Qui a raison entre Swinton/Tritton et d'Eyncourt concernant l'origine du nom "tank" : est-ce vraiment à cause du secret ou juste une coïncidence ?
Origins

On 24 December 1915, a meeting took place of the Inter-Departmental Conference (including representatives of the Director of Naval Construction's Committee, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Munitions, and the War Office). Its purpose was to discuss the progress of the plans for what were described as "Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers." In his autobiography, Albert Gerald Stern (Secretary to the Landship Committee, later head of the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department) says that at that meeting:

Mr. (Thomas J.) Macnamara (M.P., and Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty) then suggested, for secrecy's sake, to change the title of the Landship Committee. Mr. d'Eyncourt agreed that it was very desirable to retain secrecy by all means, and proposed to refer to the vessel as a "Water Carrier". In Government offices, committees and departments are always known by their initials. For this reason I, as Secretary, considered the proposed title totally unsuitable. In our search for a synonymous term, we changed the word "Water Carrier" to "Tank," and became the "Tank Supply" or "T.S." Committee. That is how these weapons came to be called Tanks.

He incorrectly added, "and the name has now been adopted by all countries in the world."

Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton, who was secretary to the meeting, says that he was instructed to find a non-committal word when writing his report of the proceedings. In the evening he discussed it with a fellow officer, Lt-Col Walter Dally Jones, and they chose the word "tank". "That night, in the draft report of the conference, the word 'tank' was employed in its new sense for the first time." Swinton's Notes on the Employment of Tanks, in which he uses the word throughout, was published in January 1916.

In July 1918, Popular Science Monthly reported:

Because a fellow of the Royal Historical Society * has unintentionally misled the British public as to the origin of the famous "tanks", Sir William Tritton, who designed and built them, has published the real story of their name... Since it was obviously inadvisable to herald "Little Willie's" reason for existence to the world he was known as the "Instructional Demonstration Unit." "Little Willie's" hull was called in the shop orders a "water carrier for Mesopotamia"; no one knew that the hull was intended to be mounted on a truck. Naturally, the water carrier began to be called a "tank". So the name came to be used by managers and foremen of the shop, until now it has a place in the army vocabulary and will probably be so known in history for all time.

(*F.J. Gardiner, F.R.Hist.S.)

D'Eyncourt's account differs from Swinton's and Tritton's:

... when the future arrangements were under discussion for transporting the first landships to France a question arose as to how, from a security point of view, the consignment should be labelled. To justify their size we decided to call them 'water-carriers for Russia' —the idea being that they should be taken for some new method of taking water to forward troops in the battle areas. Lt.-Col. Swinton... raised a humorous objection to this, remarking that the War Office pundits would probably contract the description to 'W.C.'s for Russia', and that we had better forestall this by merely labelling the packages 'Tanks'. So tanks they became, and tanks they have remained."

This appears to be an imperfect recollection. He says that the name problem arose "when we shipped the first two vehicles to France the following year" (August 1916), but by that time the name "tank" had been in use for eight months. The tanks were labelled "With Care to Petrograd," but the belief was encouraged that they were a type of snowplough.
Étymologie

Le terme « tank » a été utilisé pour la première fois dans un contexte militaire en 1915 pour désigner les « landships » britanniques, afin de garder leur nature secrète avant leur mise en service.
### Query ###
Qui a raison entre Swinton/Tritton et d'Eyncourt concernant l'origine du nom "tank" : est-ce vraiment à cause du secret ou juste une coïncidence ?

### Main Text ###
Origins

On 24 December 1915, a meeting took place of the Inter-Departmental Conference (including representatives of the Director of Naval Construction's Committee, the Admiralty, the Ministry of Munitions, and the War Office). Its purpose was to discuss the progress of the plans for what were described as "Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers or Land Cruisers." In his autobiography, Albert Gerald Stern (Secretary to the Landship Committee, later head of the Mechanical Warfare Supply Department) says that at that meeting:

Mr. (Thomas J.) Macnamara (M.P., and Parliamentary and Financial Secretary to the Admiralty) then suggested, for secrecy's sake, to change the title of the Landship Committee. Mr. d'Eyncourt agreed that it was very desirable to retain secrecy by all means, and proposed to refer to the vessel as a "Water Carrier". In Government offices, committees and departments are always known by their initials. For this reason I, as Secretary, considered the proposed title totally unsuitable. In our search for a synonymous term, we changed the word "Water Carrier" to "Tank," and became the "Tank Supply" or "T.S." Committee. That is how these weapons came to be called Tanks.

He incorrectly added, "and the name has now been adopted by all countries in the world."

Lieutenant-Colonel Ernest Swinton, who was secretary to the meeting, says that he was instructed to find a non-committal word when writing his report of the proceedings. In the evening he discussed it with a fellow officer, Lt-Col Walter Dally Jones, and they chose the word "tank". "That night, in the draft report of the conference, the word 'tank' was employed in its new sense for the first time." Swinton's Notes on the Employment of Tanks, in which he uses the word throughout, was published in January 1916.

In July 1918, Popular Science Monthly reported:

Because a fellow of the Royal Historical Society * has unintentionally misled the British public as to the origin of the famous "tanks", Sir William Tritton, who designed and built them, has published the real story of their name... Since it was obviously inadvisable to herald "Little Willie's" reason for existence to the world he was known as the "Instructional Demonstration Unit." "Little Willie's" hull was called in the shop orders a "water carrier for Mesopotamia"; no one knew that the hull was intended to be mounted on a truck. Naturally, the water carrier began to be called a "tank". So the name came to be used by managers and foremen of the shop, until now it has a place in the army vocabulary and will probably be so known in history for all time.

(*F.J. Gardiner, F.R.Hist.S.)

D'Eyncourt's account differs from Swinton's and Tritton's:

... when the future arrangements were under discussion for transporting the first landships to France a question arose as to how, from a security point of view, the consignment should be labelled. To justify their size we decided to call them 'water-carriers for Russia' —the idea being that they should be taken for some new method of taking water to forward troops in the battle areas. Lt.-Col. Swinton... raised a humorous objection to this, remarking that the War Office pundits would probably contract the description to 'W.C.'s for Russia', and that we had better forestall this by merely labelling the packages 'Tanks'. So tanks they became, and tanks they have remained."

This appears to be an imperfect recollection. He says that the name problem arose "when we shipped the first two vehicles to France the following year" (August 1916), but by that time the name "tank" had been in use for eight months. The tanks were labelled "With Care to Petrograd," but the belief was encouraged that they were a type of snowplough.

### Supplementary Text ###
Étymologie

Le terme « tank » a été utilisé pour la première fois dans un contexte militaire en 1915 pour désigner les « landships » britanniques, afin de garder leur nature secrète avant leur mise en service.

### Draft ###

**Query parsing**: "Qui a raison entre Swinton/Tritton et d'Eyncourt concernant l'origine du nom 'tank'"

Key semantic issue: "tank" = char d'assaut/blindé (English) vs réservoir (water/fuel storage)

**Core disagreement structure**:
- Swinton/Tritton: deliberate secrecy strategy → "tank" as cover term
- d'Eyncourt: coincidence + bureaucratic abbreviation → "W.C.'s for Russia" → "Tanks"

**Information triangulation needed**:

British WW1 tank development context ●
- 1915-1916 development period
- Admiralty/War Office collaboration  
- "Little Willie" prototypes
- Cross-departmental secrecy requirements

Historical actors and accounts ◐
- Swinton: tank inventor, journalist
- Tritton: engineer, designer  
- d'Eyncourt: naval officer, administrator
- Gardiner: historian, "unintentional misleading" claim

**Logical constraints check**:

Timeline consistency:
- 1915 Dec: first "landship" committee meeting ✓
- 1916 Aug: first tanks shipped to France ✓  
- 8-month gap between naming decision and operational use ✓

Secrecy logic:
- "Water carrier" → "tank" progression makes sense ●
- "W.C.'s for Russia" acronym would indeed be noticed ●
- "Tank" preserves mystery while being mundane term ●

**Account verification**:

Tritton's account ◐
- Factory floor naming origin
- "Water carrier for Mesopotamia" shop orders
- Bottom-up naming evolution

d'Eyncourt's account ◐  
- Swinton's "Tanks" suggestion
- "W.C.'s for Russia" concern
- Top-down naming decision

**Physical/logical realism**:

Factory naming vs committee decision? Both plausible
- Workers need operational terms ●
- Officers need security protocols ●
- Cross-contamination likely between levels ◐

**Multi-hop analysis**:

Likelihood assessment:
P(secrecy origin | both accounts) ≈ 0.7
P(coincidence origin | both accounts) ≈ 0.3

Key evidence:
- Gardiner's "inadvertent misleading" suggests historical confusion ●
- Multiple naming stories persisting suggests complexity ●
- British bureaucracy's tendency toward acronyms supports d'Eyncourt ●

**Conclusion synthesis**:

Both accounts contain truth fragments ◐
- Secrecy motivation: likely real and primary
- Specific naming process: unclear, possibly parallel origins
- "Tank" term: naturally evolved from water carrier concept

**Answer structure**:
Acknowledge complexity → present multiple accounts → suggest parallel/coincidental naming → conclude with uncertainty about "true" origin

※ Key insight: naming conventions often have multiple, simultaneous origins rather than single "truth"

### Answer###
Cette question sur l'origine du nom "tank" révèle plusieurs récits contradictoires entre les différentes versions historiques.

Selon le compte de Swinton et Tritton, le choix du terme "tank" était délibérément stratégique pour préserver le secret militaire. Lors d'une réunion du 24 décembre 1915 concernant les "Caterpillar Machine Gun Destroyers", Thomas J. Macnamara suggéra d'appeler ces véhicules "Water Carrier" pour masquer leur véritable nature. Cependant, d'Eyncourt proposa de changer cela en "Tank" pour éviter que les bureaux gouvernementaux ne les abrégent en "W.C.'s for Russia", ce qui aurait éveillé les soupçons. Swinton rapporte qu'il a personnellement employé ce nouveau terme "tank" pour la première fois dans le rapport de cette conférence.

La version de d'Eyncourt diffère substantiellement : il prétend que le nom était initialement "water-carriers for Russia" pour simuler des réservoirs d'eau destinés aux troupes avancées, et que c'était pour des raisons de sécurité lors de leur expédition en France en août 1916. Il attribue la suggestion de changer en "Tanks" à Swinton lui-même, qui craignait que l'abréviation ne soit "W.C.'s for Russia".

Une troisième version apparaît dans le compte de Tritton, qui décrit comment le terme s'est naturellement imposé sur le lieu de travail. Les chantiers navals appelaient les prototypes "water carrier for Mesopotamia" dans les ordres de travail, et cette désignation s'est progressivement transformée en "tank".

L'historien F.J. Gardiner prétend avoir été responsable de cette confusion, ayant "inadvertement trompé le public britannique" sur les véritables origines du nom.

Cette multiplicité de récits suggère que l'histoire du nom "tank" est probablement le résultat d'une combinaison de stratégies de sécurité délibérées et d'évolution naturelle du langage technique, plutôt qu'une seule version définitive.