Dragon Artillery Tractor

vehicle

The model was amongst a collection of objects given to IWM, by The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).

Caption for MOD 313 & MOD 238 DRAGON ARTILLERY TRACTOR MkIII towing 6in 26cwt HOWITZER and LIMBER British Inter-War After 1918, with the tank's success in overcoming bad terrain in mind, the British Army looked at tracked towing vehicles for artillery, and in 1922, the Royal Carriage Department at Woolwich Arsenal built the first Dragon. It used a suspension and track unit based on the current Vickers medium tank, could carry 10 men in addition to the driver and towed an 18pdr field gun and limber at 12 mph. This was soon replaced by the MkII with a more powerful engine, and then supplemented by the MkIII with gear ratios changed to permit towing medium guns of 5in and 6in calibre. However, in 1936 a policy decision was made to revert to wheeled vehicles for artillery towing, and so the Dragon was a dead-end development. This particular model was made in the Engineering Workshops of the Royal Military College of Science in the mid-1930s. Scale 1:8