BBC Documentary - Tankies - 5 RTR, Jan 6th.

Some of my observations were very similar to Jonny's, so I shall give my own take on those already mentioned.

The use of archive material and personal photographs was excellent (in this second episode at least), with some cracking film of 7th Armd, much of which I had not seen before. The lack of footage of Americans was a real breath of fresh air.

The Veteran's recollections were, as usual, the highlight of this documentary for me. The entries from Wardrop's diary were also well selected and characterfully read. These in combination provided a superb and very powerful insight into the thoughts and attitudes of the men of the Filthy Fifth – of particular note to me was Roy Dixon's mention that the old hands “spoke in a special language of their own, partly arabic”. I am certain I have read of such before, but to have it verbally confirmed was excellent.

The 'reconstructions' in this second episode were, on the whole, very good indeed, with full and accurate (save the inclusion of the AoS strip) insignia worn on BD, while not on Denims. It also helped that the extras were, I believe, re-enactors rather than simply 'actors'.

Alas though, it was not without it's problems.

I found the coverage of the infamous events of 13th June 1944 slightly wanting and a little incomplete in places – of particular note was that they failed to mention that Wittmann's Tiger was later knocked out in the village, forcing him and his crew to leave the scene on foot (for anyone not already familiar with his work, I refer you to Daniel Taylor, who has conducted extensive original research into the events at Villers Bocage, and who has solidly proved several of the myths incorrect). I presume the reason for the omission of this fact may well have been, as Jonny says, for dramatic effect. The above said, however, it was acceptably covered in the time allowed.

The use of the Sherman M4A3E8 with HVSS of all things was beyond me – particularly when Mr. Urban sat beside the tank, making the HVSS (Horizontal Volute Spring Suspension) all the more noticeable. A Firefly or Cromwell would certainly have been much more appropriate for the role the M4A3 played and I believe there to be several of both still around in running order, though I can appreciate the additional cost which would undoubtedly accompanied the use one of these for filming may well have rendered this impracticable.

I also felt that, while the description of the Bocage country was well done, it came at an odd point through the programme – before the actions of 5 RTR on 7th June had been fully summed up. Considering that the Bocage does not begin until a few miles inland, I felt this section would have been better employed a few minutes later in the programme.

However, this last is a minor point, and this documentary had much to it's merit, the Veteran's recollections being particularly powerful.

Some of the BBC's historical documentaries have been, in my view, hampered by presenters who do not seem to have the knowledge of the subject, but merely reading from their script – no such problems with this whatsoever. Indeed, Mark Urban proved an excellent presenter, not many could have done it better, other than David Fletcher MBE himself*.

A superb and long overdue documentary and a fitting tribute to the men of 5 RTR.

Regards,
Five-Five


* I'd like to take this opportunity to wish David congratulations on his recent retirement and all the best for the future.

 

Just to add (again as this has been niggling me), I feel that some of the issues come into play - such as the Villiers issue you highlight - are troubling. I still think its one of the best programmes on the subject matter, and frankly made me interested in 7AD ( I'm far more interested in Tank Brigades and Infantry Divisions) but...

1. Tiger vs Cromwell comparisons - terribly erroneous and done to DEATH by the historians that he took up issue with. Its like comparing a cucumber and an apple, both are fruit but they are used in radically different ways. A handful of Tigers were in Normandy compared to the armfuls of Panzer IVs, StuGs and Panthers.
2. Confusion - sometimes it was a little confusing jumping from 5RTR to the CLY at Villiers, not least that it wasn't quite clear what 5RTR were doing at the time. Also the reasons for having a brew up came as insanely foolish, some discussion could have been made on the attempt to race the I SS Panzer Corps to the front and other Tigers (again repeating your comments), and some more info on Villiers. For my part I see the part where the CLY go bashing into Villiers as insanely aggressive action despite they are heavily outgunned which the Germans could not have comprehended occurring and ultimately helped put them onto the backfoot somewhat.
3. The Great Swan et al all felt somewhat rushed.
4. 88s - not every gun was an 88, would have been nice to comment on that as well.
5. Tigers vulnerability at close ranges as all tanks in Normandy were pretty damn vulnerable in close quarter action. Also Cromwell's key turn of speed... just gone made it look like a seriously lacklustre vehicle.
6. Some additional aerial maps could have been helpful for illustrating Goodwood.

Those are my gripes expressed more in full, which I feel mean that it DID appear to make 7AD appear sticky as a whole, despite the evidence is a major countermeasure to this. I'd love to know material was edited out, or otherwise omitted.

Still think its excellent, just feel the cut of it made his point that 7AD wasn't sticky was heavily weakened. Which as this was the real 'new' part to the programme which was very interesting... disappointed me somewhat. 5 minutes on that they were not sticky vs a preceding episode on inferiority, and then say 25 minutes on inferiority could arguably entrench some myths rather than dispel them.

 

My observations:
The use of archive film was (80% of the time) not linked to the events being talked about. Several sections were used twice. Some 3 times and 1 at least 4 times. The scene where an 11th AD ammo truck blows up during EPSOM seemed very popular.
A clip of a burning Panther was used 3 times but it was filmed in August rather that the beachead battles it was linked to.
Another section showing Shermans advancing across an open field during EPSOM was played in reverse. Not very noticable to those who have not seen the original even if you miss the infantrymen walking backwards behind them!
Stragely the following mistake was repeated sevaral times.
See if you can spot it






Now the commentary:

I recognise the numbers used and can say with 99% certainty that it was lifted directly from AHF. I can also say that a still from an IWM film I posted some years back was used a few times. This still is only available as a screen capture and is not published anywhere. More to the point if he had seen the original film it came from he would have used more of it.

Very shallow but a great improvement on the many SS adoring DVDs on the subject
5 out of 10.

 

Five-Five

Re:
of particular note to me was Roy Dixon's mention that the old hands “spoke in a special language of their own, partly arabic”. I am certain I have read of such before, but to have it verbally confirmed was excellent.
I first discovered this when I arrived in Algiers in April'43 and found that, without exception, all the "old hands" used many words such as "shufti" & "maleesh" in their every day vocabulary.

We have discussed Army Slang before:
http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/general/15091-military-slang-7.html

Ron

 

Very good points Jonny. The comparison of the Cromwell to the Tiger is a particular bugbear of mine - while it is true that the Cromwell did have several shortcomings, as you quite rightly say, very few Tigers were in service in Normandy compared to scores of Panzer IVs to which, given favourable conditions, the Cromwell was pretty much equal to.

I believe a lot of the Cromwell's bad press has come about from Villers Bocage, but as David Fletcher states in his Osprey title which examines the Cromwell;

Fletcher, Osprey New Vanguard 104, Page 24:

In fact, given precisely the same circumstances, no tanks could have survived what happened outside Villers Bocage, not even if 4CLY themselves had been equipped with Tigers.
I think this is an excellent point, it was not the Cromwell's shortcomings which resulted in the chaos, but , in my view at least, the element of surprise, the location, and the high saturation of vehicles around the village.

I too find the issue of 'stickiness' troubling, as I have not at any point considered 7th Armd to be a 'sticky' formation. While it is true that, due to their experience, the men may not have possessed quite the same 'blind courage' as newer, greener men, they did have something that I would personally consider much more important; experience and courage. As Bob Lay states during the documentary;

“when you had the experience we had, you know when to go and when not to go.... and that experience saved many lives.”
I agree that a decent amount of the archive footage was not linked to the topic under discussion at the time, but alas we seem to have to accept this with the great majority of documentaries. Due to the cost involved with procuring footage (take a look at Bovington's film prices....) and, in many cases, the lack of availability of footage or stills - Gold Beach being particularly notable for photographs being none too pentiful - it is far more economical and practicable to use footage which, while not of the event, gives the 'public' the general idea at least. I do not like it, and if making a documentary I would endeavour to use appropriate footage at all times, but if it's not possible, there's not much one can do.

I did think that there were a few pieces of footage that should have had no place in the documentary though, particularly the footage of the Keonigstiger and Waffen-SS Infantry in the Ardennes.

An important attribute of their use of archive material for me was that there was very little footage showing Americans, this break from the norm was most refreshing.

Still, an excellent documentary on the whole, and one which I shall, without doubt, watch again. Thank you BBC.

I first discovered this when I arrived in Algiers in April'43 and found that, without exception, all the "old hands" used many words such as "shufti" & "maleesh" in their every day vocabulary.

We have discussed Army Slang before:
http://www.ww2talk.com/forum/general/15091-military-slang-7.html

Ron

Many thanks for that, Ron - I seem to have missed that thread, will take a dekko.

Regards,
Five-Five

 

I can't see the series on BBC or iBBC but I saw the 2nd episode on Youtube (but where is the 1st episode?).

I noticed one huge error that everybody here missed:
Somewhere at 50 minutes it shows a map in which tanks and colourisation give the impression that the tanks liberated the whole of west Holland (up to Den Helder) in september 1944 ..when the "tankies" crept through Belgium and Holland.
...oh dear... nobody noticed ?
The narrator did not mention or hinted at the market garden -failure- (despite correct footage of airborne troopers).. the Zeeland/Walcheren struggle in winter 44-45.
People here criticise the HVSS Sherman depiction ("as an american replica of the firefly"..lol), but that map is so historically incorrect and actually offensive to the suffering dutch people of the hungerwinter.


For me , it is once again an example how the BBC , really isn't that quality producer that many voice out to be.

Tssk, tssk, shame on Mark Urban (or "richard" ?).



By the way, although I enjoy getting to see a program focussing on tank units, I was not as entertained as I hoped for judging the uplifting comments here.
Most, if not all footage, I have seen before... only one or two minor things from personal experiences were new/interesting...but what is disappointing is that the episode does not captivate me like Band of Brothers did (which is propagated by "Richard").
There is no true or deep connectivity with the interviewed tankers that the american "show" did achieve.
I think it is the hasty narration, the fast pace between events , and the pressure to put as much information as possible in 60 minutes that is debet to this feeling.
Perhaps the quite lacklustre report by a commander of yet another of his colleagues burnt/splashed to pieces that shuns the viewer away from the cold/professional tank commander.
Perhaps it is because there isn't one tank unit/team interviewed together , and that stayed together all of the war, that makes it not the epic story the narrator was hoping to achieve.

To me it is an episode to see once, without repetitional value.

 

5th Royal Tank Regiment... the perfect choice by Mark Urban - Diplomatic and Defence Editor for Newsnight, Author, and presenter of Tankies: Tank Heroes of World War II.

The Second World War was such a uniquely destructive episode in human history, that entire divisions - thousands of men - were often written off in a few days fighting, with the broken remnants sent to other units. It might seem inconceivable that a formation could have gone all the way through six years of it, with a cadre of people who served in combat throughout that time, but a handful of British formations did.

So what did involvement in prolonged involvement in such intense fighting do to those who survived it and how did they rationalise their experience? The survivors are now disappearing at an alarming rate, so I couple of years ago, having found a British tank battalion that had been in combat dozens of times between the abortive 1940 campaign in France and VE Day in Germany in May 1945 I was anxious to trace former members and interview them as quickly as possible.

The choice of a tank battalion was important for a number of reasons. The issue of armoured warfare, and how the Allies managed to recoup ground lost to the Germans when they unveiled their ‘Blitzkreig’ (or ‘Lightning War’ tactics, with panzers as their centre piece) is in itself of major interest. But the other reality, sadly, is that men in infantry formations simply didn’t last long enough for a study of their role in the war as a whole to be viable.

‘Band of Brothers’ the classic work about Easy Company, one of those in the US 101st Airborne Division shows how quickly men churned through due to the casualties and stress of combat - and really it just focuses on eleven months from D-Day to the end of the war. When I looked at the record of one of the battalions of the Queen’s Regiment that was part of the famous 7th Armoured Division or Desert Rats, I found that just ten out of 1,200 who landed in Egypt with the battalion in the summer of 1942, had survived until VE Day just under three years later - half the war in other words.

So I was happy to settle on the choice of the 5th Royal Tank Regiment, or 5 RTR, another element of the Desert Rats, of which something like three dozen men in its ranks in 1945 had been with it or sister battalions at the outbreak of war. To the best of my knowledge none of them survive to this day - but I did find old soldiers who had served in its ranks for most of the war, and one of 96 who was serving with 5th Tanks in 1939 and spent four years as a prisoner of war!

My research about 5 RTR was conducted for a book that will be published in March 2013. But early on it struck me that the veterans who agreed to talk should be recorded on camera too, and soon after putting this idea to the BBC, the Tankies documentary was born, growing into its own distinctive thing.

The films feature: Harry Finlayson, that one time prisoner of war who had been captured at the battle of Sidi Rezegh in November 1941 (how many tank commanders from that bloody, and seminal, 8th Army action are still around to tell the tale ?); Gerry Solomon, a volunteer who joined soon after the outbreak of war and fought up to the battle of Normandy in 1944 when his Firefly was knocked out by SS Panzergrenadiers and he was badly wounded; Bob Lay, another desert veteran who made it all the way to the finishing line in Hamburg in 1945; and Roy Dixon who joined 5 RTR as a fresh faced subaltern in 1944 and soon rose to be the battalion’s adjutant.

Of course the work I have been doing - films and book - features much more than the testimony of veterans. It gleans dozens of written accounts, unpublished memoirs, letters and diaries. In many ways the 5th Tanks is just a typical unit of the Royal Armoured Corps - we wouldn’t pretend that it did its duty any better than some of the other regular army Royal Tank Regiment and cavalry outfits that were around in 1939.

It did however, in my view, produce a very rich seam of testimony from the other ranks - the non-commissioned soldiers who commanded most of its tanks and were its backbone. The diary of Jake Wardrop, a 5 RTR sergeant killed just weeks from the end of the war, is remarkable for its honesty and has already appeared in book form - but during this project his family made available to me extraordinary new material that was edited out of the original published text. The battalion contained many other wise chroniclers too, from hardened regular army NCOs to smart grammar school boys like Bob Lay who brought their sharp civilian sensibilities to the bloody business they were collectively engaged in.

Although usually numbering between 500 and 600, 5 RTR churned through nearly 2,500 men during the six years of war. Of these about 10% were killed in action, something like 40% were wounded and around 90 became prisoners of war like Harry Finlayson. Of the remaining difference between those who served at some time in 5th Tanks and were still there at the end of the war, hundreds were posted to other units to help train them, and others who were sometimes posted away because their nerves couldn’t take any more fighting.

What did those who remained at the centre of this battalion, the corporals and sergeants commanding tanks or the trucks of the transport echelon make of this experience? That’s the story that we will start to tell on BBC2.
Richard

This Richard. Richard Bexley ? Seems like he has something to do with this program ?

 

This Richard. Richard Bexley ? Seems like he has something to do with this program ?

Rumbled.....I would have expected by now that in true Spartacus/LoB style all the "Richards" on the site would have come forward with their "I'm Mark Urban", "no, I'm Mark Urban" interjections. I wouldn't normally comment on such things: y'know if you become part of the story... though, I used to be confused with my child/sitcom actor namesake who ran off with Tony Blackburn's wife (of course he's much, much older than me).

Enough of the flippancy, just to conclude this note by saying that I added the links for the programme, including iPlayer, because I, myself, was interested in it and unlike my Dad have never ever got anywhere near one. And by watching the programme, I've learnt a lot and by reading the ongoing comments on the thread, learnt a whole lot more.. all good. If I WAS actually Mr Urban, I would be rather pleased with all the efforts..

And the comment on the BBC, missteps apart, you've obviously not seen the recent output of ITV/C5 or C4..tsk, tsk.

keep the comments coming - I need to learn more.

best

 

I used to be confused with my child/sitcom actor namesake who ran off with Tony Blackburn's wife (of course he's much, much older than me).




Much, much, much older!

As he grows worryingly frail, Richard O'Sullivan's former co-star and lover says... I still love my Man About The House | Mail Online

 

Richard
One has always to consider the source - especially when they think that ANY Tank crew stayed to-gether for the whole of the war as I thought my crew did very well to hang on for some 14 months of fairly active service....until one day we finally bought it with one killed and two badly wounded - never did see each other again BUT our driver - Charlie Bailey from Yorkshire took time out of his Liap leave to visit the crew's parents to tell what happened.....now THAT was what being in a Tank crew was all about..
Cheers

 

Mark_Urban has contributed to the ARRSE thread about Tankies.

I hope he is the real one; god help him if he's walting on there!

 

My battalion generally teamed up with 13th/18th Hussars and we got to know each other, depended on one another as we faced the changing pattern of the battle and coming to grips with the unexpected.

The Hussars were a fine outfit, Joe. They started with 27th Armd Bde on D-Day, supporting I Corps infantry until July when the unit transferred over to 8th Armd Bde. They worked superbly with the 50th Div infantry in BLUECOAT.

 

I did notice throughout the first episode (haven't seen the second) the tendency to ascribe every failing to the Germans having 'better tanks' - the sort of technological reductionism which encumbers much military history, the idea being that success in war is simply a matter of having a slighter longer gun or a few inches more armour plate.

The Germans didn't particularly have better tanks; what they did have, at least in the early years of the war, was better tank doctrine.

Best, Alan

 

Just found this great site if you love tank photos

Flickriver: Peeteekayy's most interesting photos

 

Alan
moot point of over better German tanks in the initial phases - what was missing was an up to date doctrine of Armoured warfare in British leadership in the desert until the day when Monty was able to fire the leaders at Medenine and come up with a British strategy of "Cab Rank" support for armour and a battle grouping of all arms - we never looked back from there - early 1943 - late but not too late
Cheers

 

By some curious twist of the internet I have just viewed part one of the recent BBc programme on the Tankies of the filthy RTR battalion hich was not broadcast to north America and other countries - and I was struck by some of the words used by the narrator Mark Urban such as Sledgehammer - Shambles - Humiliation and his careful use of the language to avoid pointing the finger at the responsible people for the use of such words
as the facts were clear to all that Britain was woefully unprepared for armoured war
owing to the idiotic adherence by the Cavalry's Balaclava attitude that horses were better
than oily Tanks.
Time after time in the early desert we see British Tanks ( sic ) chasing German PzMk111's
when suddenly they disappeared to be replaced by four 88mm guns- and another squadron was wiped out - no lessons learned- Battleaxe - Crusader - Gazalaall the same tactics .

Urban slides over the one Massive victory at Beda Fomm but that was 2nd RTR - The filthy fifth were not involved with that one ....

Monty finally arrived to find his corp commanders short of new ideas - Gott was dead - Godwin- Austin had resigned - Norrie disappeared as did many others as the new broom swept very clean in days not months - to be replaced by Leese - Horrocks and Kirkman to handle the Artillery - alas the grand National winner Lumsden still headed up the Armour-and therein lay the rub...

Urban agrees with me that Alum El Halpha was the true turning point of the desert war as the Armour stood still and let the Arty and DAF do the main damage to Rommel - this also restored the confidence of the rank and file's confidence in 8th Army's leadership - he said he would win - and he did as a defensive battle- El Alamein finished him off with the offensive battle. BUT the armour still made a pig's ear out of the chase across the desert
until Medenine when Monty was able to fire Lumsden and create the British "blitzkrieg" along with Harry Broadbents "Cab Rank" air force support which was so successful at El Hamma - Tunis and later toward Antwerp...

Hopefully I shall be viewing part two probably to-morrow and the filthy fifths activities in the NWE theatre

One observation is that the 5th's veterans display all the known problems of a fighting Tank crew - deafness and shortage of breath
Cheers

 

Just watched both of the programmes and found them interesting.

Cheers
Paul