The tank, I was surprised to learn, was a British invention. It provided a much-needed response to the recent development of barbed wire, fortified trenches and rapid-fire machine-guns. Armoured against both wire and gunfire, the tank could lurch across trenches and traverse roadless battlefields pitted with shell craters. 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. 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. 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. 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.

LRB 16 November 2000 | PDF Download