MotorTrend

A Car-Crushing, Trailer-Destroying Romp Through the Battlefield

Tank Experience Offers Slow-Motion Thrills
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Everything tastes like diesel and dirt when you drive a Sherman tank.

I try to relay this observation to my instructor, but he can't hear me. The clanking of the tracks and the roar of the engines — two big diesel engines drive this Sherman Easy Eight — drown out everything else as we lumber down a dirt road.

If ever there were a vehicle that most symbolizes the way the world sees America, it is the tank. It's big, it's ugly, and it's powerful. Its hardened steel protects its occupants while crushing any path it likes. Tanks don't sneak up on anything. They just plow over or through whatever stands in their way.

Those are just a few lessons I learned during a day at the only facility in the United States that allows just about anyone to get behind the controls of this arsenal of capitalism and drive them through a pretend battlefield, over a car, or through a junked trailer home. Simply put, this was my best day in 2015.

Drive A Tank is a small company based in Kasota, Minnesota, about 70 miles south of Minneapolis. The owner of the company, Tony Borglum, 28, is an astute entrepreneur who wheels and deals with more American spirit than any Sherman tank. Borglum, for all of his Midwestern friendliness and likability, will feverishly search the Internet every chance he gets for future tanks, their parts, and other items that might enhance his personal and professional playground. (Tanks are just part of the experience at Drive A Tank, which also offers people the chance to shoot an armory's worth of machine guns on a hand-built indoor range.) Between buying and selling tanks and helping with the family concrete recycling business, Borglum plays the commodities game with junked cars, machine guns, and street-legal military Humvees.

I was there, however, for the big rigs and to become the first journalist to drive his Sherman E8.

Driving most tanks is not complicated. Although modern tanks come with more computers to navigate and operate the big guns than any Apollo mission had, the controls to move a tank from point A to objective B remain rather basic.

There are two levers to steer the tank, a set number of forward gears, and reverse. More modern tanks will include an automatic transmission, though the driver might still have to manually shift gears. Pull the left lever if you want to move the nose of the tank to the left, pull the right one if you want it to go to the right. Pull them both back if you want to stop, and leave them alone if you want to go straight. It's really that simple.

But it's also difficult. The heavier the tank, the harder it becomes to pull the levers. For example, the FV433 British Abbot, a self-propelled gun, is relatively light at 32,000 pounds. It's quick and turns on a dime — as long as that dime is the size of a small swimming pool. Borglum owns three of these tanks and typically puts people in this vehicle first to help them understand the fundamentals.

However, the Sherman E8 weighs almost three times as much at 42 tons, so often even the most basic turns require me to use both hands on a single lever to get it to move where I want it to go.

All of the tanks offer two driving positions, one where you head sticks out of the hull like a Whac-A-Mole and one where you're completely enclosed in steel. Both have their advantages and are easily accessed by moving the seat up or down. The accelerator pedal is placed so you can easily reach it comfortably in both positions. The open-air driving position allows you a full view in front. The other encloses you and then requires you to drive by periscope, a small, mirrored device that gives you a flat view of the world. The periscope lacks depth perception, and the limited view makes it even more difficult. I was told more than once to move one way or another as I was hitting tree branches that I never noticed.

One note on the accelerator: Tanks seem most comfortable when the accelerator is mashed to the floor. There's an old expression about diesel engines that you should drive them like you're angry. That certainly applies when you're trying to toss 30 tons of steel on a narrow road. It didn't matter which vehicle I drove. Stomp on the pedal, and the engine (or engines) responded happily. The drive gears determine the speed more than the accelerator.

After trying out the Abbot, we hop into the Sherman. A legendary medium tank used during World War II and known for its versatility, the Sherman E8 is a rare find because of its diesel engines. (Borglum explains that most Shermans used gas engines, but some slotted for the Pacific theater had Detroit diesels in them.)

The five-speed manual transmission requires the driver to get the tank moving, push in the heavy clutch, pop the tank out of gear, let out the clutch as the gears slow down, push the clutch back in, and then pop it into the next gear. Though be careful when reaching for the gear shifter because you could also grab the .45-caliber grease gun — that's an M3 submachine gun — mounted right next to it. The shot might not hit you, but the bullet's ricochets only stop when it hits something not steel. (Fortunately, these guns are replicas.)

I get the Sherman into third gear and finally feel like I'm cruising, probably around 15 mph. Like on all the other tanks, the Sherman's suspension was not devised for a comfortable ride. My body jerks back and forth, which is disconcerting at moments when my head pushes forward and my face stops just a few inches in front of steel edge of the hole I climbed through.

That hole is no laughing matter, either. War is a young man's profession. Twenty-year-old men can scamper over steel and slide through tiny openings with ease. By the end of the day, there were bumps and bruises on my knees, elbows, and shoulders from trying to squeeze through those openings. The lump on my head arrived later, when the hatch of an armored personnel carrier fell on me as I closed it. Steel does not forgive. From then on, I strained my neck hard to the side to keep my noggin clear.

The reason we closed the hatch was to protect me from a house falling on my head when we drove the APC through a trailer home. Known in Kasota as El Tornado because of its infamous attraction to trailers, the British FV432 is still in use today around the world. The ease with which it crunched through the aluminum trailer was staggering. It hardly flinched as I powered through the former home again and again. The trailer collapsed after its roof got caught on the APC during the second pass. A third pass completely obliterated what was left.

Of course, the 121,000-pound Chieftain MK10 tank showed even less mercy on a Pontiac Grand AM. The left side of the Chieftain rose slightly, and the grinding sounds of metal against metal were almost as loud as the engine, but other than that, it was difficult to tell that a car was underneath. It was just gone, its back window exploding with a pop.

The bigger trick is getting the tank off of the car. The weight of the tank can cause giant pieces of the car to get caught in the track. Borglum describes it as the same way a soda can — pop can in Minnesota — can get caught on your shoe if you step on it. The tank gently rolled off the car, leaving more than half of it no taller than a few feet. (Credit goes to Pontiac engineers, as the rear passenger door still opened in case any remains needed to be removed).

Of course, tanks have already lost much of their usefulness in war. Today, airpower reigns supreme, and tanks may never again be used in the same volume or manner they once were. But they still can arrive to the battlefield with purpose and incredible destructive power.

Knowing all of this does not change the experience of operating these machines. Driving a tank is a visceral experience that vibrates through your entire body in slow motion. Your chest puffs out. Your eyes widen with wonder. Your head spins with thoughts of big guns firing. (That is something no one gets to do here, though Borglum is toying with ideas of adding paintball cannons.) To control a vehicle that can literally crush anything in its path — then actually crushing everything in your path — feeds that primal being in all of us with a newfound power.

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