My father volunteered to fight for the Allies in the Second World War at the age of 17, within a day of the war being declared. He lied about his age as they only took men over 18. He left the country within 24 hours and returned to SA six years later. He spent most of the war as an infantryman in the Egyptian desert, but finished the latter part of the war in a Sherman tank as a radio operator, fighting up the Italian peninsula.

That is almost the full complement of what I know about what must have been the formative period of my father’s life. I could have and should have asked him about his war experience, but because I’m a complete idiot, I never did. And then he died some time ago. Like so many people of that age, he said almost nothing about the war; no bragging, no bravado, no explanations, no justifications, no war stories.

Well… some. Now and then, something would slip out, but almost always the good stuff. His friend sneaking out of camp, swimming across a river and entering an enemy-occupied town to see a famous painting in a church. Playing rugby with an imaginary ball in Italian piazzas, to astound the locals. He loved Italy, and he would insist we returned almost every European holiday we had when my sister and I were kids. (I think it may have had at least something to do with the attitude of Italian girls to Allied soldiers when they arrived to liberate their towns.)

It was during one of these trips that he showed me some scrape marks on an old Italian monument that he said were made by his tank sliding on the cobblestone streets of Rome. And then once, we visited the Imperial War Museum in London, which was exhibiting a Sherman tank, and he was delighted to see his old chariot. We clambered into the tiny interior, where he showed me his seat next to the radio. I could have asked a million questions, but didn’t. There was something about that “good war” that was sacrosanct. It’s not an accident that his generation is described as the silent generation.

There is one thing my father’s experience did do: it made me interested in tanks. Let’s be clear about this: they are the alpha predator of the battlefield. And yet, over the years, they have gradually become outmoded; at least that is what I thought until this month.

In the Second World War, tanks were the supreme weapon; deadly, manoeuvrable, heavily protected, something like the armoured knights of old. Some of the greatest battles have been fought with tanks, none more so than the battles on the Kursk salient, especially around Prokhorovka, and the Battle of the Bulge on the Western Front. In both, thousands of tanks swarmed at each other in the style of powerhouse battering rams.

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But during the Cold War, tanks gradually lost their lustre. The big problem with tanks is their size, and although they are pretty fast, they are still 50-tonne behemoths, so sprinters they are not.  Consequently, the post-WWII experience was that tanks were vulnerable to the new rocket-powered weaponry. Even pretty simple infantry-held weapons like RPGs could knock out an enormously expensive tank. So tank development slowed. Notably, the key tank of the Ukraine war, the Russian T72, as well as the US’s M1 Abrams entered production in the late 1960s (although they have been extensively upgraded). The German Leopard is really just an Abrams in drag.

So why is it such a huge step change that the US and Germany have decided to provide these tanks to the Ukrainian forces? 

One of the answers is that the vulnerabilities of tanks have now been considerably reduced. Arena M in the Russian case and the Trophy system in the Abrams case protect the tanks from most rocketry. These are now countermeasures for RPGs, drones and even aerial missile fire. How effective they will be we are about to find out.

The second reason is that the area in which the Ukraine war is now being fought is flat and open. The Russians have dug in deep, which rules out infantry-only attacks. Tanks could be decisive here.

The US and Germany, particularly, have been cautious about escalating the war, which explains their reticence in providing Ukraine with offensive weapons like tanks. But they also don’t want a stalemate to emerge along the existing lines of occupation. What they want, it is now clear, is for Ukraine to win.

Consequently, it’s time for deep breaths everywhere.  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has requested 300 tanks, and at the moment, he is likely to get a third of that.

That is not going to cut it: Russia has some 2,000 battle-ready tanks and another 10,000 or so in storage facilities, mostly T72s, but also about 600 T90s, although they have already lost more than 1,000 tanks, US military officials have estimated. But what the Russians don’t have is unquestioned air superiority, and you can’t drive tanks into a modern battlefield that has no ground cover without air support.

But the crucial thing is the change of attitude in the West. From now on, Nato is effectively at war with Russia; we need to face that fact. If I was a Russian conscript, I would be extremely worried now. As should we all. DM/BM