The tank was a weapon that made its debut in the Great War, but it was the one of the defining technologies of the Second World War, enabling the German Blitzkrieg, preventing the re-emergence of trench warfare and significantly changing the scale over which battles were fought. As the title suggests, Robert Kershaw’s excellent book deals both with the machines, with all their quirks and shortcomings, and with the men (and in the Red Army, women) who lived in them, fought them and often died in them. It’s this focus on the human dimension which makes this such an enjoyable and impressive book.

It kicks off with the genesis of tank warfare in the latter stages of the Great War, and the impact of these unreliable monsters on the battlefields of France – they were credited with enabling British victory at Cambrai, which may have been an exaggeration – but even at this early stage in their existence, many key characteristics of the tank were set: confusion about the best way to use them in battle, a tendency for tank designers to ignore the needs and comfort of the crew, and the terrible toll that they could take on those crews. In the inter-war years British tank design was neglected while the Germans progressed in leaps and bounds, and were the only nation with a proper vision for armoured warfare when war came, though they did not really have the tanks to back it up.

From the initial German assaults on Poland and then France, to the ‘pure’ tank warfare of the Western Desert and the gigantic tank battles of the Eastern Front, World War II was the war of the tank – seeing innovations such as amphibious tanks, flamethrowers and giant leaps in tank design generally. Anyone who picks up Tank Men thinking that some plate armour and a big gun makes a tank a relatively safe place to be in a battle will get a rude awakening – the rate of attrition, on men and machines, was frequently appalling, and as the Germans introduced their gigantic Tiger and Panther tanks, it often took 10 or more British or American tanks to overcome one German; the America Sherman had an awful reputation for catching fire, and was horrendously undergunned; the British Centurion was the first tank to have built-in tea-making facilities!

By conducting numerous interviews with surving tank men, and making excellent use of accounts from those who did not see the end of the war, Kershaw always keeps a human face on this clash of machines, covering topics like combat fatigue and mental exhaustion in tank crews in great detail. His own background in the military means he really knows what he’s talking about, and Tank Men is an impressive and accessible piece of popular history which comes highly recommended.

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