THE NELLIE

A rabbit out of Churchill’s hat

MADE BY: BRITAIN DATE: 1939

As war in Europe was commencing again, minds naturally returned to the years of conflict just a couple of decades previous and the toil that the Great War involved. But in those intervening years technology had advanced greatly and new solutions to the challenges of that war could now be found. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill was in charge of some of these ideas, one of which was ‘White Rabbit’, a trench-digging machine that could dig ahead of a column of infantry and move the trench lines without endangering troops. Codenamed Cultivator No. 6 and later moved to the Ministry of Supply division for Naval Land Equipment (NLE), it picked up the name Nellie. Using two 12-cylinder high-speed diesel engines, the Nellie became something of a beast, unable to be carried by conventional transport into the field. For all that, though, by 1940 it was becoming clear that smaller, fast-moving tanks were making trench warfare redundant. As clever as the Nellie could have been, it didn’t really have a place in this conflict.