John Peabody

“Churchill also deserves credit for pioneering the battle tank in World War I. When the British army failed to take up design plans for the project, Churchill overstepped the bounds of the navy to form the Landship Committee in February 1915 to develop an armored vehicle for the war. Engineers worked in secret. In typical English fashion, even men providing security for the plant didn’t know what the project was and were told that the materials arriving were for the construction of water tanks. “Tank” became a code name for the operation, then was adopted as the name of the armored vehicle itself. Churchill, always convinced of the superiority of Diesel motors, tasked Mirrlees with developing a Diesel for the battle tank, though none was completed until after the war.”
― Douglas Brunt, The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I