Word: tankful
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Herewith a copy of a letter to my former tank driver, who is still with the outfit in Germany...
Five thousand U.S. artillery shells rained down on Coblenz - one of them blowing to smithereens a statue of Emperor Wilhelm I. Then, one evening, a lone U.S. medium tank equipped with a loudspeaker rolled up to the Moselle river bank and hurled a surrender ultimatum across to the survivors of the Coblenz garrison. There was no answer...
...roads to Mandalay had never seen such strange companies of men: long-bearded Sikhs, tall, blond Britons, swart Gurkhas. Their companions were as strange. On almost every truck and tank perched a sad-faced monkey. A sheep marched beside an Indian Army officer, took cover with him in battle, lay down beside him at night. Fierce Gurkha warriors walked beside their mules, talked affectionately to them, brushed them devotedly (a Gurkha looks upon a mule as infallible, and weeps like a child when one is killed...
...before that the enemy is indeed tough. There is a closeup of a bullet-hole in flesh, at once as intimate and as impersonal as if it were your own wound, so new you cannot yet feel it. There is a shot made through the slot of a tank of a Japanese soldier trying to evade the machine-gun bullets which stitch the ashes all around him. Bemused, almost hypnotized in his dreadful slowness, fumbling in the footless dust with much the clumsiness of a terrified rat, he half falls, at last, behind a mound. For a moment, before...
There is also a moment, inside the same tank, of intercom dialogue which was recorded on the spot. It is spoken, against insane din, in voices so local, so familiar, that your impulse is to look into the face of the last man who spoke and say something in reply. But the speaker's face does not appear; and if you are a civilian, it is unlikely that there are any words you could find...