Portal:World War I/Selected equipment/3
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The Tank was one of the most significant innovations of the First World War. The fighting conditions on the Western Front during the war prompted the British Army to begin research into a self-propelled vehicle which could cross trenches, crush barbed wire, and would be impervious to fire from machine-guns. Having already seen a Rolls-Royce Armoured Car used by Royal Naval Air Service in 1914, and aware of schemes prompted by Major Ernest Swinton to create a tracked fighting vehicle, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill sponsored the Landships Committee to oversee development of this new weapon. The Landships Committee created the first successful prototype tank, nicknamed Little Willie, which was tested by the British Army in September 1915. Although initially termed landships by the Admiralty, the initial vehicles were colloquially referred to as water carriers, later shortened to tanks, to preserve secrecy. The word tank was used to give the workers the impression they were constructing tracked water containers for the British army in Mesopotamia, and the name became official in December 1915.
