OT: Book Review "Tank"

[Cuchulainn]

This in today's papers:

TANK: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine

by Patrick Wright

Faber £20 pp499

ANDREW LYCETT

The tank is the armour of preference for Third World dictators. Often a middle-vintage Soviet T-55 with many miles on the clock, it sits impassively outside the presidential palace, watches menacingly over the main square, encircles the radio station during coups.

At all times, its steely message is clear: don't mess with me.

Inspired, no doubt, by his brilliant The Village that Died for England (about the multi-dimensional wave of protest that hit Tyneham in economically depressed Dorset after the army had taken it over for tank practice), Patrick Wright has had the promising idea of telling the tale of this totemic 20th- century war machine.

With his command of contemporary culture and his reporting skills, Wright is adept at teasing out unusual, often symbolic patterns in history.

He starts in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 - and the potent image of the single Chinese student holding up a column of battle tanks. Had the behemoth had its day? Were human sensibilities changing? As the young man's defiance was transformed into a globalised icon of the human spirit, Wright, ever alert to such ironies, notes that it was in America, not China, that the tanks refused to stop when, in April 1993, they participated in the bloody raid on the Branch Davidian cult.

Rewind to the start, 1915, when the first world war became mired by what the early tank boffin Major-General J F C Fuller called the new trinity of trench, machine gun and wire, and the Admiralty Landships Committee dusted down a science-fictionish idea (used by H G Wells, for example) and commissioned trials of an armoured vehicle with caterpillar tracks. For secrecy's sake, it was decked out as a water tanker: hence the name, which preserved odd nautical connotations.

Introduced on the western front, these lumbering Heath Robinson contraptions provoked laughter among the troops - a gallows humour that betrayed fear at their diabolical hideousness. But they proved their military worth and, after eyewitness correspondents and war artists had provided a propagandist gloss, tanks were paraded through Britain's towns, raising money for the war effort through the National War Savings Committees Tank Bank. Their success was celebrated in popular song, their menace etched in cubist art.

Soon the tank was ubiquitous, not just in savage little wars in Ireland or Iraq, but as a weapon of social control at home. In 1919 it rolled through the streets of Glasgow (whose citizens had only recently contributed to the Tank Bank) to face off striking workers. "It is infinitely more humane to appal a rioter or a savage by showing him a tank than to shoot him down with an inoffensive-looking machine-gun," wrote Tank Corps intelligence officer Clough Williams-Ellis, better known later as the architect of Portmeirion.

Even so, the British army was unclear about the weapon's future. Would it provide support for existing cavalry or infantry? Or was there a case for an independent or even wholly mechanised motorised force? Some of the brass hats adopted the former position, regarding tanks as a temporary expedient to deal with trench warfare. But the cause of science had a powerful advocate in Fuller who, even when dismissed as too eccentric within the defence establishment, exerted a decisive influence as a military journalist, particularly after finding an eager disciple in Captain Basil Liddell Hart.

Fuller promoted mechanisation with the enthusiasm of a religious crusade, for, as Wright skilfully shows, his ideas had as much to do with magic as science. As a young lieutenant in India, Fuller became an acolyte of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His call for a radical new military order owed what Wright calls its cranky dialectics to Crowley's satanism, though he himself claimed he had switched from destructive to constructive iconoclasm. Fuller's distaste for the Establishment extended to his politics: a supporter of Oswald Mosley, he would almost certainly have become Fascist minister of defence. No wonder Whitehall kept him at arm's length.

In the second world war armoured brigades operated much as Fuller anticipated. They dominated the German blitzkrieg of France, the see-saw desert campaign in north Africa, the Panzer drive into Russia and the remarkable battle at Kursk in July 1943 when the Nazis failed to hold the line against a Soviet force estimated at 3,275 tanks. Wright tells these stories well, not forgetting the experiences of ordinary people (both soldiers and civilians) who came into contact with this lethal weapon.

But his true interest lies in the sideshows, whether it be psychologist Wilhelm Reich's rants about the links between the mechanisation of warfare and of the human psyche, or the tale of the Polish cavalrymen who charged invading German tanks in 1939 - a myth of bravery invoked by Margaret Thatcher but, as Wright found, played down by Poles who regard it as a patronising slur on their stupidity and backwardness. (Their otherwise favoured countryman Andrzej Wajda's 1959 film, Lotna, which portrayed this figment, is viewed as a crude communist calumny on the Polish officer class).

In the modern world, Wright ranges over the importance of the tank in Israel's defences, the problem of the conversion of munitions factories in eastern Europe, and robotic warfare as seen in post-Desert Storm America. He finds plenty to interest him, from an examination of the biblical-cum-Zionist concept of the iron wall, through official disapproval of a pink tank displayed in Prague as late as 1991, to the American military's acknowledgment of the inhumanity of virtual war.

Wright's achievement is to present the tank from so many perspectives - from arms manufacturers to radical artists. If I preferred The Village that Died for England, it is because his style seems better suited to the historical quirks of rural England than the horrors on far-flung battlefields.

Symbolically, the tank is too inanimate, too destructive, for his creativity. This makes for a certain ambivalence. His general stance is that tanks are evil but, occasionally, as in Israel, he cannot help marvelling at their macho glory.

Futuristically, Wright tells of a tiny sensor-bearing robot that attaches itself to a tank and, like an insect, eats through the operating systems. Recalling the motorised metallic boxes of 1915, he notes that thinking on tanks remains fixated by period fantasy. Though neither frantic nor fantasy, Wright's intelligent scepticism is certainly of its period. We appreciate the tank, we worry about its power, we try to understand it, all the while maintaining an ironic distance. Meanwhile, our consumer society tames it in the latest sports utility vehicle.

Websites: www.achtungpanzer.com

Lots of information on the most fearsome of all the second world war tanks

Books:

An Intimate History of Killing by Joanna Bourke (Granta £9.99)

How soldiers deal with death

[This message has been edited by Cuchulainn (edited 10-08-2000).]