Cold War Armor Display, Military Equipment Exhibition, 1950s

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Cold War Armor Display, Military Equipment Exhibition, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Cold War Armor Display, Military Equipment Exhibition, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1953–1959

AA-2026-30B3D6

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Sometime in the 1950s, a Western military force decided that the best way to reassure a civilian public about the state of national defense was to park several tanks in a field and let people look at them. A soldier in a steel helmet perches in the turret hatch of what appears to be a French AMX-13 light tank — the kind of nimble, autoloaded machine that NATO armies acquired with great enthusiasm on the theory that speed and firepower could compensate for the fact that Soviet armor outnumbered them by a considerable margin. The crowd behind the cordon has the relaxed, Sunday-outing quality of people who have been told this equipment exists to protect them and have chosen to believe it, which in 1955 or so was a reasonable position to hold. Pennants and what appears to be a guided-missile display in the background suggest a full military equipment show, the postwar genre in which democracies demonstrated their deterrent by charging no admission. The tanks are parked close enough together that the display communicates abundance rather than tactics, which was the whole point.

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