Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine

by Patrick Wright

When the first tanks lumbered onto the battlefields of the Western Front in 1916, they created an enduring myth and tapped into deep currents in the 20th-century into ideas of unstoppable progress and of technological futurism. The tank, always more than the sum of its mechanical parts, is a social and cultural object, partly mythical, a curious compound of fact and fantasy, surrounded by legend. Going beyond military history, this book examines the tank's development as a 20th-century icon. In some ways it was a product of the artistic imagination (it was prefigured in the work of Leonardo da Vinci and H.G. Wells), and part of its effectiveness as a weapon is its mesmerizing visual impact. It has been a component of many enduring 20th-century the Blitzkrieg, the Polish cavalry charge, the Desert War, Tiananmen Square and, in Operation Desert Storm, the harbinger of a new, computer-age warfare of simulators and virtual-reality systems. The book's content encompasses discussion of the tank photo-opportunity (as used by Lenin, Margaret Thatcher and George Bush), women in tanks, and the curious case of the tank in Turkey which, by way of punishment for mechanical failure, was made to stand under guard on a hillside.

Genres: History, Military History, Nonfiction, War, Military Fiction, 20th Century, Reference

509 pages, Paperback

First published October 16, 2000

About the author

Patrick Wright FBA is a British writer, broadcaster and academic in the fields of cultural studies and cultural history. He was educated at the University of Kent and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Reviews

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I picked this book off the shelf at, I'm assuming it was Waterstones, long, long ago (yes, it's another one of those tomes that has sat there, glaring at me, for years) I was attracted to the idea of reading a "biography" of the Tank, so, when I decided (finally!) to read it I was battened down for a slightly dry read... How wrong I was!
This is a brilliant book full of serendipitous facts and humorous anecdotes, biographies of the most eccentric individuals (like Aleister Crowley and J.F.C Fuller - the Tank Warfare Messiah), military history, and the impact of the tank on modern culture. In some ways it is a to-die-for book; what shelf should it go on? Military History? Art? Popular Culture? Social History? One moment you're reading about the struggle to get the tank off the ground, the lack of understanding by the military dinosaurs as to how it should be employed and the realisation that it was the tank that won World War 1, the next you're reading about the artworks of Krzystof Wodiczko and the New York economic and social depression of the 1990s.
Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

not the greatest book but still full of interesting facts and ideas (esp. when he explains the Aleister Crowley business). Worthwhile. Really.

[Michael Burnam-Fink · Rating 3 out of 5]

ank is a rather bizarre book, a cultural history of the armored fighting vehicle in the 20th century, rather than a military or political history. It is often interesting and charming, and always scattered. Wright begins with the iconic image of "tank man" at Tiananmen Square: a single anonymous civilian facing down an armored column representing the full mass and might of an oppressive state.

He then leaps back to the origins of the tank in the First World War as a solution to the attrition of trench warfare. The Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps carried out the first tank attacks in 1916 at the Battle of the Somme, and the first successful attacks at Cambrai. The tank attracted immediate fascinating, being described as a great yet ludicrous beast by war correspondents, and then being used as the focal point of a nationwide war bonds campaign.

The first intellectual of armored warfare was the British officer J. F. C. Fuller, who envisioned a new kind of sweeping maneuver against the "horse-minded" stodges of the cavalry. Fuller was a fascinating figure, an early discipline of Alistair Crowley who in the 1930s became a leading British fascist. Strategic brilliance is not always coupled to good sense.

World War 2, the Bltizkrieg, and the Battle of Kursk is treated in a cursory and obligatory way, as if Wright is bored with the moment when the tank came of age. As many words are spent on the ambiguous status of the tank in post-Communist Poland as on the Second World War. A chapter spent with General Israel Tal, Israeli armored leader and designer of the Merkava, is more interesting. Yet for a cultural historian, Wright repeats entirely uncritically the mythos of the Israeli tanker in the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War. The book closes out with a visit to Fort Knox, and the optimistic futurism of the US military in the "end of history" years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the World Trade Center.

It's hard to say exactly what Wright's thesis is, beyond "hey, look at all the diverse meanings that have been attached to tanks". There are lots of interesting pieces here, but the overall effect is less than the sum of its components.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely not what I was expecting. I grabbed this book at a book sale, expecting a straightforward history of the tank. The author intended to look at the tank more from its impact on a cultural scale. While the book does tackle that, it wanders needlessly. The discussion on Fuller, one of the early proponents of the tank, goes into far too much detail in his dealings with the occult. Other sections could have been cut down as well.

[Andrew Otis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very very dense read. I'd only recommend this if you really like tanks, and I don't mean their history in battle, but the intellectual and cultural history of them. The part about the Israeli army was good but much of the rest I thought could benefit from trimming by the editor's pen.

[David Ingrum · Rating 1 out of 5]

In fairness to the book, it wasn't at all what I was expecting. I expected to read about the military history of the tank. The development of the weapon and early tactics were addressed, but undue and unnecessary pages were devoted to J.F.C. Fuller's adherence to the philosophy of Aleister Crowley.
In the main, the book seems to be an examination of the sociological and psychological effects that the tank has had on various countries and societies.

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A social history of the tank, as told in the style of thematic essays.

So we have the early years of the machine in WWI, the later life of JFC Fuller, the Poles and their cavalry charge through history, Israel's cult of the armoured brigade, post cold war disarmament and the digistisation of the modern US Army.

Strange book, this one. A bit disjointed, a bit repetitious (thanks for telling me the same bit of info on successive pages, on multiple occasions), but full of anecdote and curiosities.

For the collector.

Rated G, with war violence references. 3/5

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

It sounds unpromising, but this history of armored vehicles goes way beyond nuts & bolts to talk about depictions of tanks in literature and popular culture.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting tale of the development of the tank marred by digressions only slightly related to the topic at hand