![]() ![]() It reminds us that tanks still lacked any form of radio contact, that the technology of mechanisation was running far ahead of the technology of communication. A human hand, poking out through a hole in a tank sponson, grasps a fluffy pigeon by its tail, like Noah with his dove. The most telling is captioned: ‘Method of releasing a carrier pigeon from a porthole in a Tank’. The book begins with eight photographs of British tanks from the First World War: fallen into a ditch, resisting a flame-thrower attack, lined up in rows at the Central Workshop and ready for issue, surmounting a parapet before crunching down into a redoubt. The story of the tank is inseparable from the development of highly mechanised and mobile armies, equipped with the new technologies that enabled troops to combine the means of defence with the means of attack, armour with artillery.Įrnest Swinton gave his indispensable book of memoirs, Eyewitness, the subtitle ‘Being Personal Reminiscences of Certain Phases of the Great War, Including the Genesis of the Tank’. Nonetheless, the tank was and is primarily a military object and military history remains the foundation on which the more fanciful constructions of the cultural historian can be built. Patrick Wright’s fascinating book is a cultural rather than a military history, dwelling on images and impressions of the tank, its impact on the general public, the responses of artists and writers, rather than its evolving strategic role and its transformation of the concept of the battlefield. I was even more surprised to learn that the tank was developed in the first instance not by the Army but by the Navy, which had already armoured its gunships and was open-minded about new inventions, prepared to back them even if they had no naval relevance. Armoured against both wire and gunfire, the tank could lurch across trenches and traverse roadless battlefields pitted with shell craters. It provided a much-needed response to the recent development of barbed wire, fortified trenches and rapid-fire machine-guns. ![]() The tank, I was surprised to learn, was a British invention. ![]()
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