Medium Mk A Whippet

Whippet Firefly of F Battalion in The Museum of the Army in Brussels (original colors)
General characteristics
Length	20ft/6.10 m
Width	8 ft 7 in/2.62 m
Height	9 ft/2.75 m
Weight	14 t
Suspension	unsprung
Speed	? km/h road 8.3 mph / 13.4 km/h off-road
Range	? km
Primary armament	4×0.303 machine
Secondary armament	none
Maximum armour	14 mm
Power plant	2×Tylor petrol 90? hp, (? kW)
Crew	3

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. A foto of a Whippet (dog). ... The metre is the basic unit of length in the International System of Units (SI: Système International dUnités). ... The word ton or tonne is derived from the Old English tunne, and ultimately from the Old French tonne, and referred originally to a large cask with a capacity of 252 wine gallons, which holds approximately 2100 pounds of water. ... A hoplite wearing a helmet, a breastplate and greaves (and nothing else). ... Gasoline, as it is known in North America, or petrol, in many Commonwealth countries (sometimes also called motor spirit) is a petroleum-derived liquid mixture consisting primarily of hydrocarbons, used as fuel in internal combustion engines. ... The horsepower (hp) is the name of several non-metric units of power. ... World War I was primarily a European conflict with many facets: immense human sacrifice, stalemate trench warfare, and the use of new, devastating weapons - tanks, aircraft, machineguns, and poison gas. ...

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 the crew was only three, 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. An armoured fighting vehicle (AFV) is a military vehicle, equipped with protection against hostile attacks and often mounted weapons. ... A Mark I tank (moving left to right). ... The Hotchkiss machine gun was the standard machine gun of the French Army during World War I. This article is a stub. ...

Production History

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

The Whippet was first produced in 1917. On 3rd 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 the 25th that same month. 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 the 31st July. He wasn't really competent to do so but, 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 the 14th December 1917. Image File history File links File links The following pages link to this file: Whippet Mk A ... Image File history File links File links The following pages link to this file: Whippet Mk A ... 1917 was a common year starting on Monday (see link for calendar). ... A Mark I tank (moving left to right). ... Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig (June 19, 1861 - January 28, 1928) was a British soldier and senior commander during World War I. He had independent wealth: his family manufactured Haig & Haig whisky. ...

Variants

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. A Mark I tank (moving left to right). ...

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. General characteristics Length 22 ft 9 in, 6. ... General characteristics Length 5 m Width 1. ...

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

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 would fight 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 (8th 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. World War I British light tank, nicknamed Whippet This image was scanned from a public domain text by the Great War Primary Documents Archive and is made available by them for any purpose provided that they are credited and a link is given to the Photos of the Great War... World War I British light tank, nicknamed Whippet This image was scanned from a public domain text by the Great War Primary Documents Archive and is made available by them for any purpose provided that they are credited and a link is given to the Photos of the Great War... 1918 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar). ... The Spring Offensive (Operation Michael) was a German offensive along the Western Front during the First World War which marked the deepest advance by any side since 1914. ... General characteristics Length 24 ft 1 in / 7. ... Battle of Amiens Conflict First World War Date 8-11 August 1918 Place East of Amiens, Picardy, France Result Major Allied victory The Battle of Amiens, which began on 8 August 1918, was the opening phase of the Allied offensive, later known as the Hundred Days, that led ultimately to...

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 Thirties, fitting 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. An Irish War of Independence memorial in Dublin The Anglo-Irish War (also known as the Irish War of Independence) was a guerilla campaign mounted against the British government in Ireland by the Irish Republican Army under the proclaimed legitimacy of the First Dáil, the extra-legal Irish parliament... Red Army flag The short forms Red Army and RKKA refer to the Workers and Peasants Red Army, (Рабоче-Крестьянская Красная Армия - Raboche-Krestyanskaya Krasnaya Armiya in Russian), the armed forces organised by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War in 1918. ...

A single vehicle was sent to South-Africa to put down labour unrest. This still survives at the Armour College in Pretoria. Others are to be seen at the Bovington Tank Museum, Aberdeen (Maryland), CFB Borden and The Museum of the Army in Brussels. The Bovington Tank Museum is the foremost collection of armoured vehicles in the United Kingdom, and with almost 300 vehicles on exhibition from 26 countries it is the most wide-ranging collection of tanks and armoured vehicles in the world. ... Aberdeen is a city located in Harford County, Maryland. ... Canadian Forces Base Borden (also CFB Borden or 16 Wing Borden) is a Canadian Forces Base located in Borden, Ontario. ... Emblem of the Brussels-Capital Region Flag of The City of Brussels Brussels (Dutch: Brussel, French: Bruxelles, German: Brüssel) is the capital of Belgium and is considered by many to be the headquarters of the European Union, as two of its four main institutions have their headquarters in the...

External links

• http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWwhippet.htm
• http://www.tankmuseum.co.uk/colww1.html

See also