Angry Planet - Comics, Garth Ennis, and the Golden Age of Tanks

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

“From mud, through blood, to the green fields beyond.” The tank was meant to push through entrenched enemy lines and put an end to the stale-mate of trench warfare during The Great War. It created a whole new kind of combat. It was high risk, high reward, as men in armored units trundled across the world.With us today is comics writer Garth Ennis. Ennis is the diabolical mind behind Sara, Hitman, War Stories, The Boys, and Preacher. He’s here today talking about his new collection of war stories—Tankies. Set during WWII and the Korean War, Tankies tells the story of British tank crews as they fight across Europe and Asia.Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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freedom is never a saint-guided peaceful anyone who is depriving you of freedom isn't deserving of a peaceful approach hello and welcome to angry planet i'm matthew gault from mud through blood to the greenfields beyond the tank was meant to push through entrenched enemy lines and put an end to the stalemate of trench warfare during the great war it ended up creating a whole new kind of combat it was high risk high reward as men and armored units trundled across the world. With us today is comics writer Garth Innes. Innes is the diabolical mind behind Sarah, hitman, war stories, The Boys, and Preacher. He's here today talking with us about his new collection of war stories, Tankies. Set during World War II and the Korean War, Tankies tells the story of British tank crews as they fight across Europe and Asia. Sir,

thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. So what it is at What is it about tanks? Why do we love them so much? Why do we like telling stories about them? I think on the most basic level, it's a big clanking machine, a big iron box with a gun that goes bang. And that takes hold of you at a young enough age, you never forget it. As for a story, it's a good opportunity to tell a team story. You've got four or five guys very much focused on the same object, each with his own individual job, but all part of a co-heaval.

here at the hole. And if they get it right, they survive, they drive on to triumph. Of course, what you need there, especially in comics, is you need a really good artist, which I did have in Carlos Ascarra, because you're talking, again, you're talking about four or five guys, all wearing the same uniform, probably white in the gloomy interior of a tank surrounded by metal. So you've got to make sure you have someone who can make those four or five guys look like individuals. And that was what, that was something Carlos excelled at. Yeah, I noticed the, the, the, the, the, Hockney grew a mustache between volume one and volume two. Was that something that was consciously done to further distinguish him,

or just to show that he was growing and changing? I don't think that the only, as far as I know, the only two characters that followed from the first story were Stiles, who's a Jordy, and then also, although a lot of people didn't realize this, the German tank commander is the same bloke, But Stiles himself, the Jordie Tank Commander, he's been promoted from Corporal to Sargent. He's still the same ugly, bad-tempered little sod that he was in the first story. Carlos really brought that.

Carlos has a nice cartoonish sense to his artwork. And I think he brought out that aspect of Stiles. Stiles is almost a grotesque. He's got this horrible, knobbly little face. By no means is he a handsome man? He's almost a gargoyle. But Carlos really brought that out perfectly. I thought it's slightly larger than life, permanently bad-tempered, Jordi Tink Commander.

I'm glad you used the word grotesque. So I think that's, that would be one of the art, like the artistic themes I think of your work overall, is this kind of fascination with the grotesque. And I think it really works in like a war story, especially because you do have these, in a war, you have these long, boring moments that are punctuated by horrifying imagery. Can you talk a little bit about the use of the grotesque in comic books and in war stories in particular? So I'm thinking back to Kurtzman and the old EC guys. It's one of those things that, as you say, a certain amount of your story is going to involve scenes of dialogue, people just talking,

anticipating what's about to happen to them. We're talking about what just had. And you want characters to come alive during those scenes just as they do in the action scenes. you want characters that stick in the reader's mind. And if that means a little bit of exaggeration, if it means this strange, knobbly-faced little man shouting, as I say, in a permanently bad timbre, that just helps to bring it alive.

It helps to get away from that kind of dry documentary feel that these stories can sometimes have. No one knows anyone who looks exactly like styles. I don't think that that person exists. But everyone knows, no matter what, situation you're talking about. Everyone knows that sort of slightly larger than life guy who's louder than everyone else or uglier than everyone else or has a worse attitude than everyone else or has some combination of these elements. And it's having a character like styles who tars

over the others in that sense that can help give a story a bit of zest, a bit of life where it would otherwise be quite dry. I'm glad you mentioned some of these, some war stuff, especially war literature can feel dry and documentary. I thought one of the really interesting tricks that you pull in this is that you put a lot of the tank nerd exposition in conversations with the different officers as they're talking about how they're going to, how do we deal with this king tiger? And then, I don't know, I like, there's a great scene thing towards the end of the first book or maybe this top of the second where they have a downed tiger.

and one tank commander encourages the Jordy to, or Stiles, who I think is a sergeant at this point, to take aim and practice on this thing. I know you did a lot of research for these books. How much of the stuff is pulled directly from primary sources? Did something like that ever happen? Things like that did happen, but just not in the circumstances that I portray where an American tank commander says, look, it's sitting there. If you want to have a pop out of it, go ahead, try your 17-pounder gun on it. There were instances during the Normandy fighting or in between actions where the British in particular were very concerned to find out whether or not their new 17-pounder gun would cut through the armour of the tigers and the panthers.

They did try them out on a few wrecks. It's interesting, I see when you read the accounts of these tests where one guy said that he watched the shot from the 17-pounder bounce off the front of a panther. and thought, oh God, here we go again, because this guy had served in the desert, and he'd seen the British two-pounder bounce off the Panzer Mark 3 and Panzer Mark 4. But another unit said that their 17-pounders cope with the Panthers, no problem at all, and there are certainly plenty of instances of that happening in combat, not just the test. So the thing did seem to work, but I would imagine that, to go back to your question, any opportunity these guys had to try and find out whether or not the new technology that they had was going to work on the enemy.

I'm sure they would grab any opportunity they could. It just makes sense. What was daily life like for someone in the tank crew during World War II? I think what you said earlier sums it up the long periods of boredom, followed by moments of horrifying violent action back to if you survive the periods of boredom. But I think what broke up even the quiet times where the concentrated periods of maintenance that these enormously complex machines required,

the gun had to be maintained and kept clean. Likewise, the engine, the tracks and the bogey wheels had to be checked. So much to do on those things so that when the moment comes, it won't let you down in combat. And this was actually especially true for the Germans whose tiger and panther tanks, while impressive looking,

were over-engineered and prone to breakdown, had all sorts of problems with those things. That's why in the story, you'll see that the tiger and the king tiger do horrific damage to allied tanks, but they keep breaking down. When you see the tiger, at one point, it can't take part in the battle because they're working on the engine. The king tiger in the second story actually breaks down in the middle,

of the fight and you see the driver praying to the gods of war or gods of armor or gods of anybody. Just start, please start, please start. So those things were extremely labor intensive and would have taken up a good part of the day of any German tank crew. And I think beyond that, it's probably just the social aspect of those four or five guys, scavenging around for better food than iron rations. And fighting in the Normandy countryside, of course, was all sorts of stuff there for the taking and a great deal of livestock, I think, went missing from French farms in the vicinity as well as Calvados, which is that particularly lethal

apple brandy that's made in the region. I think the tank crews appropriated a good deal of that and paid the price. So really, I think it's just a sort of daily life would be that of any soldier while having to maintain and occasionally fight this horribly complex. piece of machinery on which you were betting your life, literally. How did the rest of the infantry view the tank crews? What was that relationship like? I think when it worked, it was pretty good in that the infantry would rely on the tanks to solve certain problems for them, and they would reciprocate when the time came.

When an anti-tank gun starts popping away at the tanks, that's an infantry job. but for most of the time the infantry are happy to go in behind the tanks and use them as cover and so on there are accounts of reminiscences by both infantry soldiers did say that when a tank was hit and burned and the crew were trapped

and they heard them screaming inside unable to escape from this metal furnace they would look at each other and say oh my God I'd never get into one of those things ever ever and likewise the tank soldiers remember the infantry being moaned on by enemy machine guns, nowhere to run, no cover, and hear those same bullets sparking off their hulls and thinking, my God, I wouldn't have that guy's job, not for all the money in the world. So I suppose it's incredibly subjective.

It's whatever, it's whatever's under your nose at the time is going to form your, is going to form your memory of the experience. I think each was glad of the other being there, neither really wanted the other's job. I mean, I think that may be a cork of war, right? Nobody wants to do what is perceived as the dangerous job everyone else has to do. What are the unique qualities of the comic medium that make it good for telling stories about war? It's very immediate. A story I'm writing now will appear in a matter of months from now. A movie would take anything up to a year, perhaps longer. There's an immediacy to the artwork, that visual impact. You can, get straight away. Now, probably not as vivid and visceral as film, but again, we get to do

things quicker. And we also get to do, we get to cover a great deal more territory. There was that movie Fury about five or six years ago, the Brad Pitt tank won. And a very impressive film, but that's probably going to be it for mainstream big budget tank films for another five or 10 years. I think it did reasonably well, but it wasn't a world beater, so no one in Hollywood is going, we want more tanks. Whereas in comics, I can really write as many of those as I like, and I can range further afield. I've probably been writing war comics for about 20 years now, and I've written tank stories, infantry stories, fighter pilots, snipers, motor gunboats, battleships, torpedo bombers. I've done World War II, Korean War, Yom Kippur War. I can really go

anywhere and anywhere and I like and cover any battle, any mode of warfare I choose. And I've been able to do all that in that time. Now, if I was a filmmaker in 20 years, even if I could make nothing but war films, and I just wouldn't be able to do that because of the economic reality of Hollywood and where people's tastes like. Even if I could make only war movies, I might have managed to make, what, a dozen in that time? Maybe.

That's being generous, I think. Let's cut that in half and say half a dozen. That's more sensible. Budget, cast, equipment, the hardware, the crews, the locations, whereas comics, writer, artist, colorist,

letter, and we're away. Why are you drawn to telling these kinds of stories? Like, stuff that's more anomaly fantasy or about other topics. There's almost always, you know, William Butcher is a veteran of the Falklands in the comic. Jesse Custer's dad, his guy was a Vietnam veteran, there's always this element in there. Why is this something that you keep coming back? Like everyone else in comics, I'm interested to an extent in reproducing the comics I grew up on.

I just read different comics as a kid. And the reason for that is while everyone else was reading superhero comics, because of a quirk in the distribution of those in the part of Northern Ireland I grew up in. I didn't see them. Occasionally, they might appear on the newsstands, very occasionally, but not to any great extent, not very frequently. It was very hard to follow them. So I read the mainstream British titles, and apart from 2000 AD, which in which Judge Dred appeared, which is a sort of science fiction action comic, the vast majority of my reading was where British work was, where British work comics, most obviously battle, but also series like War Picture Library and Commando, which are

smaller, Digest Format, Black and White War Stories. So I grew up on these things in a way that no one else did, really. And I then followed, you know, as a little kid, I slowly became aware that these comics, allowing for the hyperbole of comic book storytelling at the time, were based on things that had happened in a way that Superman and Batman and Judge Dread are not reading battle and seeing stories about fighter pilots and soldiers in World War I and stuff. I did become aware that these things had happened and that led me to an interest in military history, which survives to this day. And so when I started writing comics myself, I wanted to write my own war comics. I wanted to explore these themes and look at these historical events too. So I suppose

As I say, I'm just doing what everyone else does. It's just that my comics from childhood that I encountered during childhood are different to it almost everybody else's. Obviously, very kind of different comic traditions in Britain and America. I've always been fascinated by, this is some cultural ignorance on my part. In America, we had this grand tradition of this kind of vibrant medium in the 40s and 50s where people are telling their superhero books, But there's also the war comics, there's the horror comics, there's the romance comics, there's all kinds of genres. In the 1954, one psychologist publishes a book and gets everyone frightened, kind of the quick version of the story. And we get down restricted to just this place where there's just superhero books.

Did anything similar happen in Britain? Did that book have an impact in Britain at all? Was there to retreat from the more graphic imagery and the more true-to-life stories? Not really. You were, as you say, your comics were hamstrung by the Code, by the Comics Code Authority, which is a strange organization with a surprisingly arbitrary set of values. A friend of mine who told me the one time he actually heard from anyone of the Comics Code, a friend who used to work at Marvel Comics told me that he got a call from them very late at night. The guy said, I'm from the Comics Code and I'm objecting to something you've put in this new book. And he said he said, he's, He rapidly realized this guy was drunk, severely drunk, and he had a bizarre conversation with him about what he was supposed to change in the book. And he realized the guy was so incoherent that he didn't even know what he wanted him to change. However, the existence of the code meant that everyone had to be very careful.

Rob Haney, who went to work for DC's War Comics, not long after his World War II Military Service, described it as, describe the comics as bowing to a formula for war stories that had nothing to do with the reality of war, but it was a formula that worked. And that's why when you see classics like Sergeant Rock and so on, you'll see tanks blowing up and airplanes being shot on, but you'll very rarely see people being shot. And if you do, it'll happen in the background. You'll see small indistinct figures in the background falling over. You won't see anything more vivid. than that. And this was all because you couldn't show people getting killed. That's why Sergeant

Rock, for instance, and his guys will usually end up in a sort of weird fist fight with the German unit rather than Tommy gunning them at close range. In Britain, there was never a comics code, and there was never really that moment where everyone panicked and said, oh my God, we can't do this anymore. There was just a steady, quite organic advance towards what we might call explicit or adult storytelling. When Battle was published, Battle was, it's my favorite war comic and it was a British war comic anthology that was published in the mid-70s. There were often complaints about content, but the editor, a guy called Dave Hunt, said that when he replied to the complaints and said, look, look, these things happened.

We are simply showing the reality of what happened in, for instance, the Burma campaign or the Russian front. And we don't see any reason to hold back. We don't see any reason to be dishonest about this. He said that tended to end the argument there and then. Although battle survived until the 80s and then a sort of general decline in war comics, saw seals fall away and the comic be cancelled. But in its heyday, it had no problem with showing pretty near the knuckle, realistic scenes of war comics violence. And that, I think, that sort of

survives into the present day and the kind of work that myself and others do. Of course, the comics code is now gone. It's long gone. It collapsed about 20 or 30 years ago. And it's just not a concern for me and for people like me. We don't have to worry about that anymore. Was there never a perception in Britain there was in the United States that, this was a medium exclusively for children? Oh yeah. Very definitely. It's just that I think for some people beg the question. In that case, what is it okay to show children? If we're going to do war stories, for instance, should we simply make them hyperbolic fantasy or should we maybe be honest about what happens

in them? Dave Hunt, for instance, the battle editor wanted to show the truth of the Burma campaign for instance. He also wanted to demonstrate to a young British audience that the Russians played a huge role in World War II in the defeat of the Nazis. Really, no one, this was the height of the Cold War and no one else was in any hurry to tell us about this. So I do feel he did us a good service there. And the stories that appeared in the comic that dealt with those issues are among the very best. Darkie's mob by John Wagner and Mike Western and Johnny Red by Joe Colhoun and Tom Tully. And another story, a famous one called Charlie's War by Pat Mills and Joe Colhoun.

These opened the eyes of a whole generation of young readers to certain historical realities that I think you could honestly say had a very strong educational effect. Well, and I feel that to a certain extent, comics get to fly under the radar in a way that a television program in a big, budget movie does not. There's an intimacy to the medium, and it's so easily like, I remember sitting under my covers with comic books, reading them in the middle of the night when I was a kid. Like, I could have never gotten up and watched whatever movie was playing in the middle of the night. My parents would have known. Do you think that allowed, that kind of allowed people to tell stories that were more honest in the medium than you could get away with?

I think so. I think so. Pat Mills, who wrote Charlie's, which is a World War one story about a young guy who joins the British Army just in time for the Battle of the Psalm. Quite spectacularly bad timing there, actually. He saw it as his mission to fill his story with as much really educational material about the reality of the First World War as he possibly could because he just knew it wasn't being taught in schools that an entire generation was growing up not knowing anything.

but the most vague details about the Great War, which of course was rapidly receding into the historical rearview mirror. Yes, so Pat and others, but specifically Pat Mills, I think definitely saw that as their mission to get these ideas across. How many of these old, this old guard were veterans themselves? The guys who did battle were generally not. There was one guy, a fellow called Eric Hebden, who I, think had been an artillery officer in World War II and he was generally relied on for the technical details. There were also some people in management who were definitely veterans. I remember there was a guy one of the publishers of Battle or sorry who was on the editorial board. It was a guy called

Jack Legrand who I think had been a glider pilot at Arnhem. But they were few and far between what these guys mostly were, guys who in the mid-send, 70s are in their mid-20s and are really opening comics up to a whole new view of things. Comics have become hidebound. They're not really doing anything interesting. And the people like Pat Mills and John Wagner creating the stories I grew up on, see it as an opportunity to do some new material, find out new things for the medium to do, open people's eyes. What makes a good tank story? What makes a compelling tank story? What differentiates something like tankies from the haunted tank?

I have to say I have a bit of a soft spot for the haunted tank because it is a sort of brilliantly insane silly story. But what I set out to do with the tankies and with a couple of other things I've done is just try to get things a bit closer to the reality of what it was like for tank crews. Funny thing is that at one point to answer your question, your question, I would have said that a good tank story has to involve a scene. where one tank meets another and there's some degree of armoured combat. But in fact, I thought the last tankie story where the British centurions race in to rescue the British troops from the advancing Chinese army, worked perfectly well without enemy tanks because that's what happened.

No enemy tanks showed up. I believe that in the Korean War, it was actually the American forces who, the American tank forces who ran into armored opposition. The British had just did. didn't have enemy tanks in their sector at that time, which I think was a bit frustrating because the Centurion, of course, was the British tank that had been created to finally dominate the battlefield in a way that none of their other tanks had. And now there was nothing to try it out on. But of course, they found their own problems. And this is, as I say, you don't

need to have enemy tanks showing up to have a good tank story. When you're running your Centurion tanks at top speed down this road with, I think, quite literally thousands of Chinese soldiers coming at you and they're crawling all over the tanks and trying to pry open the hatches and get grenades in. I think that's very much its own nightmare. And reading about that, it instantly became something I wanted to write about it. Perfect. Segway, or my next question, does the research come first or does the idea come first? Does it sounds, sorry, go ahead. It varies. Sometimes, you know, a lot of this stuff comes from stories I've been reading my whole life. As I say, as a kid, did slowly develop this interest in

military history. Sometimes it'll be just that little detail that'll make you want to spin out a whole story. I think in the Korean War story in the book, that began with my reading about the Gloucester regiment and their stand on Gloucester Hill. But there is that sort of interesting little sting in the tail to that story where the British then send their tanks in to the try and rescue the other units who were more fortunate than the Gloucesters. And there are details like the tanks being swarmed by Chinese soldiers and having to, as they put it, delouse each other where one tank would stay still while another machine gunned it, thus removing the Chinese soldiers. And then that tank would shoot back at the other tank and do the same thing for it.

This sort of, it's a horrific thought. And yet it's a very compelling image. It really sparks to the imagine. Beyond that, the second, I'm working backwards here. The second story was a little unlikely because it portrays a duel between two tanks, the Sherman Firefly and the King Tiger, really without any other participants, which was very unusual for World War II, because, of course, there's artillery, airstrikes, accompanying infantry, all anti-tank guns, all these things that can get in the way of a pure armored jewel. But because I wanted that to be a little bit more of a personal story, for Stiles as he reaches a level of obsession with destroying the enemy, I thought it was the way to go. And then the first one really comes from a ton of reading I've done about the Battle for Normandy,

where the British and the Americans and the Canadians smash themselves against the German armor week in, week out. They have massive numerical superiority. They have very near air supremacy. And yet the Germans proved to be such a tough nut to crack that it still takes, I think, six, seven weeks for them to bash through the Germans, break out, surround them at fillets, and then move on into the low countries. I think the first one was really an attempt to capture a little bit of the flavor of that battle with the 101 challenges that the Allies faced in the Bocage country. Can you explain the differences between how a German soldier viewed himself versus how an Allied soldier, and especially the British soldier, viewed themselves?

Yeah, yeah. With the Germans, there is that degree of military professionalism that goes back to, I think, that's sort of Prussian ethos. That's backed up by a good deal of brutality. I believe the penalty for desertion in the US Army during 1944 was five years in the stockade. You can probably guess what the penalty for desertion in the German army was. It was a lot more final, and it wasn't the kind of thing that you could just say, yeah, all right, I'm off, I'll do my five years later. You're also talking about a totalitarian society that has produced a good deal of fanaticism, especially in the Waffin SS and similar units. The regular army units have this incredible level of professionalism, this diehard attention to duty.

The Waffin SS take that a stage further. but of course some of their activities go over the brink into the frequent committing of war atrocities and so on. So you are talking about men who are incredibly hard and professional to begin with and who are occasionally over the edge into fanaticism. Now the British and the Americans, the British in particular, both countries raise their armies, conscripted armies in World War II. They fill their armies out with citizen soldiers. men who are soldiers for the duration and then fully expect to return to civilian life.

This is a job that has to be done, but that's all it is. And the British in particular, I've always thought that for the generation that went through World War I and managed to survive, there is this incredible sense of betrayal where they took horrific casualties, lived in unimaginable squalor, and were told that they were fighting, that what was waiting for them when they got home would be a land fit for heroes. What they actually got was the 1920s and 30s and driven with unemployment, social unrest, poverty,

any ideas of a land fit for heroes or fighting for the glory of the empire and so really got short shrift. And so when World War II comes along and you have the sons of those men being called up to join the army, there's far less of the kind of, dedication to duty that their fathers would have shown at the beginning of the First World War,

but was slowly knocked out of them through sheer disillusionment. And you have this Second World War generation of men who, well, as I say, they see it as a job to be done, but it is not a grand crusade. They do not have a great cause. They are best, dubious and sometimes openly suspicious of the motives of their leaders. They do not react well to officers, for instance, who they regard as being incompetent. And you might say that their commitment, their level of commitment perhaps doesn't always match that of the Germans. But on the other hand, the British soldiers, the British and American soldiers of World War II do not really have this record of atrocity and wrongdoing that can be laid at their door. There are incidents. Things do happen. I know

when American soldiers learned of massacres of American prisoners by Waffan SS troops during the Battle of the Bulge, they pretty quickly reciprocated. That's only natural. But you can't find anything in the British or American record to match what the Germans got up to in Russia, for instance, or indeed what the Russians did when they got to Germany. You might say that what that comes down to is the things that conscripted soldiers, citizen soldiers, from democracies will do and can be expected to do compared to what men coming from totalitarian societies who have perhaps had a good deal more ideology knocked into them what they're going to do

and what on the kind of behavior you can expect from them. Can you explain the phrase, enjoy the war, the peace will be terrible? Yeah. That was one of those sort of bleak one-liners that was doing the rounds in Germany. towards the end of World War II, as the German people and the German military realized that actually this hasn't been such a good idea after all. And things are tough now because our soldiers are retreating on every front and our cities are being bombed flat by the American and British Air Forces.

But when we have to face the reckoning, particularly of the Russians after the war, then it's going to be no fun at all. And they were right about that. They were absolutely right. Another one of my favorite bits in this was the colonel taking an inspirational stroll. Can you lay out that scene in your comic and then tell us how it is similar to events that actually occurred? Yeah. I think with the, there's a scene in the first story, the first tankie story where a British armored unit is about to launch an attack. And their other attacks have gone very badly.

They've lost all their armor. They've taken heavy casualties. and their commanding officer senses this and he takes a sort of stroll in full view of the German lines with his second in command. I think they're talking about birdwatching actually and he's very blithe, very debonair,

but he knows exactly what he's doing and he knows the effect he's having on his men because he's inspiring them. And that was, as you've guessed, based directly on a memoir, of reminiscence. I read by some British troops who saw their colonel and his second in command.

I think they actually took shooting sticks, which are those sort of portable seats that people used to take with them when they went grouse shooting or whatever. And they set these up in full few of German lines under German fire and proceeded to have a bit of a chat. And the guy said, no one was fooled by this. No one didn't know why they were doing it. But at the same time, it did morale a lot of good.

and it bucked up the troops a bit. So one of those strange little details that you just can't not put in the story. There was another moment that was really fascinating was when those nine guys repel that entire infantry assault. Can you tell that story? That was a true one as well, right? Yes, it's, as I recall, what happens is

that they find essentially a fieldful of dead British troops where an attack has gone badly wrong. And they know the Germans are going to be counter-attacking very quickly indeed. What happened was, I think, an officer said, all right, everyone should go down into this field and find a brand gun being that rapid-fire light machine gun that was the British used to such good effect. And they did this. And when the German attack did come in, they were able to stop it.

I think that was just one of those smart plays by a British officer. The British, it's one of those no-your-enemy things. things, they did realize that the Germans were in the habit of counterattacking very quickly, which can be quite daunting. But at the same time, they understood that if you could be ready for it, you could inflict massive casualties because the Germans would just, it's that, I think there's an element of that fanaticism that SS troops showed where they would just mount a pretty much a bayonet charge straight into the British guns. As I said, that could be quite daunting, but the British realized if they were ready for it, in fact, they would be the ones doing it.

the damage and so it proved in this instance. I think something similar happened in the Far East, the famous Japanese banzai charge where a battalion or a company of Japanese infantry comes flying at their opponent, everyone's screaming, bayonets and swords glinting in the sun. And many allied troops were put to flight by this sort of display. Their morale broke. But as the war went on, they realized, hang on, all they're doing is making themselves a marvelous target. They were able to inflict heavy casualties on the Japanese in this way. All right, Angry Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break.

We are talking to Garth Innes about tankies. All right, thank you for sticking with us. Angry Planet listeners. Now back to our conversation with Garth Innes about his comic tankies. What differentiated take combat from World War one to the Korean War? How are they different? Or World War II in the Korean War? My apologies.

I suppose in the Korean War, it's just, so much rarer. I think I already said that the British tanks never ran into any armored opposition. I believe when the North Korean advance began, their T-34s basically made mincemeat of anything they ran into. But there were so few American tanks at the time, and what there were, I think those light tanks, those M24 Jaffe, which very effective reconnaissance tank, very fast, low profile, but not. much good for tank-to-tank combat. And so when the Americans began their push north, I believe they made sure that they led with Pershings, the M26, which was like the Centurion, pretty much too late for

World War II. A few Pershings did see combat towards the end of the 1945 fighting, but in the Korean War, they were exactly what was needed to combat the T-34. And I believe the American units wrought havoc on the North Koreans. Beyond that, though, apart from the sort of first year and a half of the Korean War, and this is true of that war throughout, there really wasn't much more to it than that, because in 52 and 53, that war becomes a very bogged down attritional affair, and there aren't many advances or retreats. It's just the two sides slugging away at each other. so their armored activity dies off as well. Apart from the instances I've talked about with the Pershings against the T-34,

you really don't get much tank-on-tank combat, and you certainly don't get anything like the vast clashes of huge armored armies that you get in World War II. World War II is a golden age of tank combat, right? We haven't really seen anything like that since, have we? I suppose the Israeli in the Six-Day War, and the Yom Kippur War did experience a good deal of tank combat with their fighting on the Golan Heights in the Sinai Desert. I believe they experienced massed Arab armored charges, odds of 10, 12 to 1, that they were actually able to come out of victorious, I think, because their tanks were so good, British centurions and American M60s.

and their tactics were so good. Apart from that, I think perhaps India and Pakistan have had a few dust-ups. Funny enough, the British Centurion pops up there as well. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's been a great deal of tank-versus tank combat. I don't think it's a thing of the past, but I suppose the last big one would have been what the Gulf War in 91

when the British and Americans, again, carved up all the Iraqi armor. Yes, and there's Syria actually has an impressive amount of armor that it's been using in its Civil War. But I don't know if I would clap, like, but that's very different. I don't think it would be, it doesn't rise

to the same level as what we see in World War II or even the Gulf War. I don't think. You've run through my basic tank questions. I'm going to start getting a little bit weird. Let's see how I want to phrase this. And this is a particularly American viewpoint, I think. But superhero

culture dominates American the American pop culture landscape right now. As I was watching Falcon and Winter Soldier this weekend, like a good Marvel consumer, it occurred to me that

it feels like superhero literature right now is the only way that Americans can engage on a pop culture level with the wars that it's fighting. Do Americans use superhero literature to abstract from telling stories about the wars that they are currently engaged in? Possibly.

I've always struggled to find any kind of a point to superhero stories. If you can shoot lasers out of your eyes or whatever, that's going to just skew any kind of conflict and any kind of story about conflict. I can recall after 9-11 seeing a Captain America story where he's trying to dig survivors out of the wreckage of the World Trade Center. Then someone says, we need you on a secret mission in da-da-da-da. And I don't really know where to go or what to say about those stories because they are so far from any kind of relevance to what's about to happen. If you have that superhero answer to everything, which is simply to find the bad guy and beat him, part of the problem of the last 20 years is actually finding the bad guy.

So why superheroes would be any better at that than anyone else by the intelligence gathering services with their incredible tech. technology. I suppose what I'm saying is it just pushes the thing further and further into fantasy and therefore makes the story less worthwhile. It might be better to keep superheroes out of that kind of story and just keep them doing what they've always done, which is beating up all their brightly colored people with superpowers in attractive costumes. You don't like superheroes, correct as a genre in general? I don't like their domination of the industry. Earlier on you talked about how at one point

you had romance comics, action comics, crime, horror, sitting beside superhero comics. I would like to see a return to that rather than 95% of the industry's output being what it's always done. So that's one thing I find frustrating. It doesn't mean you can't do interesting stuff with the idea of the superhero

look at Watchmen, look at Miracle Man, look at Dark Night. Look at the boys. Right. Things like that or some of Warren Ellis stuff, super gods and things. But the problem boils down to that companies continuing to pump out product that's always worked for them. And so in a way, it doesn't really matter about what any philosophical insights into superheroes and their place in the industry and what can be done with them because they are product. they get a good response commercially and they will continue to be produced.

Well, and they're in it's beyond now, even the comic book industry, right? This idea of superhero individuals dominates the pop culture at the moment. It is in TV. It is in the big budget films. It is beyond what started there. That's actually been extremely successful in a way that I think at one point people didn't expect that to happen. but I think all that happened was the filmmaking technology simply advanced to the point where all of a sudden you could make this stuff look believable,

you would believe a man could fly, ha ha, ha, you couldn't see the wires. And all of a sudden people went, oh yeah, okay, that looks decent, I'll go for that, I'll buy that. But you're right, it has led to saturation. It has led the last, what, 10, 15 years to a massive glut of superhero material. I would say to the detriment of film and TV, sadly. So if you had told me five years ago, even five years ago, that the boys would become the basis for one of the most, I think, popular television shows that's running right now.

I would not have believed you. I would have called you a liar. I would have said there's no way anyone would have been able to make that and do it well. But you've got this thing, the show on Amazon, that is really incredible. Again, it's about superheroes, though. Why do you think that particular story that you've written has caught on and why are people so invested in the boys? There's a spinoff show coming out as well. Yeah.

First of all, I'd be the first to admit that there's an element here of having my cake and eating it. Because here's a story about superheroes, about people who don't like and don't trust superheroes that seems to have, as you say, enjoyed enormous success. And I think related to that, we talked about how superheroes have come to dominate film and TV. The boys could not have succeeded without that because, five years ago, even, there simply wouldn't have been enough general public knowledge of these characters. There wouldn't have been enough acceptance of them. And yet now, the general public viewers of superhero film and TV shows have exactly the same understanding that comic readers always had, which is these guys always have.

exist in the same universe. They all live in the same world. And in this world, it is entirely natural to be walking down the street in New York and see Spider-Man swing past and walk a couple more blocks and the Hulk rampages past. And maybe that afternoon you'll catch a glimpse of Ironman. Point is, they're all there. And the general public has now been educated to this notion of the shared universe. And the boys couldn't have worked without that. Because the boys relies on one of those shared superhero universes where those superheroes are extremely dubious people and a small CIA back unit has arisen to do something about it. So yes, one was definitely very reliant on the other.

Yeah, the deep doesn't make sense as a comedic figure unless you are intimately aware with how much Aquaman sucks, right? Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us. I know we only had you for an hour. I do want to say before I let you go, though, that I found a friend's copy of Preacher, Volume 3, Proud Americans that had the Vietnam story and the Cassidy's coming to America's story. At a formative age, when I did not know that comic books could be more than just superheroes, that there were these kinds of stories out there.

And that book unlocked a whole world for me. Thank you for writing it. And Preacher, as a boy growing up in Texas, was a very important book for me. Thank you very much. Thank you. Garthinis, the new book is, tankies, and it's out now, I believe, correct? That's right, yeah, from Dead Reckoning. And it's an excellent look at mechanized combat in World War II in the Korean War. Thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you. That's all for this week on Angry Planet.

The show is me, Matthew Galt, Kevin O'Dell, and Jason Fields. He's created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like the show for just $9 a month, you can get access to two bonus episodes. That's at Angry Planet Pod or Angry Planet Pod, or angryplanet.substack.com. As always, thank you for listening. We will be back next week

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