There was a trend on TikTok or Instagram last year where frustrated girlfriends asked their men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were startling when it appeared that even students from the mid-West had Julius Caesar and Cicero on the mind.
If my wife had managed to master TikTok and asked me, in all honesty I do not think I would have agreed with the college kids from Wisconsin. But, had it been tanks, perhaps I would have had no option to admit that yes, I do think about them an inordinate amount. So much so that, during lockdown (pre-Aspects of History days), I constructed, with the help of the great modelmaking company, Tamiya, three tanks: the Tiger II, the T-54 and the Cromwell. Hours of my previous employer’s time was spent with these marvels. So I was overjoyed when I received a copy of Mark Urban’s new book, Tank. In it he has ten tanks, from their inception with the Mark IV in the Great War, right up to the M1 Abrams, in use in the war in Ukraine.
When I met him recently to discuss the new book, I started by letting him know that this is a quite outrageous tome filled with everything one would want to know about tanks and their evolution. Nothing short of tank porn: hugely enjoyable and stimulating reading.
‘If that’s your take, who am I to question it? As an author I’m just delighted that it hit the spot for you! There’s quite a lot of history here, but what I’ve tried to do is put in a single volume a potted history of the tank as a weapon, a machine, an idea, and what it represents from the outset at the First World War right up to Ukraine.’
Of course, with the mention of Ukraine, we must inevitably talk about what the conflict says about the development of warfare, and the tank, which has been so prominent since Putin’s invasion in February 2022. On the one hand, we have seen plenty of images of Russian armour knocked out by Ukrainian drones, or poor maintenance, but on the other, tanks have proven hugely effective, on both sides.
Early in the book, Urban quotes the Australian general, Kathryn Toohey, who comes up with the great line of ‘tanks are like dinner jackets. You don’t need them very often, but when you do, nothing else will do.’
Urban nods his head vigorously, ‘they [tanks] were on a downward trajectory and the numbers in use in some of the armies that had really big fleets like the Israeli army, which, by the 1973 Yom Kippur War, had nearly 6000. Extraordinary for a small country like that. Part of this is what people sometimes call ‘structured disarmament.’ The tank becomes so expensive that with each generation you can only afford fewer and fewer of them.
‘But, as Boris Johnson taunted the Chair of the Defence Select Committee just a matter of months before that full scale invasion: “we’re not expecting hordes of Russian tanks to come flooding across.” Well, of course you get this corrective event in Ukraine.
‘Right from the day of the first really successful use at Cambrai in November 1917, where the tanks do suddenly allow a seizure of several miles’ depth of the German lines, right to the Kharkiv Axis during the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the summer of 2023, you get that same debate oscillating back and forward.
‘Zelensky says we need tanks to break through just as with 1917, whereas others say no, you’ve just lost a load. The Germans, when they were surveying the smouldering wrecks of these Mark IV tanks at Cambrai, are saying this will never catch on.’
The sad thing about the tank, from a British point of view, is that much like T20 cricket, we invented the damn thing and then everyone else did it better, and all we’re left with is the dreaded Hundred. Or should I really mention the Churchill, the Cromwell (despite my own minor revival!), and worst of all, the Comet. I am now about to receive incoming fire from irate readers. Fear not, apart from the Mark IV, Urban has included the Centurion in his ten. Can we claim the Sherman as ours? Probably not.
But when we think of the tank, it is not long before we all dream of that most perfect of armoured beasts, the Tiger. Such was their armour, 88mm gun and, let us be honest, sheer awesome good looks, as Urban writes, the resultant psychological impact on enemies was such that Russian tank crews would flee their T-34s at the sight of a Tiger. Who can forget the Tiger in the Brian G. Hutton film Kelly’s Heroes? It has held a fascination for many ever since. Incidentally another of the tanks in the movie is a Sherman, with a few of Oddball’s ‘improvements’, and Urban’s pick for the best tank of the Second World War.
‘The Tiger tank, is absolutely formidable and particularly in a tank versus tank role. But it was so big and heavy and so wide that in order to get it on a railway car, they had to partially deconstruct it. they had to take off the mud guards, the outer row of road wheels and fit narrower tracks, simply to get it onto the railway. The sheer size of it, and weight, came to cause all sorts of other design complications. It ended up, when empty, at about 56 tons. Fully laden for battle, about fifty eight. The German Army didn’t want anything heavier than 30 tons because most of the bridges couldn’t take a tank heavier. Then the bureaucrats running procurement want the bridge to go under water. So the Tiger had to be engineered to snorkel to a depth of 4.5m of water.’
But despite all these design consequences that seem to go on endlessly, the Tiger still does have that aura.
‘There’s no doubt it’s formidable. Famously, at Villers-Bocage, a handful of Tigers absolutely mauled the British 7th Armoured Division in June 1944. There’s no doubt it could be an absolutely formidable adversary. When these Tigers under the SS officer Michael Wittman started running amok, there were quite a lot of British armoured vehicles that had the technical ability to destroy them. Why didn’t they achieve that more quickly? I think it comes back to what you mention, which is the psychology, the shock effect.’
One area we have not yet discussed is the future of tank warfare. If we keep in mind the Toohey quote, but also a lot of tanks that have been destroyed by relatively cheap kit, what is the future of the tank?
‘There is still a place for tracked heavy armoured vehicles on the battlefield into the foreseeable future, whether they are tanks or not, with a very powerful gun that fires at other tanks? Who knows?
And what of AI, which seems as though it is still at an embryonic stage – at least where MS Word is concerned?
‘I was at the London Defence Conference recently, and I interviewed the Ukrainian Deputy Defence Minister. She is very closely involved with their drone development programmes. One of the things she talked about was a software system called Avenger, which is an AI enhanced database of targets. They put in images of all kinds of Russian vehicles, equipment etc. Sometimes it’s just the barrel poking out of a tree line. Sometimes it’s the rear end appearing from behind a house.
‘They put all these thousands and thousands of images of equipment they have encountered in the battlefield. Avenger produces a constantly enhanced algorithm of targets, which the software uploads into drones before they are launched. This AI software allows the drone to seek its own target during the last mile through this compressed library of every kind of Russian target that’s been encountered by the Ukrainians. Clearly you could have a similar system in a tank or another armoured vehicle. You could have a similar system which could be used in place of a human gunner. That might be part of getting the crew down to a single individual or two people.’
Since the Strategic Defence Review is now upon us, and as the Treasury argues over percentage of GDP with the Ministry of Defence, one wonders if such considerations are on the table. One would hope so, but like German procurement bureaucrats during the Second World War, the MoD is a notoriously poor performer, and so, just as one can never discount aircraft carriers with no aircraft let us hope that history, whether recent or not, does not repeat. Our current Defence Secretary would do well to read Tank.
Mark Urban is a journalist, historian and the author of Tank, published in June 2025.
Oliver Webb-Carter is the Editor and Co-Founder of Aspects of History.
