Book Review: Tank Boys by Stephen Dando-Collins

I was about three quarters of the way through Tank Boys (which wasn't unenjoyable, and which I picked up from my old man’s bookshelf) before I did a little research on GoodReads.com and realised that the book was aimed at a younger adult audience.

That, at least, was an explanation for why there was little in the way of graphic war description. The deaths, when they happen, are either distant or very clean. Nor is there any of the language typically used by our soldiers at the time. Even the supposed unpleasant characters don’t really use unpleasantness. Knowing why, it makes better sense now. Strangely, though, it wasn't really mentioned on either cover of the book.

Regardless, the story of the fighting around the French village of Villers-Bretonneux is one that deserves to be told in a more widespread fashion. After all, it was a decisive battle on 24-25 April 1918 that went a long way to stalling the German Spring Offensive, which had nearly carried the Kaiser’s armies to the gates of Paris, and to total victory.

The Australians were key players in what was one of the first recorded tank versus tank battles in history, yet Villers-Bretonneux – where they still fly the Australian flag, because the locals are so grateful to our soldiers – is barely mentioned, in comparison to the Gallipoli campaign, which was actually a defeat. That quirk has never made much sense to me, but I digress.

Tank Boys goes at least a little way to rectifying that. It’s the story of three sixteen-year-old soldiers – Taz and Frankie are Australians and Richard is a German – who, in the case of the Australians, lie about their age to enlist because they wanted adventure, and Richard, who was forced to join the German Army late in the war, probably due to a manpower issue.

Of course, the three meet on the Villers-Bretonneux battlefield. Richard is a loader for a German tank called Mephisto, which, itself, plays a large part in the story, and the two Aussies are infantrymen detached and sent to observe how tanks fit in on the battlefield.

What happens after the battle ends is a little far-fetched, but the prologue is a sort of redeeming feature, taking place in the eighties, at an exhibit that brings Mephisto, Frankie, Taz and Richard all back to the one place. The book is obviously well-researched, and it certainly doesn’t get bogged down.