Bullock Tractors & Elephant Feet

A Bullock tractor looms up in front of the cameraman during tests at Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire in June 1915.

The Bullock, or Creeping Grip Tractor, was an American tractor that, like most tractors, had small wheels at the front, and unlike most tractors, had tracks, as opposed to large wheels, at the back.

Much like this.

And by the summer of 1915 tracks were very much at the forefront of the minds of the boffins entrusted with the task of finding a way of crossing those damned trenches that now stretched from the Channel coast to the Swiss border, and thus winning the war.

The solution, perhaps, when you have a blank canvas to work on, might be ‘elephant feet’, wooden poles that would extend to the bottom of the trench, allowing the tracks above to glide effortlessly across the top of the trench.

As is the nature of experiments, however, what looks the ideal solution on the drawing board might not necessarily work as planned in practice.

By August 1915, when these pictures were taken, experiments with tracks were well under way, although you didn’t need them sagging, as in this picture,…

…and they did have a tendency to take the odd plunge into a trench,…

…for which an early solution…

…might be to attach a metal frame, fitted with ‘elephant feet’, to your Bullock tractor…

…as seen in these photos, and those that follow.

Or it might not be,…

…this shot showing the whole apparatus being towed out of trouble (note the towing chain), the ‘elephant feet’ having failed miserably to extract the tractor.

Another experiment involved coupling two Bullock tractors together, back-to-back,…

…creating this articulated machine, seen with its wheels in the air (which probably isn’t a good thing) in a photo also taken, as are those that follow, in August 1915.

If this was an attempt to give the tractor enough power to get itself out of trouble, I’m not entirely sure how much of an improvement it was over the ‘elephant feet’,…

…when it came to crossing trenches, by the looks of these photos.

Nonetheless, despite the failure of these concepts, the point is they might have worked, and it was the efforts of the men who thought up these ideas, and the men who then painstakingly tested them, that led, just over a year later, in September 1916, to the first British tanks rumbling up the road towards the German trenches surrounding Flers.  But there was plenty more experimentation to be done before then, and we’ll have a further look at some prototype tracked vehicles in a future post.