The Tank Museum
Published 28 Jul 2023Join David Willey as he tells the complex story of how the Centaur and its sister vehicles were developed when the need for a new cruiser tank emerged.
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November 21, 2023
Centaur | Tank Chats #172 | The Tank Museum
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November 14, 2023
Inside T-72: A Commander’s Perspective | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 21 Jul 2023A fast tank with a low profile and a big gun, the T-72 is a classic Soviet designed Main Battle Tank, in use all over the world. In this video, we talk to Dag Patchett, a former T-72 commander and get his impressions of a tank built in the Cold War era but still very much in service.
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November 13, 2023
QotD: The “queering-the-museum” movement
The so-called queering-the-museum movement, which was launched in Amsterdam in 2016, is all about contemporary identity politics. It rests on the assumption that museum curation is too “heteronormative”. By queering museum collections, activist curators claim they are including and representing gay and gender non-conforming people.
That at least is the objective. But the actual result is an exercise in narcissism. It turns the past into little more than a mirror reflecting the identitarian obsessions of the present back at us. It tells us less than nothing.
And no wonder. Understanding the past through a “queer” prism is profoundly ahistorical. In the 1500s, “queer” didn’t mean what it does today. It meant “strange, peculiar, odd or eccentric“, and had nothing to do with sexual or gender identity at all. Queer only started to be used as a term for gay men at the turn of the 20th century. And “queer studies” was not named as such until the mid-1990s. Viewing the Mary Rose collection through a “queer” lens is to obscure its historical specificity.
It’s not just the Mary Rose Museum that has succumbed to the cult of queer theory, either. Even more bizarrely, the British Library claimed during Pride month this year that the animal world can be viewed through a queer lens. And so Britain’s national centre of knowledge and learning staged events “celebrat[ing] nature in all its queerness”. In particular, it focussed on animals whose sexual behaviour breaks free from standard “gender roles”, from bisexual penguins and lesbian albatrosses to gender-bending fish. “[Researchers’] discoveries”, stated a press release, “show that animal sexuality is far more diverse than we once thought and has been limited by narrow human stereotypes of heterosexuality, monogamy and gender roles”.
This is obviously absurd. Animals do not experience or possess a sense of identity, sexuality or gender. For a fish to “bend” gender it would need to understand what gender is and how to subvert it – quite an achievement for a creature with a five-second memory recall.
Applying “queer” models to the animal world in this way does a disservice not just to our knowledge of animals, but also to our understanding of humans. Non-human animals aim to remain alive and comfortable and propagate their species. Human sex and sexual identity goes far beyond mere survival and comfort. While there may be many interesting reasons why two female penguins pair off, we can be certain that a sense of lesbian self-identity is not one of them.
As the cases of the Mary Rose Museum and the British Library show, queer methodology does not help us to understand history or nature. This is hardly a surprise. Applying a queer lens to species or epochs where it has no place simply exposes the banality of queer theory. It sees nothing but its own reflection. This narcissistic endeavour is now posing a threat to knowledge itself.
Ann Furedi, “The narcissism of queer theory”, Spiked, 2023-08-12.
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November 6, 2023
The Army Door Knocker | Pak 35/36 | Anti-Tank Chats
The Tank Museum
Published 14 Jul 2023In this video, we look at the Pak 35/36, the German Army’s first anti-tank gun. Obsolete by 1941, it picked up the nickname Heeresanklopfgerat – the army door knocker – after its inability to penetrate tank armour. In spite of this, it carried on in service until 1945. Chris Copson talks you through the gun and its history.
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October 24, 2023
See Inside The M3 Grant | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 30 Jun 2023With a crew of six and a chaotically crowded interior, the Grant was a US-produced WW II tank more used by the British and Indian Armies than anyone else. Join Chris Copson as he explores probably the best preserved example of this rare vehicle – and listen out for the cheese sandwich …
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September 27, 2023
Knock Out: The Evolution of Tank Ammunition
The Tank Museum
Published 8 Jun 2023Tank ammunition has gone a long way from basic solid armour piercing shot to the high-tech fin rounds of today. In this video we look at the development of tank ammo in its different forms and how it has evolved from the First World War to the modern battlefield.
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September 20, 2023
Wire Guided Tank Killer | Swingfire | Anti-Tank Chats
The Tank Museum
Published 2 Jun 2023In this video, Chris Copson looks at the Swingfire, a Cold War period anti-tank guided weapons system. This powerful and hard-hitting missile was mounted on vehicles including Striker, Ferret, and FV 432. With a range of up to 4km, it had the significant advantage that it would outrange tank guns and could be fired remotely by the controller, enabling the launch vehicle to remain in cover.
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September 6, 2023
Radical or Ridiculous? | T-14 Armata | Tank Chats #171
The Tank Museum
Published 26 May 2023In this Tank Chat, David Willey takes a detailed look at a vehicle that has garnered significant interest and controversy — The Russian T-14 Armata. David explores why this vehicle draws so much attention, and how it has taken a radical departure from previous Soviet design philosophy.
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September 4, 2023
Ask Ian: Donating Gun Collections to Museums … or Not
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 May 2023Lots of people put together significant gun collections over a lifetime, and want to see those collections preserved after they pass. This often manifests as looking for a museum that will keep a collection intact and display it — which is unfortunately a nearly impossible goal.
First, it is very rare to find a museum whose mission matches the collection focus of a specific private collection. Firearms cover a vast amount of history even firearms-specific museums are usually fairly narrow in scope.
Second, museums already have all their display space filled. Promising to display a new collection means taking down something they already deemed worthy of display — and promising not to take it down in turn if something more suitable comes along.
Third, even if a museum has space and shares the theme of a collection, they will almost certainly already have examples of many of the items in the collection. If a museum is not allowed to break up and sell off parts of a collection, it simply ensures that many of the items will remain perpetually locked away in a reserve archive.
I would propose that we really need to rethink the idea that museums have a duty to keep everything they acquire. We know that virtually all museums have much more in storage than on display, and forcing duplicate items or pieces unrelated to the museum’s focus to remain in museum property simply ensures that those pieces are kept away from the collecting community. It is the collecting community that does most of the research and publication on firearms history, and this practice undoubtedly hinders research and scholarship. That is not to say we should close museums; certainly not! Museums are extremely valuable for preserving artifacts and making them available to some degree to the public, but they are only one part of the historical community.
If you are a collector who really wants your collection to be displayed in full in a museum, you really only have one option: bequeath the museum enough money to build and maintain a new wing specifically for your collection.
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August 17, 2023
See Inside Char B1 | French Tanks of World War Two
The Tank Museum
Published 12 May 2023Chris Copson goes inside one of his personal favourite tanks, the Second World War French Char B1, to discover the quirks and surprises hidden within. Find out why these tanks performed so badly against the German onslaught of 1940, despite being bigger and more heavily armoured than the vehicles they faced.
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August 11, 2023
Queer Eye for the Tudor ?guy?
At First Things, Carl R. Trueman looks into a recent post from the Mary Rose Museum (where the remains of King Henry VIII’s favourite warship now resides), considering Tudor artifacts recovered from the wreck from a Queer perspective:
“Mary Rose Museum & HMS Victory” by Silly Little Man is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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The anti-Western left has been exposed for its sexual imperialism over the last few months. Evidence is all around. American Muslims have led protests against the imposition of LGBTQ policies and curricula in schools, leaving American progressives uncomfortably caught between two pillars of their favored rhetoric of political thought-crime: transphobia and Islamophobia. The Washington Post opined that anti-LGBTQ moves in the Middle East were “echoing” those of the American culture wars—as if Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan had been listed by the Human Rights Campaign as favored vacation destinations until their ruling elites started reading the website of Moms for Liberty.
It is, of course, the nature of imperialism that everything, everywhere, is always to be measured by the imperialists’ standards. And that is also what makes them so impervious to spotting their own imperialism. “Queering the Mary Rose‘s Collection”, an article on the website of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth, England, is a recent example of this. The Mary Rose was a Tudor warship that sank in 1545 and was raised from the seabed in 1982 in a groundbreaking act of marine archaeology. The museum is dedicated to displaying artifacts retrieved from the wreck, some of which are now been analyzed “through a Queer lens”.
The specific examples are an octagonal mirror, nit combs, a gold ring, and Paternosters. Apparently, looking into a mirror can stir strong emotions for both straight and queer people, and for the latter it can generate, for example, feelings of gender dysphoria or euphoria, depending on whether the reflection matches their gender identity. Combs would have been used by the sailors to remove the eggs of hair lice. Today they are reminders of how hairstyles can be the result of imposed gender stereotypes, but also make possible the subverting of these through hairdos that break with social expectations. Rings are a reminder of marriage and, of course, that the Church of England founded by Henry VIII, king during the Mary Rose‘s working life, still does not allow gay marriage. Finally, the Paternosters remind us that the crew were “practicing” Christians and that, once again, Henry VIII, via his initiation of the English Reformation, facilitated the civil criminalization of homosexual acts.
Two things are striking about the article, in addition to its lack of any intellectual merit. First, the absence of any historical awareness is striking. For example, the category of “practicing Christian” is essentially meaningless when applied to the early sixteenth century. Everybody, bar a few underground Jews, Anabaptists, and radicals, was part of the Catholic Church by baptism. The question of how the crew might have understood themselves, whether in terms of mirrors, rings, combs, or Paternosters, is never asked. To be fair, a short blog post cannot ask all the relevant questions, but this does not even nod in the direction of suggesting that the differences between yesterday and today might be remotely interesting or instructive.
David Thompson also has some thoughts on the Mary Rose artifact interpretations:
It’s quality stuff. Just like being there, in the mists of history. And not at all inept, or jarring, or comically incongruous.
As we have seen, many objects can be viewed through a Queer lens and can indirectly tell LGBTQ+ stories.
And thanks to peering through this “Queer lens”, readers will doubtless find that their understanding of Tudor history has been enriched no end.
We’re told – indeed, assured – by Hannah McCann, of the museum’s collections and curatorial staff,
From the Tate Britain and the Wellcome Collection, to the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, museums are reinterpreting and Queering their objects.
A comfort, I know.
Exactly why such “queering” is underway – what its relevance might be – is not, however, made clear. An explanation for this bolting-on of irrelevant, flimsy tat – in the name of “queer theory” – was not, it seems, deemed necessary. Nor is it entirely obvious how such “queering” of museum contents benefits those who wish to know more about Henry VIII’s favourite warship.
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August 10, 2023
MOBAT, WOMBAT, CONBAT | Anti-Tank Chats
The Tank Museum
Published 5 May 2023Welcome to this episode of Anti-Tank Chats. Today, Chris will be discussing the variations of a lesser-known weapon, the British Army’s B.A.T. (Battalion Anti-Tank Gun).
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July 16, 2023
Cheap, Effective, Everywhere: The RPG-7
The Tank Museum
Published 7 Apr 2023Join Chris Copson as he presents our latest in Anti-Tank Chats. In this episode, we will delve into the fascinating history and practical applications of the RPG-7, a powerful anti-tank weapon.
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July 2, 2023
Tank Chats #170 | Sd. Kfz. 251 | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published 31 Mar 2023Curator David Willey is back with another Tank Chat. This time, he will be discussing the Sonderkraftfahrzeug 251, which is more commonly referred to as the Sd.Kfz. 251.
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June 15, 2023
See Inside King Tiger | Tank Chats Reloaded
The Tank Museum
Published 10 Mar 2023In this video, Chris Copson gives us a glimpse inside one of the most formidable German tanks of World War II – the King Tiger.
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