Tanks for the Memories

“If the tanks succeed, then victory follows."

- WW II German Panzer Division Commander Heinz Guderian

“As long as the earth revolves around the sun, as long as cold and heat, storms and sunshine exist, there will always be struggle.” So speaks a character with an uncanny resemblance to history’s most infamous lance corporal in the 2012 Russian film “White Tiger.” The mustached figure continues, “War is a natural, ordinary thing. War is eternal and everywhere…War is life itself. War is the original human state.”

Hand in hand with the industrialization of the economy in Europe and America came the mechanization of warfare. Tanks made their first appearance on the battlefield in the form of the British Mark I on September 15, 1916, utilized by the British Expeditionary Force under General Sir Douglas Haig in the Battle of the Somme during World War I.

 

A British Mark I tank shielded entrenched troops in World War I.

The earliest concept for the combat tank can be traced to Leonardo da Vinci’s 15^th century sketches of what could be described as a human-powered, wheeled vehicle encased in armor, with cannons all around.

 

Leonardo da Vinci's original sketch is shown beside a modern, working model.

H.G. Wells’ 1903 short story “The Land Ironclads” described awesome, 100-foot-long, armored cross-country vehicles, equipped with pedrail wheels (the invention of which inspired Wells’ story) and armed with cannons and remote-controlled repeating rifles.  The war machines are variously described as “big black monsters,” “iron turtles,” and “vast cockroaches.”  Wells’ tale about “man-killing machinery” and “the whole unfathomable imbecility of war” added to his reputation as a prophet of the future.

 

An original illustration of H.G. Wells' "large and clumsy black insects"

Coincidentally, it was also in 1903 when a Captain Levavasseur of the 6^th Artillery Battalion proposed to the French War Ministry a self-propelled cannon, fully armored and moved by a caterpillar system. Powered by an 80-horse power petrol engine, the “canon autopropulser” would carry a crew of three with storage for ammunition. The project was formally abandoned in 1908.

During the 20^th century, battle tanks became a major component of modern armies. In the 21^st century, with the end of the Cold War (at least, so far) and the increase of asymmetrical warfare, the importance of tanks has diminished. Modern tanks seldom operate alone, as they are integrated into combined combat units with support of infantry.

Not to worry, though, because tanks will always roll along on the screens in the Moviehouse. One of this fall’s box-office hits and critical favorites, “Fury” (below) stars Brad Pitt as Sgt. “Wardaddy” Collier, a battle-tested tank commander in World War II, who, along with his crew – grizzled veterans nicknamed “Bible,” “Gordo,” “Coon-Ass,” and new kid “Machine” – makes a Custer’s Last Stand against an advancing German column of 300 Waffen-SS infantry.

The plot of a desperate, outnumbered, outgunned tank crew making a last stand goes back over 70 years to the World War II classic, “Sahara,” starring Humphrey Bogart, at the top of his game a year after “Casablanca,” as the commander of an American M3 Lee tank (christened “Lulubelle”) serving with the British army in the Libyan desert.  Separated from their unit during a retreat from German forces, Bogart and his two-man crew eventually pick up a motley assortment of stragglers, including a British army doctor, four Commonwealth soldiers, a French corporal, a Sudanese officer and his Italian prisoner, and a captured Luftwaffe pilot. In the obligatory exchange of hometown stories, someone asks Bogart, “What part of the States are you from, sergeant?” “No place, just the Army.”

In dire need of water, they decide to defend a meager desert well against a battalion of 500 very thirsty Germans while sending a single man out for reinforcements. One of the British soldiers tells Bogart their handful of defenders have an edge over the approaching enemy because “the men out there have never known the dignity of freedom.”

 

Humphrey Bogart and director Zoltan Korda were apparently
not on the best of terms during the shooting of "Sahara." Bogart
regarded Korda as something of a phony, Korda thought Bogart
was behaving as if he was constantly suffering from hemorrhoids.

Directed in 1943 (one year before D-Day) by Zoltan Korda, a filmmaker with such Hollywood classics as “The Four Feathers,” “The Thief of Bagdad,” and “Jungle Book” to his credit, “Sahara” was filmed in southern California’s Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, near the Salton Sea, 80 miles northeast of San Diego, utilizing soldiers and equipment from “C” Troop of the 25^th Cavalry Reconnaissance Mechanized Squadron. Second Lieutenant Kenneth Koyen recalled his division supplied extras as German soldiers, “and the men found the business of getting into German uniforms sheer comedy.”

 

Officers and enlisted men of the 4th Armored Division pose in the California desert
with "Lulubelle." Lt. Kenneth Koyen stands to the left of Humphrey Bogart (far left).

Not so funny was the fact that when the movie opened, the squadron was on its way to England, and many of the men and their officers never lived to see the film. Casualties in recon outfits ran high as they were in the leading divisions of General Patton’s Third Army, from Normandy through France, into Belgium and the Battle of the Bulge, into Germany and finally meeting the Russian army in Czechoslovakia.

"Sahara" was faihfully remade for cable television in 1995, with James Belushi
receiving critical praise in the original Humphrey Bogart role.

Undoubtedly the best known American tank commander, General George S. Patton was memorably portrayed by George C. Scott in the 1970 epic, “Patton.” The Oscar-winning screenplay, co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, follows the controversial World War II general from his victory over experienced German tank units in Tunisia to his ignoble removal from command. Just as controversial was actor Scott’s refusal of an Academy Award nomination (referring to the “whole thing” as “a goddamn meat parade”), which he won anyway.

 

Screen "Patton" George C. Scott faces off with the genuine Gen. George S. Patton.

As officers in the U.S. Army’s fledgling Tank Corps, both George S. Patton and Dwight D. Eisenhower had been involved in the birth of the new form of warfare and revolutionized the way battles were fought, helping develop the technology for tracked armored fighting vehicles. Patton also aided in the invention of the co-axial tank mount for cannons and machine guns.

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower (left) and George S. Patton (right) pose alongside WWI
tanks. Eisenhower never saw combat during World War I but commanded a unit
that trained tank crews at Camp Colt, the site of Pickett's Charge on the Gettysburg
battlefield in Pennsylvania.

Lt. Col. Patton was the first member of the U.S. Tank Corps in 1917 during World War I and organized the first American tank school in France, training 500 soldiers. In August 1918, he was placed in charge of the U.S. 1^st Provisional Tank Brigade. Ordering that no tank be surrendered, Patton personally commanded a French-built Renault FT tank, leading the others from the front and often riding on top to inspire his men.

The film “Patton” famously opens with George C. Scott delivering a speech to an unseen audience of servicemen in front of a gigantic American flag, stating, “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” In reality, Patton’s series of pep talks to the Third Army in England in 1944 were rife with jarring profanities, including the promise, “We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks!”

Released a couple months after “Patton,” “Kelly’s Heroes” delivered a different kind of war message in an eccentric mix of guys-on-a-mission action flick, buddy comedy, and heist picture; scripted scenes conveying an antiwar sentiment were either toned down or deleted in favor of a more lighthearted atmosphere, to the chagrin of star Clint Eastwood, who anticipated a more serious message. Eastwood’s costars included Telly Savalas, Don Rickles, and Donald Sutherland, as one of the screen’s most peculiar tank commanders, an anachronistic hippie appropriately named Oddball.

"I only ride'em, I don't know what makes 'em work."
Oddball (Donald Sutherland), Kelly (Clint Eastwood), Crapgame (Don Rickles),
Babra (Gene Collins), and Turk (Shepherd Sanders) in "Kelly's Heroes"

Oddball explains his strategy behind commanding a Sherman tank to Kelly, “Like, all the tanks we come up against are bigger and better than ours, so all we can hope to do is, like, scare ‘em away. This gun is an ordinary 76-millimeter, but we add this piece of pipe onto it, and the Krauts think, like, maybe it’s a 90-millimeter. We got our own ammunition, it’s filled with paint. When we fire it, it makes pretty pictures. Scares the hell out of people! We have a loudspeaker, and when we go into battle we play music, very loud. It kind of calms us down.”

Shot in Yugoslavia, “Kelly’s Heroes” employed the country’s surplus of authentic Sherman tanks, but when it came to depicting German Tiger tanks, the filmmakers utilized Soviet T-34 tanks that had been converted by the Yugoslavian army for the 1969 picture “Battle of Neretva.” The Tiger tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” was played by Karl Otto Alberty, a Berliln-born amateur boxer and apprentice fashion designer who became one of cinema’s most recognizable Nazis, playing SS officers, Luftwaffe pilots, Gestapo agents, and various German soldiers in at least a dozen productions, from “The Great Escape” in 1963 to the TV miniseries “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance” in the 1980s.

 

Hollywood's go-to Nazi: Karl Otto Alberty

Five years earlier, “Kelly’s Heroes” costar Telly Savalas played a black market smuggler and Sherman tank commander itching to see combat action in 1965’s “Battle of the Bulge,” a wannabe-epic, dramatizing Germany’s last major counter-offensive attack on the Western Front, with the all-star cast of Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Dana Andrews, Charles Bronson, and Robert Shaw as the fictitious commander of the column of Nazi tanks, Col. Hessler.

 

Telly Savalas commands what's left of his cement-mixer
in "Battle of the Bulge."

Shaw’s character was originally intended to be real-life Joachim Peiper, a field officer in the Waffen-SS who was the youngest man in the German Army to be promoted to full colonel. After the war, Peiper was convicted of war crimes, but his death sentence was commuted because the trial had been marked by illegalities. He served 11 years in prison. Because he was still living when “Battle of the Bulge” was made, his character was fictionalized. Peiper was murdered at his home France in 1976, presumably by French communists, who then burned down his house.

 

Robert Shaw as Col. Hessler in "Battle of the Bulge"

An epilogue at the end of “Battle of the Bulge” states, “To encompass the whole of the heroic contributions of all the participants, places, names and characters have been generalized and action has been synthesized in order to convey the spirit and essence of the battle.” Huh? The film was publicly denounced by former President Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, for its glaring historical inaccuracies, such as the depiction of a climactic tank battle on a sprawling, snowless plain (the film was shot near the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range in Spain), nothing like the wintry forests and rugged terrain of the Ardennes. Incidentally, the movie’s Tiger tanks were actually converted American M47 Patton tanks, while the M4 Sherman tanks were really M24 Chaffees, American light tanks used during the latter part of World War II and in the Korean War.

At age 68, director Samuel Fuller, a past master of such hardboiled film noir as “Pickup on South Street,” “House of Bamboo,” “The Crimson Kimono,” and “The Naked Kiss,” paid tribute to his personal wartime experience as a soldier in the storied 1st Infantry Division, from North Africa to Sicily to Normandy to Belgium and Czechoslovakia, in the 1980 film “The Big Red One,” not only the best picture Fuller made but undoubtedly one of the best World War II pictures ever made. Lee Marvin, in the finest role of his career, portrays the nameless, war-hardened sergeant of a squad of seemingly immortal riflemen, played by Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine (modeled after the young, cigar-chomping Fuller), Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward.

In a rare and humorous respite from the brutalities of battle, the Sergeant and his squad use the interior of an abandoned German tank to deliver the baby of a hysterical French woman, utilizing ammunition belts as stirrups. It is a charming scene of welcome humanity for the characters and audience alike.

 

Private Griff (Mark Hamill) and the Sergeant (Lee Marvin)
welcome new life on the battlefied in "The Big Red One."

Like the aforementioned “Kelly’s Heroes,” 1987’s “The Misfit Brigade” was filmed in Yugoslavia. In what one internet reviewer called “a rather silly and lighthearted knockoff of ‘The Dirty Dozen,’” a German tank crew of screw-ups from the penal brigade is offered amnesty if they go behind enemy lines on a suicide mission to blow up a Russian train. The “half-assed buddy comedy,” to quote the aforementioned web critic, was based on a reputedly grim novel about discarded soldiers who team to survive the horrors of war, titled Wheels of Terror (1958) by Sven Hassel.

Hassel was the pen name of Danish-born Borge Pedersen, who served with the 2^nd Panzer Division as a tank driver during the Nazi invasion of Poland. He served with the 2^nd Cavalry Regiment and later the 11^th and 27^th Panzer Regiments. According to his version, he was wounded several times, was promoted to lieutenant, and received the Iron Cross before surrendering to Soviet troops in Berlin in 1945. However, there are claims that Pedersen was actually arrested in Denmark after its liberation and was tried and sentenced for collaboration with the Germans in 1947. He was released from a Danish prison in 1949.

Borge Pedersen as a recruit in the German Army

Acclaimed British writer Alan Sillitoe, author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, hailed Wheels of Terror as “a book of horrors” which “should be left alone by those prone to nightmares. Sven Hassel’s descriptions of the atrocities committed by both sides are the most horrible indictments of war I have ever read.”

“The Misfit Brigade” director, Gordon Hessler (best known for such Roger Corman/Poe-like horror films of the 1970s featuring Vincent Price as “The Oblong Box,” “Cry of the Banshee,” and “Scream and Scream Again,” as well as 1974’s “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad”), opted instead to depict the outsiders as ne’er-do-well pranksters, flaunting German authority (personified by David Carradine and Oliver Reed in brief cameos that earned them above-the-title portraits in movie ads) as if they were frat house rapscallions.

At least "The Misfit Brigade" offered the rare opportunity to see
David Carradine and Oliver Reed onscreen together in the same film.

Leading the frat pack is Bruce Davison (fondly recalled for his definitive ‘70s appearances in “The Strawberry Statement” and “Willard,” as well as his recent role as Senator Kelly in the “X-Men” franchise) as a wisecracking Marxist fond of donning a vibrant yellow top hat. David Patrick Kelly (best known for portraying unsavory characters in films directed by Walter Hill: “The Warriors,” “48 HRS.” and “Last Man Standing”) plays a feisty, Cagney-like former French Legionnaire-turned-Muslim polygamist. The merry band’s Little John, aptly called “Tiny” (“How come we get all the shit details?”), is portrayed by Jay O. Sanders, a physically imposing character actor familiar to filmgoers as Union General Crockett Strong in “Glory” and as Lou Ivon, a chief investigator of President Kennedy’s assassination in “JFK.” Sven Hassel is played onscreen by Crotaian-born actor Slavko Stimac, who had a small role in director Sam Peckinpah’s “Cross of Iron” (1977).

Jay O. Sanders (resting on the cannon), David Patrick Kelly
(perched atop the turret), Bruce Davison (in the yellow top hat)

Traversing (that’s tank talk) 180 degrees, unquestionably one of the most unique World War II dramas ever made, “White Tiger” was produced by Russian filmmakers and was selected as the official Russian entry in the Best Foreign Language Film category for the 85^th Academy Awards but failed to make the final short-list. In the summer of 1943 on the Eastern Front, an imposing, ghostly German Tiger tank mysteriously appears to decimate Soviet tanks, only to inexplicably vanish again.

The German Tiger tank in "White Tiger" was a modified Soviet IS-2 tank.
The Russian tanks were T-34-85 medium tanks.

A severely burned survivor of one such attack makes a miraculously complete recovery. Although he has amnesia (Russian officers give him a new name, “Naydenov,” which means “found”), he retains all his skills as a tank commander and becomes obsessed with destroying the Tiger, “a product of the German mastermind,” the existence of which even captured Germans deny. As played by Aleksey Verktov, the haunted tank commander effectively adopts a thousand-yard stare and prays to the “Tank God.”

Aleksey Vertkov as Naydenov: "I hear tanks.
All tanks talk, only no one hears them, but I hear them."

Toward the end, the story makes an abrupt shift into the surreal, a jarring, unsettling change at first that ultimately and appropriately fits into the overall mysticism of the film as the German high command in Berlin surrenders to the Russian Army, Naydenov vows to track down the white Tiger, and a character who strongly resembles Hitler converses with a shadowy figure (the Devil?), insisting, “There will always be struggle between people and nations…Mankind became what it is thanks to struggle.”

Major Fedotov (Vitaly Kischenko) recognizes Naydenov as
ideally suited for war: "He is born out of it."

Co-written, produced and directed in a straightforward, no-nonsense but visually striking fashion by a man named Karen Shakhnazarov (who in March 2014 signed a letter in support of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military intervention in Ukraine), with a score featuring music of Richard Wagner, “White Tiger” is unlike any other war movie, with imagery and ideas that will linger in one’s mind for some time to come.

“Fury” was the first film featuring a genuine German Tiger tank (above) since the 1946 British movie “Theirs Is the Glory,” which depicted Britain’s involvement in Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied airborne operation of World War II (later recreated in the 1977 war epic “A Bridge Too Far,” directed by Richard Attenborough). The world’s last functioning Tiger, it was captured by British troops in North Africa in 1943 and now resides in England’s Bovington Tank Museum.

Germans favored quality, Americans favored quantity, and the only way a Sherman could defeat a Tiger was to outnumber and outmaneuver it, a costly tactic. Heavily armored and brandishing a powerful 88mm cannon, a single Tiger could lay waste to several Sherman tanks.

The Tiger tank in “Fury” was driven by David Rae, who served in the British Army for 22 years, retiring as a warrant officer and regimental sergeant major after four tours in Bosnia, one in Iraq, and three in Afghanistan. His specialty? Armored reconnaissance, of course. Rae appears onscreen as well. “When you see a German pop out of the top,” he said in an interview, “that’s me.” About the Tiger, he commented, “It had an aura about it. I had the honor of commanding it in the film.”

David Rae as a Germank tank
commander in "Fury"

Seventy years ago, Billy Betts, now 91, was wounded on D-Day and spent six weeks in a British hospital before returning to the front and fighting his way into Germany as radio operator in a Sherman tank with the name “Beverly” painted on its turret. According to Betts, “‘Fury’ accurately portrays how superior the German tanks were. A Sherman provided you with protection against most enemy fire but against a Tiger it could easily become your coffin.”

Billy Betts revisited Gold Beach where he was wounded on D-Day.

According to Betts, “ ‘Fury’ shows just how vulnerable you were…in a Sherman tank. There is a lot of blood and gore in the film but nothing can really come close to the true horrors of tank warfare. I saw people being blown up and burnt alive. Going to see ‘Fury’ you don’t get that dreadful, nauseating smell of burnt flesh. That will stay with me forever.”