Cast: Gerard Kearns, Luke Norris, Shaun Dooley, Danny Walters, Chris Reilly, Anna Bolton, John Hollingworth, Niall McNamee, Ryan Kiggell, James Wilson, Kyle Evans, Sholto Morgan.
The final episode in Joe Barton’s utterly compelling and extremely well observed series, Our World War, looked at the final days of the war and the comradeship forged in the newly formed Tank Company but also the grief and feeling of helplessness and desolation in those that were left behind and who to face up to the news from the front lines.
It is the summer of 1918 and the War Machine comes into its own as the scale of industrial and mechanised conflict takes on a new image in the British invention of the tank. The war to end all wars, the perfect stalemate in which only hunger, starvation or running out of man power could possibly have finished the most illogically thought and ill fought war of all time, finally had a break through as the crew of the Niveleur took part in the offensive outside the town of Amiens. Under the command of Lieutenant Mould, the team inside the tank faced the German army, the equally dangerous carbon monoxide that collected inside the new invention and caused quick acting hypoxia to act as a killing machine as well, and their own prejudices, desires and thoughts on the war.
Told again with the inclusion of a superb cast, including Gerard Kearns as the man behind the story Chas Rowland, a towering performance by Shaun Dooley, James Wilson as the small German boy soldier who perhaps captured the horror of the machine and of withstanding the enemy placing a gun against his head and Anna Bolton who framed the dire want at home as the wife of a soldier serving abroad, War Machine was the perfect end to what has been a fine and well-crafted set of Docu-dramas. The only issue is that to get across the full horror of this insane war there really wasn’t enough time devoted to it, it is a series that could have had a much longer run, telling the stories of many who fought in World War One, including the many women who finally got the start of equality as they were drafted into the factories to do work that had been typically done by men and also for objectivity, tales from those perceived as the enemy across No-Man’s Land. All had tales to tell, letters that perhaps will never be known.
The invention of the tank, like the invention of the Atomic Bomb three decades later, bought about a hasty end to World War One, but at what cost? It is a question delicately handled by the superb writing of Joe Barton and one in which cannot be, neither should be approved by a rating system, for what type of war deserves that?
Ian D. Hall