More than a hint of cordite

The best personal account of tank warfare in the Western Desert is generally reckoned to be Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas. It is indeed a great book, telling in spare, sensitive, limpid prose how it feels to turn from being a young man with romantic illusions about the nobility of war into a batttle-hardened tank veteran. But because it was written by an upper-class poet there are some elements that are missing.

For example, Douglas never mentions how you can tell if a soldier on leave has been involved in a tank battle: for days afterwards, thanks to the constant inhalation of shell fumes in a confined space, he will fart the smell of cordite. Nor does he dwell overmuch on the foulness of your shirt and socks after weeks in the 100- degree heat without washing or how to cope with dysentery in the midst of an action. Nor, being a cavalry officer from a smart county yeomanry regiment rather than a grimy tankie from the Royal Tank Corps, would he ever write a sentence like, ‘There is something about a tank that becomes part of you … almost as if the engine pumped the blood through your veins.’

This is where Jock Watt’s memoir, A Tankie’s Travels excels. If you want to know what it was really like to fight in tanks in the North African campaign — the noise, the smells, the flies, the scorpions, the almost surreal horror — you will not find a better book. Raised in an idyllic fishing town in the north of Scotland, Watt  enlisted in 1937, handily in time to catch every one of Britain’s early wartime reverses. In 1940, with the BEF, he narrowly escaped from Calais.