Buried among the admirably detailed archives of The Tank Museum in Bovington, Dorset, is this account of a ferocious pitched battle, from the point of view of a tank commander – in this case, a British Lieutenant named Ken Giles:

“The 75mm main gun is firing,” Lt Giles recalls, breathlessly. “The 37mm secondary gun is firing, but it’s traversed round the wrong way. The Browning [machine gun] is jammed. I am saying, ‘Driver advance’ on the A set, but the driver – who can’t hear me – is reversing.

“And as I look over the top of the turret, and see 12 enemy tanks, just 50 yards away, someone hands me a cheese sandwich.”

But, while this story might seem funny to a civilian, it sums up what, for many tank commanders today, is the very recognisable chaos of tank warfare.

This particular cheddar-based incident occurred in an M3 Grant tank in North Africa, during the build-up to the Second Battle of El Alamein in the Second World War. But, as the Tank Museum’s curator David Willey points out, the same bedlam could have happened at any time in the past century.

“Our museum has chronicled stories from the eight-men crews in the first tanks in World War One,” says Willey, “as well as accounts from tank crews in the Second World War, the Cold War and even modern battlefronts like Iraq and Afghanistan. Mix them up and you wouldn’t know which era they came from.”

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