Extracts
1. From Chapter 3 – Big Joke
On 15th September 1916, the Heavy Section of the Machine Gun Corps went into action in the Battle of the Somme. Forty-nine machines were available for the attack, but some broke down, or sank into craters and collapsing dug-outs. Others lost their direction and one is said to have failed because its driver refused to plough down a narrow sunken road full of dead bodies. Rather than being used in the concentration that Swinton had advocated from the earliest days, the thirty-six tanks that did reach their starting points were directed against strong-points in ‘driblets’ or ‘penny packets’ of two and three…read more (PDF)
2. From Chapter 20 – Fort Knox: Cybertanks and the Army After Next
To visit the Armor Centre in Fort Knox, you fly to Louisville and then follow the highway past thin, road-stretched towns you can drive through without ever reaching. This is dry Bible country with a mall or two, a few stranded-looking Bavarian restaurants and a dismal brick bungalow called the Endtime House of Prayer Church. It’s a land where the radio pumps out country songs that rhyme ‘negligee’ with ‘walk away’, while tele-evangelists rhapsodize about ‘Going all the way with Jesus’, and tank soldiers sit behind their wire, reading magazines with names like Full Strut and looking forward to the weekend when they will hunt wild turkeys in the Kentucky woods… read more (PDF)