was intended for fast mobile assaults. Although the track design looks more "modern" than the British Tanks Mark I to V, it was directly derived from Little Willie, the first tank prototype and was unsprung. The crew compartment was a fixed square turret at the rear of the vehicle with two engines (ex double-decker bus) in a forward compartment. The engines drove one track each. In straight forward the two engines were locked. To make a turn the driver operated the steering wheel; this braked one track and opened the throttle for the engine driving the other. Although in theory a simple solution to give gradual steering, in practice it proved impossible to control the speeds of each engine causing the vehicle to take an unpredictable path. After they had flattened their first friendly private, drivers understandably grew very wary and stopped the vehicle for every turn, locking one track which led to many thrown ones. The engines were also prone to stalling if the steering wheel was turned too abruptly. The fuel tank was in the front of the hull. Armament was four Hotchkiss .303 machine guns, one covering each direction. As there were only three crewmen, the gunner had to jump around a lot, though often assisted by the commander. Sometimes a second gunner was crammed in and often a machinegun was left behind to give more room; as they were removable, in principle you could cover all around with one gun by moving it between the respective mountings.

[edit] Production history

The Whippet was first produced in 1917. On 3 October 1916 William Tritton, about to be knighted for developing the Mark I, proposed to the Tank Supply Department to build a faster and cheaper tank to exploit gaps that the heavier but slow tanks could make. This was accepted on 10 November and approved by the War Office on 25 November. At that time the name for the project was the Tritton Chaser. Traditionally the name Whippet is attributed to Sir William himself. Actual construction started on 21 December. The first prototype, with a revolving turret taken from an Austin armoured car, was ready on 3 February 1917 and participated (probably without one) in the famous "tank trials day" at Oldbury on 3 March. The very next day, in a meeting with the French to coordinate allied tank production, the Commander-in-Chief of the British forces Field Marshall Haig ordered the manufacture of 200 vehicles, the first to be ready on 31 July. Although he was acting beyond his authority, as usual, his decisions were confirmed. The first production exemplars left the factory in October and two were delivered to the first unit to use them, F Battalion (later 6th TB), on 14 December 1917.

[edit] Variants

Back of the Whippet in The Museum of the Army in Brussels; this tank, A347 of B-company, was hit on 17 August 1918

Major Philip Johnson, the unofficial head of Central Tank Corps Workshops in France, as soon as he received them began fitting one of the Whippets with leaf springs. Later, in 1918, he fitted this vehicle with sprung track rollers, the epicyclical transmission from the Mark V and a 360 hp Rolls-Royce Eagle V12 engine. A top speed of about 30 mph was reached . This project made Johnson the best qualified man to develop the fast Medium Mark D, which looks like a reversed Medium A.

For a time it was assumed that after the war some Whippets were rebuilt as armoured recovery vehicles, but this was not the case. The Medium Mark B, a completely different design by Wilson, also had the name "Whippet". For a time it was common to describe any of the lighter tank designs as a Whippet, even the French FT-17. It had become a generic name.

The Leichter Kampfwagen (light fighting vehicle) was based on a captured Whippet, though it was extensively modified and resulted in smaller, thinner armoured vehicle.

[edit] Combat history

Whippet of 3rd Tank Battalion on 28 March 1918

Whippets arrived late in the First World war at a time the whole British Army, crippled by the losses in Flanders, was quite inactive. They saw their first action in March 1918 when they proved very useful to cover the flight of the infantry divisions recoiling from the German onslaught during the Spring Offensive. Whippets were then assigned to the normal Tank Battalions as extra "X-companies" as an expedience. In one incident near Cachy, a single Whippet company of seven wiped out two entire German infantry battalions caught in the open, killing over 400. That same day, 24 April, one Whippet was destroyed by an A7V in the world's second tank battle, the only time a Whippet fought an enemy tank. British losses were so high however that plans to equip five Tank Battalions (Light) with 36 Whippets each had to be abandoned. In the end only 3rd Tank Brigade had Whippets, 48 in each of its two battalions (3rd and 6th TB). Alongside Mark IV and V tanks, they took part in the Amiens offensive (8 August 1918) which was described by the German supreme commander General Ludendorff, as "the Black Day of the German Army". The Whippets broke through into the German rear areas causing the loss of the artillery in an entire front sector, a devastating blow from which the Germans were unable to recover.

After the war Whippets were sent to Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War as part of the British forces there. Seventeen were sent with the Expedition Forces against the Soviet Union. The Red Army captured twelve, using them until the 1930s, and fitted at least one vehicle with a French 37 mm Puteaux gun. The Soviets, incorrectly assuming that the name of the engine was "Taylor" instead of "Tylor" (a mistake many sources still make) called the tank the Tyeilor. A few (perhaps six) were exported to Japan.

A single vehicle was sent to South Africa to put down labour unrest. This still survives at the Armour College in Pretoria. Others can be seen at the Bovington Tank Museum, Aberdeen (Maryland), CFB Borden and The Museum of the Army in Brussels.