World Of Tanks Crew Quotes

A tank and its crew has but one reason to exist. To maneuver the tank’s cannon to a position where it could do the most damage and feed it once it was there.

The explosion At first the crew thought a meteoroid had hit them. As well as the noise of an explosion, the electrics were going haywire and the attitude control thrusters had fired. In fact, a short circuit had ignited some insulation in the Number 2 oxygen tank of the Service Module. The Service Module provided life support, power and other systems to the Command Module, which held the astronauts as they travelled to and from lunar orbit. The Lunar Module was a separate, though connected, craft that would be used to ferry the men to the lunar surface and back. The fire caused a surge in pressure that ruptured the tank, flooding the fuel cell bay with gaseous oxygen. This surge blew the bolts holding on the outer panel, which tore off free and spun into space, damaging a communications antenna. Contact with Earth was lost for 1.8 seconds, until the system automatically switched to another antenna. The shock also ruptured a line from the Number 1 oxygen tank. Two hours later all of the Service Module’s oxygen supply had leaked into the void. As the Command Module’s fuel cells used oxygen with hydrogen to generate electricity, it could now only run on battery power. The crew had no option but to shut down the Command Module completely and move into the Lunar Module. They would then use this as a ‘lifeboat’ for the journey back to Earth before rejoining the Command Module for re-entry. As for the mission, the Service Module was so badly damaged that a safe return from a lunar landing was impossible. These men would not be landing on the Moon. 320,000 km from home The Flight Director immediately aborted the mission. Now he just had to get the men home. The quickest way would be a Direct Abort trajectory, using the Service Module engine to essentially reverse the craft. But it was too late:

Crawling through the snow, Panse and his crew-mates black Panzer crew uniforms stood out starkly, and they were perfect targets, not only for Soviet riflemen, but for Red anti-tank gunners as well. Alternately running, diving and crawling, the four of the five men in the crew made it back to their regimental HQ. The fifth man, separated from the others, spent the night in a shell hole, covered in snow and earth and surrounded by Russians. What saved him was the parking of a T-34 right on top of his hole, which hid him from the Russians until the morning when they moved out. After a freezing night in the snow, the man struggled into the regimental HQ.

• While Rommel was going to see Hitler to beg for more tanks and a tighter command structure, Eisenhower was visited by Churchill, who was coming to the supreme commander to beg a favor. He wanted to go along on the invasion, on HMS Belfast. (“Of course, no one likes to be shot at,” Eisenhower later remarked, “but I must say that more people wanted in than wanted out on this one.”) As Eisenhower related the story, “I told him he couldn’t do it. I was in command of this operation and I wasn’t going to risk losing him. He was worth too much to the Allied cause. “He thought a moment and said, ‘You have the operational command of all forces, but you are not responsible administratively for the makeup of the crews.’ “And I said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’ “He said, ‘Well, then I can sign on as a member of the crew of one of His Majesty’s ships, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ “I said, ‘That’s correct. But, Prime Minister, you will make my burden a lot heavier if you do it.’ ” Churchill said he was going to do it anyway. Eisenhower had his chief of staff, General Smith, call King George VI to explain the problem. The king told Smith, “You boys leave Winston to me.” He called Churchill to say, “Well, as long as you feel that it is desirable to go along, I think it is my duty to go along with you.” Churchill gave up.

Of the 403,272 tank soldiers (including a small number of women) who were trained by the Red Army in the war, 310,000 would die. Even the most optimistic troops knew what would happen when a tank was shelled. The white-hot flash of the explosion would almost certainly ignite the tank crew’s fuel and ammunition. At best, the crew—or those at least who had not been decapitated or dismembered by the shell itself—would have no more than ninety seconds to climb out of their cabin. Much of that time would be swallowed up as they struggled to open the heavy, sometimes red-hot, hatch, which might have jammed after the impact anyway. The battlefield was no haven, but it was safer than the armored coffin that would now begin to blaze, its metal components to melt. This was not simply “boiling up.” The tank would also torch the atmosphere around it. By then, there could be no hope for the men inside. Not unusually, their bodies were so badly burned that the remains were inseparable. “Have you burned yet?” was a question tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time. A dark joke from this stage in the war has a politruk informing a young man that almost every tank man in his group has died that day. “I’m sorry,” the young man replies. “I’ll make sure that I burn tomorrow.

The British invented the tank. The British first employed it in battle. The British won the first battles using tanks. In 1916-17 Britain was, as one might say, the Tank Champion of the world. How then did the British tank equipment and strategy of 1939-44 become such a shambles? How was the champion so easily deposed? Why did so many British (and French and Canadian and Polish) tank crews die unnecessarily and their infantry go unsupported into the valleys of death?

generally having an address on the Labour Block. There are things out in the wilds that will kill you so they can experiment with just how indigestible Earth biomass is, but honestly that’s a marginal cause of death. On that first day virtually nothing tried to eat me at all. I felt almost rejected. But on Kiln you need to sweat the little things, the microscopic elements. Once Kiln gets into you… well, we’ve all seen the example tank. I’d noted to Primatt, before, that you weren’t keeping the camp clean if you didn’t scrub Excursions down every time. And then, not being on Excursions right then, promptly forgot all about it. And now I’m the newest Excursionista and about to get the final object lesson in my current crash course in the Use of Carrots and Sticks in the Extrasolar Carceral Programme. On returning, I expect us to be stopped at the gate but they just let us in. There’s no airlock, no gas chamber, as the Excursionistas refer to decontamination. We just… walk straight in. I actually then expect a firing squad because this seems the only plausible alternative, and even that’s unhygienic. Gas us, then shoot us, surely. Except we go into the Labour Block and get right on with dismantling the tables and turning them into our bunks. Our bunks which are now all down one end of the Block, with everyone else keeping their distance. I discover that I, subcommittee man as I am, have missed a whole underground conspiracy that’s been going on behind my back. Sure, I’d noted before that Keev and the Excursions crew all bunked together. But then they all worked together. I’d guessed it was by choice. And sure, I’d been given a quick spritz with the decontaminator every week or so, even though I’d never been near a piece of Kiln biology that hadn’t been thoroughly prepared for the scalpel rig, but that seemed just good practice on a world like Kiln. It was good practice. But here we were in Excursions, having come back from a day out in the woods wearing paper suits, and nobody has sprayed us down. I timorously raise this with Keev and he looks like he wants to thump me. “You get decontaminated after the third day,” he tells me. “Full heavy gassing. You’ll love it. Not the light mist of piss everyone else gets.” “That’s mad,” I protest. “Costs saving, they say,” Keev explains. I pick up on his tone and expression, the whole thousand-yard stare of him. He is, after all, a man who has been on Excursions for years, measured out in those three-

We were brought up in a particular kind of Soviet paganism. Man was almighty, the crown of creation. He had the right to do whatever he pleased with the world. Ivan Michurin’s phrase was much quoted: ‘We cannot wait for the favours of nature; our mission is to take them from her.’ The attempt to inculcate in the people qualities and attributes they did not possess. The dream of global revolution was an aspiration to remake human beings and the world around us. Remake everything! Yes! There’s that renowned Bolshevik slogan: ‘With an iron fist we shall herd the human race into happiness.’ The psychology of a rapist. The materialism of a caveman. Defying history, defying nature. And it’s still going on. One utopia collapses and another comes to take its place. Everyone has suddenly started talking about God. God and the market, in the same breath. Why didn’t they go looking for him in the Gulag, in the dungeons of the Purges in 1937, at the Party meetings in 1948 which set out to smash ‘cosmopolitanism’, under Khrushchev when they were destroying churches? The present-day subtext of Russian God-seeking is evil and deceitful. They bomb the homes of the civilian population in Chechnya, trying to wipe out a small, proud nation, and then stand in a church holding candles. We can do nothing except by the sword. We use the Kalashnikov instead of words. They scrape the charred remains of Russian crews out of tanks in Grozny using shovels and pitchforks, whatever’s left of them. And at the same time, we have the president and his generals praying. Russia watches all that on television.

The Primary Act. As they entered the cinema, Dr Nathan confided to Captain Webster, ‘Talbert has accepted in absolute terms the logic of the sexual union. For him all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another. What Talbert is searching for is the primary act of intercourse, the first apposition of the dimensions of time and space. In the multiplied body of the film actress - one of the few valid landscapes of our age - he finds what seems to be a neutral ground. For the most part the phenomenology of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit.’ Webster watched the images of the young woman on the screen, sections of her body intercut with pieces of modern architecture. All these buildings. What did Talbert want to do - sodomize the Festival Hall? Pressure Points. Koester ran towards the road as the helicopter roared overhead, its fans churning up a storm of pine needles and cigarette cartons. He shouted at Catherine Austin, who was squatting on the nylon blanket, steering her body stocking around her waist. Two hundred yards beyond the pines was the perimeter fence. She followed Koester along the verge, the pressure of his hands and loins still marking her body. These zones formed an inventory as sterile as the items in Talbert’s kit. With a smile she watched Koester trip clumsily over a discarded tyre. This unattractive and obsessed young man - why had she made love to him? Perhaps, like Koester, she was merely a vector in Talbert’s dreams. Central Casting. Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur . In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived. An Unpleasant Orifice. Shielding his eyes, Webster pushed through the camera crew. He stared up at the young woman standing on the roof of the maze, helplessly trying to hide her naked body behind her slim hands. Eyeing her pleasantly, Webster debated whether to climb on to the structure, but the chances of breaking a leg and falling into some unpleasant orifice seemed too great. He stood back as a bearded young man with a tight mouth and eyes ran forwards. Meanwhile Talbert strolled in the centre of the maze, oblivious of the crowd below, calmly waiting to see if the young woman could break the code of this immense body. All too clearly there had been a serious piece of miscasting. ‘Alternate’ Death. The helicopter was burning briskly. As the fuel tank exploded, Dr Nathan stumbled across the cables. The aircraft had fallen on to the edge of the maze, crushing one of the cameras. A cascade of foam poured over the heads of the retreating technicians, boiling on the hot concrete around the helicopter. The body of the young woman lay beside the controls like a figure in a tableau sculpture, the foam forming a white fleece around her naked shoulders.