A tanker's lot:

[sl8]

Last edited Tue Oct 11, 2022, 06:54 PM - Edit history (1)

Buried among the admirably detailed archives of The Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset, is this account of a ferocious pitched battle, from the point of view of a tank commander – in this case, a British Lieutenant named Ken Giles:

“The 75mm main gun is firing,” Lt Giles recalls, breathlessly. “The 37mm secondary gun is firing, but it’s traversed round the wrong way. The Browning [machine gun] is jammed. I am saying, ‘Driver advance’ on the A set, but the driver – who can’t hear me – is reversing.

“And as I look over the top of the turret, and see 12 enemy tanks, just 50 yards away, someone hands me a cheese sandwich.”

But, while this story might seem funny to a civilian, it sums up what, for many tank commanders today, is the very recognisable chaos of tank warfare.

This particular cheddar-based incident occurred in an M3 Grant tank in North Africa, during the build-up to the Second Battle of El Alamein in the Second World War. But, as the Tank Museum’s curator David Willey points out, the same bedlam could have happened at any time in the past century.

“Our museum has chronicled stories from the eight-men crews in the first tanks in World War One,” says Willey, “as well as accounts from tank crews in the Second World War, the Cold War and even modern battlefronts like Iraq and Afghanistan. Mix them up and you wouldn’t know which era they came from.”

[...]

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11167575/Fury-all-you-need-to-know-about-life-in-a-tank.html
Fury: all you need to know about life in a tank

[Aristus]

1. "Fury" was an ugly little film. Even as a die-hard tanker, I couldn't bear to watch it more than

twice.

The one thing I think it captured well was the endless bickering that goes on among the members of a tank crew. This whole "a bond forms, stronger than that between brothers" thing is a little overstated. My tank crew in the Gulf, we couldn't stand each other. We were a good crew; we worked the tank well; but that didn't translate into personal affinity. I don't know what would have happened if we had ended up serving in combat.