Off to Tankfest, at The Tank Museum, Bovington. The last time I visited
was back in 2019. I would have gone in 2020, but COVID got in the way.
Can you hide from COVID in a tank? Yes! Modern tanks can be hermetically
sealed against atomic, biological, and chemical attack. But the sight of a
bunch of buttoned-up tanks wheeling around in a field with an audience of
no-one would have been too depressing for words, so Tankfest didn't happen in
2020. Or 2021.
It came back in 2022, but there was a rail strike. This is what it was like in
2019:
Tankfest 2019
Tankfest 2023 was fun as well, and also swelteringly hot. I ended up with
sunburned hands and heatstroke. I started to hallucinate! But I'm okay now.
The effects of the heatstroke have worn off. You know what was on the tip of
my tongue? Give Me Liberty, the Frank Miller graphic novel from the
1990s. I just couldn't remember it, what with all the butterfly jam seizing me
up. Give Me Liberty. It was the other thing Frank Miller did back then,
along with Hard Boiled. No-one remembers them nowadays. I can barely
remember them.
Why was I thinking about Give Me Liberty? Because Glastonbury was
happening at the same time, and Blondie were playing Glastonbury. There was no
connection. Tankfest.
Tankfest probably isn't very good for the environment. But how better to raise
awareness of the problems facing the natural world than by driving a bunch of
tanks around a field for the amusement of paying customers. There are few
things more symbolic of humanity's destruction of nature than the tank. I like
to think that I came away with a renewed respect for butterflies. So that's
okay then.
The other criticism levelled at Tankfest, and events like it, is that it's
wish fulfilment for middle-aged white men. But that's not true either, because
some of the earliest tanks were actually women. They fought alongside the male
tanks. And of course Tank Girl was a woman.
And, yes, tanks are tools of imperialism. But the armies of Soviet Russia and
North Vietnam used tanks to overthrow imperialism. The armed forces of
Fidel Castro's Cuba used tanks to repulse US-supported Cuban
counter-revolutionaries during the Bay of Pigs invasion. You can't get more
anti-imperialist than that. Once again I checkmate you, voices in my head.
Back in 2019 tanks were stupid, at least according to the comments on
LiveLeak. Back then the big war was Syria, which was not a great advert for
the tank. The Syrian army had thousands of tanks but a chronic shortage of
personnel, so al-Assad's commanders often sent tank platoons into battle
without infantry support, with the result that Syria lost hundreds of tanks
to ambushes.
Rebel groups were encouraged by the CIA to record their tank kills in order
to demonstrate that they were actually using their new weapons, so all of a
sudden LiveLeak filled up with clips of Syrian tanks blowing up in full HD.
al-Assad has managed to remain in power - he even outlasted LiveLeak - but
the cost was enormous and Syria is still a wreck.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were captured with digital video, but the
conflict in Syria as the first full-HD war. The first GoPro war. The first
time you could see a soldier being shot dead at point-blank range in HD.
Syria also sparked off a golden age for media studies students. If you are
doing a degree in media studies right now your life is easy. You can waffle
on about the impact of image quality on the public perception of warfare,
with examples from Peter Jackson's
They Shall Not Grow Old, plus some clips from Ukraine. It's easy.
Even I could do it.
Students, I envy you. I attended Tankfest on Friday. The programme began
with a history lesson about the back-and-forth between tanks and anti-tank
weapons. The first tanks were invulnerable to anything less than artillery
fire:
But by the end of the war the Germans had developed anti-tank rifles, and in
the interwar years dedicated anti-tank guns were brought into service,
notably the British 40mm 2pdr of the 1930s:
Look at its tiny little barrel. Look at its tiny little pointy muzzle. And
yet its projectile could smash through almost 50mm of armour at
a thousand yards, more than enough to rip a hole through an early-war tank:
A replica German Panzer I
A British Vickers Light Tank
As the war progressed a new breed of heavier, tougher tanks necessitated
even-heavier anti-tank guns, culminating in a generation of 80-100mm
anti-tank guns that were the size of field artillery. The German 8.8cm
Flak 36 was extremely effective in the open terrain of North Africa,
although its size and weight meant that it was more useful on the defence
than the attack.
At that point the infantry anti-tank gun more or less died off. The guns
became too big and heavy to transport across the battlefield, so it made
more sense to put them in tanks instead. But there was another approach.
Guns use kinetic energy to defeat armour. They fire a dense projectile at high velocity, which requires a strong breech that can contain the blast of
the charge, and a long barrel that gives the propellant time to burn. That's
why high-velocity anti-tank guns are so huge.
The other approach was developed in the 1930s, although it took a while to
catch on. If a blob of plastic explosive is shaped in a certain way and
coated in copper, the resulting explosion melts the copper and accelerates
it into a narrow, high-speed jet of molten metal that can punch a hole
through armour plate, burning and destroying everything inside the tank.
Instead of using a bag of explosive to fire a solid shot at high velocity,
shaped charge warheads fire themselves; the warheads can be launched from a simple shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or even thrown by hand,
without losing any of their effect.
As of this writing the most advanced anti-tank infantry weapons are
computerised rockets that can guide themselves to an enemy tank and detonate
just above it, sending a jet of molten metal through the tank's weakest
armour. The army of Ukraine is almost the inverse of Syria, with plenty of
soldiers but relatively few tanks, and yet Ukraine's mixture of modern
anti-tank rockets and drone spotters has frustrated Russia's tank armies for
over a year.
Between the wars the Germans weren't allowed to have tanks. That didn't
stop them from training their soldiers in tank warfare, even if it meant
using mock-ups of armoured vehicles built on the chassis of cars.
Every time it looks as though the tank is kaput, it makes a
comeback. If the rusty wire that held the cork that kept the anger in during
the Cold War had given way, the war would have been fought on German soil
with tanks, as in Team Yankee and Red Army and
Chieftains and several other Cold War thrillers.
But at the same time it seemed as if nuclear weapons had made land
warfare systems obsolete, and the plethora of small wars that erupted
throughout the second half of the twentieth century didn't lend themselves
to tanks. During the Cold War Britain, France, the United States, and Soviet
Russia all found themselves fighting wars in which their overwhelming
armoured superiority did them no good, because the enemy was not stupid
enough to stand out in the open.
And tanks were often politically unacceptable. In February 1967 the
Metropolitan Police attracted widespread censure when they used a force of
Centurion AVREs to perform a drugs bust on the home of Keith Richards of the
Rolling Stones. In the ensuing conflagration Richards, Donovan, Eric
Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, and Anita Pallenberg were all killed, with
Richards' bandmate Mick Jagger only survived by putting a metal... a metal
hat on his head.
A metal hat. On his head. William Rees-Mogg of The Times wrote
something about butterflies. Because there was a butterfly inside Mick
Jagger's metal hat. I'm sorry, the heatstroke has left some residual effects. If you have the right
perk you can use metal suits to repair power armour.
Tanks became cool again during the First Gulf War. Not just cool. Hot.
Red-hot:
Do you remember The Gulf War Did Not Take Place? The First Gulf War
wasn't just a war - objectively it was pretty unimpressive, over and done
with in less than a week, predating 3DFX, back when the 386 was a thing, no
texture maps - it was instead a massive spectacle, the height of the United States'
power, the dawning of a new age.
But during the peacetime dividend that followed the end of the Cold War tanks became a joke again. In
Goldeneye, the 1997 James Bond film, there's a sequence where Bond makes his escape in a
tank, demolishing a chunk of downtown St Petersburg in the process; the film
presents the tank as a force of nature, but also as a dated symbol of a
bygone age. At one point a statue becomes lodged on its roof, almost as a mockery of the Soviet Union's former power.
I'm sorry, I'm turning into a media studies student again. During the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan tanks played a relatively minor role, reduced to
being mobile roadblocks, and in 2020 there were even rumours that the
British Army was going to
scrap its entire tank force
in favour of missiles and uncrewed aerial vehicles. During the initial
stages of Russia's invasion of Ukraine the tank seemed unstoppable, but
the invaders' armoured column bogged down, and before long Reddit and whatever
replaced LiveLeak filled up with video clips of tanks being destroyed
by infantry rockets, again.
The first day culminated in an infantry battle involving one of the
stars of the 2014 film Fury (top)
And so the tank remains in limbo. But Tankfest thrives. It's a unique
opportunity to see a bunch of unusual armoured vehicles in action, in some
cases up close, although the Great War tanks pictured above (and the Panzer
I) were replicas. The event actually takes place over three days, and I missed the
late afternoon action on account of the heatstroke-induced hallucinations. I
remember asking the medical staff if Pee-Wee Herman would have continued to be popular if Paul Reubens hadn't been arrested in a porn cinema, to which they replied that Big Top Pee-Wee (1988) actually predated Reubens' arrest and was a huge flop, so the long-term prognosis for the character was not good.
A couple of things struck me. Most of the museum's armoured vehicles would
be deathtraps on a modern battlefield, so it's unlikely that Russia or
Ukraine will buy up Bovington's collection and use it. But it would be fascinating to
find out if the Swedish S-Tank was a good idea, or not.
And secondly, even after a century, there's still something... odd about
watching a re-enactment of a Great War battle, as if it was a big game. With play-acted casualties
and barbed wire and machine-gun fire. Siegfried Sasson would probably not have approved.
No, Siegfried was not related to Vidal. Yes, he lived long enough to potentially be aware of
the hairstylist. There is no proof they ever met. Who had the biggest impact on human society? Wars will be forgotten, but we will always have hair.
Or will we? Will we always have hair? The end.
Bonus Beats: Middle Wallop Wheels and Wings 2023
But that's not all, because also in 2023 I went to
Wheels and Wings 2023, at the Middle Wallop Army Aviation Centre, in
Middle Wallop, in 2023, at Middle Wallop.
Wheels and Wings is a lot simpler than TankFest. One field has a bunch of classic cars,
another field has light aircraft that fly in during the event. But they're big fields and there are lots of things to look at. I was worried it would be naff, but I was pleasantly surprised. Perhaps it's because COVID is finally fading away, and perhaps people want to take their minds off things, but it had more cars than I expected.
There was also a flypast of a Lancaster, but I missed it because I was still hallucinating
from the heatstroke. The thought of a giant bomber flying overhead
terrified me so I left.
It's odd to think of the first-generation Toyota MR2 as a classic, but I
suppose it is. The car was launched in 1984, almost forty years ago. That
makes it twice as old now as the yellow Lotus Elan pictured just above
was back then.
The MR2 was fairly popular when I was young. Here in the UK it was a common
sight on the roads, alongside the original Honda CRX. I have to assume that
a mixture of rust and snap oversteer has thinned out the numbers, because it has been an age since I saw one. They
were a popular second-hand car in the 1990s, at which point they filtered into the hands of people who really shouldn't have been driving a
mid-engined car with a short wheelbase.
As a kid I was surprised to learn that basic concept had been introduced a decade earlier, with the Fiat X1/9, which
fitted a similar niche. However the X1/9 was dogged by reliability issues and in
particular rust. It's not so much that the X1/9 was particularly rusty, it's that all cars were rusty back then, but no-one cared if their
Morris Marina fell apart because it was just cheap transport. People cared
when their X1/9 rusted because it was special.
In the 1980s Fiat gave up on the X1/9, but the concept still had legs - sporty two-seat coupes were hot in
the 1980s - so Bertone
took over, and continued to build them until 1989 or so. Back in the 1970s and early 1980s there were rumours that the US was going to ban convertibles on safety grounds, so car manufacturers stopped selling convertibles.
But there was still a market for something sporty that was cheap enough for young people, and not everybody wanted a hot hatchback, so the MR2, Pontiac Fiero, CRX, Porsche 924 etc stepped into the breach. In reality the US never banned convertibles, but it wasn't until the late 1980s that manufacturers - notably Mazda, with the MX-5 - were prepared to risk selling a convertible roadster again, but alas the X1/9 didn't live quite long enough to take advantage from this second wind.
The X1/9 has always puzzled me. It still looks good. The concept was great.
It aged well, and Fiat specifically designed it for the US market. But
people don't talk about it nowadays. The MR2 still has a following, but the
X1/9 is almost forgotten. It's a shame.
Enzo Ferrari once pointed out that if you ask a kid to draw a car, there
will no sense of composition, no sense of dynamics, no purpose, no vision,
no strategy, the execution will be sloppy, inconsistent, and inefficient,
and overall the result will be a waste of ink with no redeeming qualities at
all. Why? Because kids are stupid. Their brains haven't developed
yet, they don't have any experience, they have no empathy, they have poor hand-eye co-ordination, they're just generally inferior. It's harsh, but that's the truth. Do you know how many Nobel prizes for physics have been awarded to children? None. Not a single one.
Not a single one. Enzo also pointed out that the car will be red, because children can vividly
remember the comfort of the womb and the trauma of childbirth. That's why
human beings associate the colour red with danger. Because there are few more
dangerous things than being born.
All of which explains why G-HEKL, pictured above, drew a crowd. With its low
wings and red paint it looked sleek and fast, especially sitting next to
high-winged general aviation aircraft. G-HEKL is a replica of a 1930s Percival Mew Gull
racer. With a top speed exceeding 200mph the original was hot stuff, and
there were even plans to press-gang it into service as a light fighter
during the early stages of the Second World War, although when loaded down
with guns and radio equipment and armour it would probably have been a
deathtrap.
There are some cars that attract people who don't even like cars. Is the VW
Camper van a car? It's not, is it? It's a van. Technically it's the
Volkswagen Type 2, also known as the Kombi, or the Transporter. It looks
cute, and the idea of drinking cups of tea while sitting inside it - and
resting the teacups on the formica tables - is powerfully appealing. Long
before #vanlife was a thing, the VW Camper was also a thing, but earlier. It was a thing before #vanlife was a thing.
It was an earlier thing. #vanlife is also powerfully appealing. But what if
you're sick, or old? Well, the answer is that sick people and old people
don't exist! That is why #vanlife is so appealing, which is
spelled two-one. Two-one. Appealing is spelled two-one.
