Saturday 1 July 2023

Tankfest 2023 + Wallop Wheels and Wings


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.