In November 1941, Sergeant Jake Wardrop narrowly escaped being killed when his tank was crippled in the midst of a catastrophic battle in the north African desert where the armour and artillery of Rommel’s Afrika Korps destroyed scores of other British tanks. ‘It wasn’t a very healthy position to be in’, he wrote in his diary that evening, ‘but it could have been worse; at least it wasn’t raining.’
When he came across this mordant comment in the course of his research, Mark Urban must have realised that he had struck gold. Aiming to tell the story of the second world war through the eyes of one unit, he had plumped for the 5th battalion of the Royal Tank Regiment largely because of the wealth of letters and journals written by those who served in it. But among them Wardrop’s diary stands out like a unicorn among horses. Mercurial in mood and sufficiently quick-tempered to end important arguments with his fists, the Glasgow-born Wardrop served with 5RTR from the first fumbling encounters in 1940, through north Africa, Italy, France and into Germany in 1945. Along the way, he changed from bolshie novice to seasoned sweat, but more importantly developed an emotional eloquence that makes his diary as compelling as the very best journals of the Peninsular War.
By selecting one small group, and weaving their stories into the evolution of their tanks and of military strategy, Urban has composed a narrative that presents the familiar story of the war from a genuinely fresh perspective, sometimes shocking in its rawness. Like airmen, tank crews depended utterly on their machines, at first cleverly designed, but hopelessly unreliable British products, then mass-produced American models that ran forever, but turned out to burn like barbecues, and finally highly evolved compromises of fire-power, armour and speed. Crammed into the metal heart of this dangerous, powerful weapon, the crews developed emotional bonds whose intensity provides the central theme of Urban’s book.
Wardrop wrote in 1944:
There are a crowd of us who have been in tanks since we came here, and at different times we could all have had easy jobs on transport, but not one has ever taken it. I know why I have not, and I suppose the others think the same. It is because of John and Stanley [friends who had been killed] and all the others who have gone; it is a trust we have left, and if I stopped now I would never hold my head up again.
The great tank victories across north Africa in 1942 represented the triumph of that commitment. Yet, as The Tank War makes plain, the tank crews’ shining virtue was also a military vice that threatened discipline when commanding officers failed to respect tribal loyalties — ‘fat, frightened, blusterer, no manners, or rather those of a pig’ Wardrop wrote of one unpopular CO who lost control of his men — and undermined the essential co-operation between tank commanders and infantry.
Most military histories blur the furious recriminations that erupted between different arms — infantry, armour, artillery and air power — through much of the Normandy campaign. But Urban lets his protagonists’ anger and jealousy speak as clearly as their admiration and loyalty, and thereby achieves the almost impossible feat of capturing something of the excess of emotion conjured up by the heat of battle.
There is, however, nothing partial in the book’s point of view. It is unsparing in its analysis of the performance of the tank crews themselves, and the gradual onset of battle fatigue is delineated with great care. Again Wardrop provided the words for what others clearly felt. ‘I discovered that I was having some difficulty in swallowing and in keeping a muscle in my knee from twitching’, he wrote after a shooting match with a German Tiger tank in Normandy. ‘The lads told me too that I had been sitting on top of the tank shouting “Come on you square-headed bastards!”, such is the red rage of battle.’
By the time his battalion reached Germany, a new commanding officer judged it to have lost its edge and grown ‘sticky’. Wardrop’s own moods were swinging from blind fury to black despair, and just weeks before the end of the war, the sergeant’s supremely expressive voice was silenced when under fire he mistakenly jumped from his tank and was killed.
From Urban’s vivid group portrait, it is possible to conclude that the individualised nature of the regimental system was both toxic to the efficient waging of modern war with its emphasis on joint operations, and absolutely essential in fostering the vital bonds that hold people together under fire. But there can be no question about the extraordinary resilience of the men who fought the war from inside their terrible machines.
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