The Tanks Are Coming

Beautiful-looking technicolor short about tanks and the training of tank crewmen. It focuses primarily on a comical trainee played by George Tobias. Gig Young, Frank Wilcox, and Richard Travis also star. Filmed mostly on location in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Some really nice footage of the place. I'm a sucker for vintage location shoots like this. I also loved all the tank action footage. It's a pretty informative short with some comedy as well. One thing stuck out to me as odd, though, and admittedly it's kind of nitpicky. It's that in some scenes several of the soldiers have shirts in desperate need of ironing. I always thought that sort of thing was frowned upon in the military. Frank Wilcox in particular has about the most wrinkled shirt I've ever seen and he's playing a colonel!

The considerable talents of George Tobias who played many of the kinds of roles here in feature films, usually in support of the leads. He's an amiable sort of lunkhead who can't bear to be parted with his taxi cab Bessie. He's a hack driver in civilian life and sees no reason he can't take his reliable vehicle into the army with him. So he drives her from New York all the way to Fort Knox, Kentucky where he reports and learns all about the driving, care, and maintenance of a tank.

Through all the propaganda and the attempts at wartime humor which don't really hold up well today, we learn a lot about tanks and their use in wartime. This was in fact the great advance in weaponry from World War I and the Nazis learned the lessons better than the Allied powers did.

Gig Young, Richard Travis, and John Litel are also in the short which did get nominated for Best Short Subject in 1941. Today The Tanks Are Coming is a a slightly amusing bit of history.

When World War II started in September, 1939, the United States stayed out of the fray. The vast majority of Americans wanted the country to stay neutral....and despite the seriousness of the war, the US government did little to prepare for war. Jump ahead two years and some things have changed for the US. The war seemed imminent and the American public, for the first time, was behind our getting involved. The problem was that the American armed forces were woefully inadequate....a tiny fraction of how big and well equipped the military needed to be. So, Hollywood and the government worked together--and began making films that glamorized life in the armed services. Among these film were mostly comedies, such as "Buck Privates", "Caught in the Draft" and "Tanks a Million"...all from 1941. Here with "The Tanks Are Coming" they made a comedy/documentary hybrid...also from 1941.

The film features the US Army's tank corps and follows men through classes at Fort Knox, Kentucky. And, the film stars George Tobias as a recruit from Brooklyn who is comic relief. Most of what you see is modern color footage of the best tanks America had, the awful and outclassed M3 light tank. While it's all very patriotic and makes it sound like America is ready for war, the opposite was actually true and the tanks mostly junk compared to the German tanks of the same era.

Overall, it's educational and probably did its best to help the war effort. Mildly enjoyable.

By the way, the poster IMDB shows for this film is wrong...it is from the 1951 film of the same name but the movies are both very different and have nothing to do with each other other than the names.

This starts with an FDR address and a call to arms. New York cabbie Malowski (George Tobias) is determined to join the Army. He drives his yellow taxi to Fort Knox, Kentucky. He joins the tank core and trained on some light tanks. Malowski's tank accidentally runs over his taxi cab.

It's an Oscar nominated education short. Warner Bros. Is waving the flag. It's pre-Pearl Harbor. It's a recruitment film. It's promoting the idea that America is ready to take on its enemies. It is propaganda. I would like better tanks. I guess the Sherman wasn't ready yet. The broad comedy is fine for what it is.

...Actually, that is very short footage of an earlier short "Declaration of Independence" in which Litel is Thomas Jefferson, NOT John Hancock, but it is hard to tell from the intro. This was made before the US entered WWII, but after everybody knew we were going to have to get in, it was just a matter of time. So little shorts like these were made to encourage men to enlist, to encourage patriotism, etc., so that when the war did come the army would not be swarming with newbies. It's actually pretty interesting from a historical perspective as to how tank training was done in 1941.

However, the comical turn the film takes is just a little corny now, and probably insulting if you are a cabbie from New York City. George Tobias plays a cabbie from NYC who comes to Fort Knox to join the army and drive tanks. He speaks in an exaggerated Queens accent as though he is an escapee from a Bowery Boys movie, and he thinks he can...drive the taxi up to the front door and leave it on the base? When he is told to ditch the car by a commanding officer, he leaves his taxi to a terrible and unintentional fate. Honestly, if this were the caliber of recruits in 1941 the US could forget winning any kind of war, much less a two front one!

Worth it for the history of it all.