I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank.
It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see coming a mile off. But don’t be put off by its structural and narrative shortcomings. This is still a very watchable, gripping and sometimes moving portrait of men at war, and likely the most realistic ever depiction of a second world war tank crew. It’s far superior to the ludicrous Fury, where Brad Pitt plays an implausibly elderly tank commander, and where a single Sherman successfully takes on virtually an entire SS Panzer Grenadier regiment.
The Tank does for armour what Das Boot did for submarines. It captures the intimacy, camaraderie and claustrophobia of having to crew a mobile coffin where all that stands between you and a very grisly death are a few inches of steel. Well, 100mm of armour plate to be more precise. If you’re into your trainspotterish technical detail, you won’t be too disappointed. The tank – a Tiger Mk 1– is based on the only surviving model at Bovington Tank Museum. It’s not exactly right: creating a replica proved too expensive. But you definitely get a good sense of what it was like to fight a tank: how very little you could see through the slit in the front, how quickly you could reload the armour piercing shells, what sort of tactics you might have had to employ when outgunned by a Soviet SU-100 tank destroyer.
Perhaps sometimes it does stretch credulity. In the initial premise, for example, I don’t think it that likely that a Tiger would have been selected for a Saving Private Ryan rescue mission into Soviet territory because it was so slow, heavy and mechanically unreliable, with a fuel range even worse than a Tesla’s. But we should forgive the scene where, to evade the tank destroyer, Der Tiger turns into Das Boot and hides under the water: some Tigers were actually equipped to do this and it did at least work in training.
Did tank commanders really go into action with their heads out of the turret hatch? And did they allow cigarette smoking next to all that high explosive? I’m assuming that on occasion they did and that this is not artistic licence on the part of director Dennis Gansel. Certainly, I can confirm on the latter score that wartime combatants were much more cavalier with their fags than modern health-and-safety strictures might permit. My late RAF friend David Hearsey told me that though he forbade smoking in his Halifax bomber, other crews were more lax – it was up to the pilot.
Unlike some veterans I got to know, Hearsey had nothing good whatsoever to say about ‘the war’ – a view I find myself sharing more and more, as I learn about the ugly stuff that tends to get left out of the bestselling history books. Apart from being spectacularly unnecessary, war gives licence to the very worst behaviour. In The Tank, this is illustrated with a hellish scene – likely based on true-life accounts – where Russian peasants are shut with their livestock into barns, which are then set alight with flame-throwers so that the terrified animals kick their owners to death. Saves scarce ammo, we are told.
Much more enjoyable is the portrait of the tank’s crew, schematically disparate but too well-drawn to be clichés. There’s the driven, firm but fair, ‘orders are orders’ commander (David Schütter); the virginal youth; the wine-grower; the gruff, working-class driver; and the intellectual, a Latin teacher, who gets the killer, on-the-money speech that by rights should turn this drama into an enduring anti-war classic:
‘If the ancient Romans handed down one thing to us […] it’s war. They waged it eternally to subjugate their own people, not the enemy. Keep fighting, keep waging war, never any peace. So the Latin teacher, the winemaker, the train driver and the farm boy join in. There’s no choice. “Yes sir, no sir.” Orders must be followed. Forget who you were and what you once loved.’
Apparently, despite the sceptical reviews, The Tank has been one of Amazon’s biggest streaming hits this year. And deservedly so, I reckon.
Meanwhile, one of my top recommends, Drops of God, is back for a second outing. This is the series in French and Japanese (hence its relatively poor viewing figures) about two competing oenophiles – a mysterious, brooding Japanese rich kid and a pretty, capricious French girl – on a quest, via sundry, capacious cellars and picturesque terrains, to discover the world’s most elusive wines. It’s probably a load of pretentious nonsense, but it’s very, very high-class, nice-to-look at nonsense, so I highly recommend it.
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