Since I went to the trouble of tracking down Tank Patrol (1941) for Bill Owen, I appreciate it giving him a particularly pointed broadside of anti-fascism even for the Ministry of Information.

Except for its technical detail of a Crusader Mk I, Tank Patrol is not among the more innovative products of the MOI, framing its rousing vignette of a knocked-out tank crew resourcefully regrouping to break out from behind Italian lines as an instructional lecture from a sergeant in the Royal Armoured Corps on the importance of a well-manufactured intercom. Any backchat from his audience of overlooked turret welders is exchanged almost instantly for the gallows banter of the crew in the vast grit of the Western Desert, evaluating their scrapped-up situation with succinct disgust: "What a life, eh, Tiger? Lost, out of gas, stone motherless broke and far from home." They wedge the tank out of sight in a sand-drifted cave and soften a berth for their front gunner who took almost as hard a hit as the intercom and the wireless, feverishly mumbling as he's field-bandaged so that the driver has to lullabye him for lack of better drugs and then clap a hand over his mouth before he gives them away to the little rustle outside that's an issue of Corriere della Sera blowing in on the dry night breeze, an unwelcome sign of just how close the encamped enemy must be. Their hull gunner can see the perimeter of sentries when he reconnoiters over the nearest dunes, a loop of oasis ringed in crates and troop trucks. It looks to their commanding sergeant like the staging for an area attack, but with some luck and nerve—and the windfall of a prisoner of war in his invaluable grigio verde and bustina—like a plan for getting hold of the petrol without which even their loader's down-to-the-wire fix-its won't get them back in the fight, let alone to their unit. At least they have been established in the kind of propaganda that is more positive reinforcement for our girls in the machine shops than cautionary tale for our boys in khaki drill. "You get some tea ready and share out the bully. We'll save the chocolate for an emergency."

Nonetheless, because he was played by an actor of interest to me in his screen debut, I worried about George the front gunner for most of his 37-minute film, especially since he had so little to do in his introductory scenes beyond wince and twitch in delirium and look almost impossible to move without further injury, a stiff-blanketed little effigy gently supported by one of his mates for a mouthful of water from a tin mug, the sweat beaded like oil on his corrugated young face. Even when he starts talking in clear sentences, he's still flat on his back in the flicker of a makeshift paraffin lamp. His grudge could be personal with all that white gauze knotted under his shirt, but as the camera dollies in on his refusal to make nice with their prisoner, unyielding as if he's staring down more than a fellow soldier's scruples, he makes its politics crystalline:

"I've had some of these Fascist beauties before when I was working at sea. When you're on top, they'll come crawling like a dog. But blimey, when they're on top, God help you. I seen these blackshirt boys in Genoa, bashing their own people over the head. When I was on that East Africa run, I heard a little of what they did in Abyssinia when they got their flamethrowers busy. When I was running food into Valencia, these Caproni boys used to come over and bomb us night and day. They killed two of my mates. Don't talk to me about Fascists."

What makes this speech more than a recruiting catalogue of atrocities is the interaction that touches it off. Beyond the popular aria he was humming when picked up on patrol, the Italian prisoner is not presented with especial caricature—he's referred to as derogatorily as the rest of the Royal Italian Army, but as played by London-born variety artist Nino Rossini, the long-faced truck driver from the 26th Light Armoured Regiment "Porcospino" comes across mostly as an average squaddie out of his depth, uncertainly fluent in English and inclined to sit tight until he can see what his British captors want of him. He is not identified with any particular campaign such as could assure his participation in war crimes. Nor is he personally offensive, a stand-in for his castor-oil state: the set-to starts because he's sharing cigarettes and snapshots of home with the loader who duly admires the other man's children and says approvingly of their surroundings, "Seen country like that back home in South Africa." The humanitarian outreach just hits a bit of a blast mine when George glances at the picture he's proffered as encouragingly as a postcard and points out the "nice big picture of Mussolini on the wall, too." The prisoner defends Mussolini as a "great leader," draws himself up proudly in his shirtsleeves and knee-fort of blanket to answer the question of whether he's a Fascist, "Of course!" It's a totalitarianism too late to recover the conversation after that. Their prisoner may be an amiable fellow, a doting father, and almost certainly doesn't want to be motoring around the sand-fly rock-flats of Libya or Egypt any more than a British tank crew, but the moment he affirms himself as a Fascist, not merely by uniform but ideologically, George has no more time for him and transitively neither should we. The slightly shocked loader attempts to smooth things over, "Oh, well, gentleman only wants to be friendly," and George snaps back as sharp as he'd do it, considerately blanked for the tender sensibilities of a U certificate from the British Board of Film Censors, "The gentleman only wants a punch on top of the –– nose!" In fact, despite the decisiveness of his rebuff, the gentleman will exit the film without ill-treatment beyond a slight case of impersonation and a share in a daily brew-up that debatably counts as a breach of the Geneva Convention. His regiment is another story, its convoy of men and munitions more than fair game for the triumphant resurgence of the refueled Crusader with all its plugs and valves in talkative order and its guns thumping the two-pounder tune of "And give 'em this one with the best wishes from good old London town . . . right from Port of Spain . . . one from Jo'burg . . . and Coventry . . . and Birmingham . . . and Plymouth . . . from the whole British flaming Commonwealth of Nations!"

Tank Patrol was produced for the MOI by the Strand Film Company, one of the independent documentary units of the 1930's which propagandized prolifically throughout the Second World War; it was directed by John Eldridge and written by A. L. Lloyd, which I thought at first must have been a false cognate for the folk singer and then after I had read that he trained with the RAC as a tank gunner and wireless operator before being seconded to the MOI, reconsidered because of the sense it would make not just of the overall scenario, but specifically of ex-merchant seaman George, anti-fascist before it was patriotically popular—a blockade-runner for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, for the love of the left wing. It's a tantalizing K-hole. Dave Arthur in Bert: The Life and Times of A. L. Lloyd (2012) discusses his subject's pre- and post-war radio career, but makes no mention of any involvement in film until the 1950's. More problematically, Bert Lloyd didn't enlist until 1942 and wasn't tapped by the MOI to write for the Russian-language weekly The British Ally until 1943. I got this film from the Australian War Memorial where its four reels loosely strung together with flickery leader are dated 1941, which is also the production date given by its object record in the Imperial War Museums. American trade mentions treat it as a recent release in 1944 and Denis Gifford's The British Film Catalogue: Non-Fiction Film, 1888–1994 (2000) places its initial exhibition in October 1943. The IWM's British Official Films in the Second World War: A Descriptive Catalogue (1980) lists it as homefront propaganda of 1941. To clarify nothing, Bert Lloyd is credited as a contributor to the MOI's Life Line, a traveling exhibition about the Merchant Navy first mounted in 1941. It's appealing to imagine he had a hand in the film, especially with its scraps of Caribbean singing and Australian reminiscence, even if I suspect that the Italian rank and file stationed in the Western Desert would have had popular songs on their gramophone as well as classical stuff by Caruso, however ironically cultured a soundtrack it makes for the violence of the commander's one-man raid. The Commonwealth cross-section of the five-man tank crew compels less of my attention, partly because I've seen Leslie Howard put the same point over more numinously and inventively, but it is neat that the screenplay thinks to include, along with Bill Elliot's Australian hull gunner, John Martin's South African loader, Owen's Battersea-bred front gunner, and the generically officer-class British commander played by Norman Williams, a driver from Trinidad and Tobago, even if Jorge Juan Rodríguez is ethnically ambiguous enough not to risk the question of a mixed unit. He has apparently brought a machete to a 40 mm fight and it serves him well. Skeptical of the red-sauce accent employed by Rossini, I was delighted to find him a cut-glass straight man to Tommy Fields. As for Owen, his first essay in the archetypal working class is convincingly harrowed and then charmingly resilient when he finally sits up on his own with his grease-grimed face and his hair falling every which way to chime in on a homesick conversation. "Port of Spain, eh? When I worked on the tankers, we used to run in and out of Trinidad, carrying oil for Liverpool. I'm glad I ain't on tankers now," he concludes with cheerful self-deprecation for a man who almost got himself blown in half on maneuvers in North Africa, "I'm no hero." His willingness to turn a cold shoulder to even the mildest-mannered of fascists makes him look like one. It seems extraordinarily unfair of the credits to misspell not only the actor's name—having not yet changed it at the behest of the Rank Organization, he's supposed to be Bill Rowbotham—but the character's. With that kind of attention to detail, God knows if the screenwriter even was an A. L. Lloyd. At least they knew the right direction to throw a punch. This meeting brought to you by my political backers at Patreon.