All of us are gamers and love to play FPS games. I also like WW2 games such as Company of Heroes. And after knowing the largest tank museum in the world is in the UK, we were working on our next road trip.
This time, the road trip was even longer than the last one. But the worst part was the service from Europcar – for some reasons, they would not accept my student VISA identification and only wanted my passport, which was a massive juxtaposition from Sixt. The staffs at Sixt were pretty understanding and very relaxed with us. The teams at Europcar looked dead and unmotivated. I highly recommend you to use Sixt in London.
After some hassles at the rental company, we began our road trip. My driving, in this case, was a lot smoother than the last road trip, indicated by my friends’ sleeping onboard, except for one. We then discussed many serious and personal topics, which made me reflected a lot about recent times.
After approximately 2 hours of non-stop drive, we arrived at the Bovington Tank Museum. I was acting a bit as a tour guide as all my Company of Heroes knowledge (FINALLY!) came handy. The museum is divided into several sections based on WW1 tanks, WW2 tanks and then cold war/modern tanks.
The WW1 section was better than we expected as we barely knew anything about that period. Most of the knowledge was learnt from Battlefield 1, and I am sure most of us (especially gamers) learnt a lot of WW1 stuff through BF1.
Left – Tetrach tank (1st Airborne)
Right – Early Churchill tank
The WW2 section is perhaps the biggest and the highlight of the museum. You can find almost any WW2 era tanks and armoured vehicles such as the Panzers, Shermans, Churchills and yes – the infamous Tiger family. I guess this is my favourite section since I could see them in person. Some tanks are smaller than I thought (such as the Tiger 1), and some tanks are enormous (such as Tiger 2 and Churchills). We were quite surprised to see a Japanese Type 95 tank in this museum; perhaps it was captured during the Burma campaign? (we did not read the description properly).
Left – Tiger 1
Right – The bigger brother Tiger 2/King tiger
There were not many modern tanks in the gallery as they were stored in a separate warehouse. And due to the Covid situation… we could not go in which was a huge shame. I could only recognise a couple of modern tanks such as Chieftain, T-72 (with underwater air tube?), T55/65 and Challenger 1 (I think).
Right – T-72 with the air tube
We had an interesting discussion on the usage of tanks in the modern warfare. While they thought that tanks were becoming useless, I had suggested the opposite. In today’s climate, it is all about combined arms. Yes, having air superiority will provide the troops a huge advantage, and having ballistic missiles/long range firepower help to soften up targets, but tanks are here to stay. Afterall, they were made to support the infantry and break through enemy frontlines in WW1. In fact, the Germans and Frenchs are collaborating to make Leopard 3 tanks and the Chinese had already made a new light tank, which imply that tanks are here to stay.
Left – Sherman 76
Right – Sherman with mine flail
We wished we could have gone into the warehouse to see more exotic vehicles. Later, we headed back to London (and using the wrong route again and again… ) to have our Japanese dinner. Some more pictures below. It was pretty awesome to see the real-life version of vehicles instead of looking at pixels on our screens.
Left – Panzer 2
Right – Panzer 4
Left – Jadpanther
Right – Jadtiger