Volume 49, Number 7 · April 25, 2002
'A Very Strange Machine'
By Gordon A. Craig
Tank: The Progress of a Monstrous War Machine
by Patrick Wright
Viking, 499 pp., $29.95
In November 1917, at Cambrai, three hundred British tanks broke through the supposedly impregnable Hindenburg trench system on a front of seven miles and, for a loss of four thousand men, captured eight thousand terrified German prisoners. It was a penetration equal to that which had taken three months and countless deaths to achieve at the Third Battle of Ypres. When the victory bells rang in England at the end of November, tank supporters were sure that they were tolling out an old style of war and sounding in a new one, which would be characterized by deep thrusts and encirclements rather than the bloody paralysis of the trenches.
Review, 2618 words
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