Newsgroups: sci.military
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!cbfsb!cbnewsc!cbnews!cbnews!military
From: packer@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer)
Subject: Re: When were tanks last used?
Organization: Dept. of Independence
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 90 02:11:53 GMT
Approved: military@att.att.com
Message-ID: <1990Nov29.021153.28280@cbnews.att.com>
References: <1990Nov27.045624.4585@cbnews.att.com>
Sender: military@cbnews.att.com (William B. Thacker)
Lines: 35



From: packer@amarna.gsfc.nasa.gov (Charles Packer)
In article <1990Nov27.045624.4585@cbnews.att.com>, wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL (Will Martin) writes...
>From:     Will Martin <wmartin@STL-06SIMA.ARMY.MIL>
>"When did a tank last fire its gun 'for real'?"
> 
>The facetious answer would probably be "yesterday", or "a minute ago",



I was the one who originally posted the query referred to above,
and I thought I was quite clear that I wanted =documented=
occurrences of tank usage that anyone had seen or read. 

It appears from followups here, e-mail, and my further e-mail
queries to the followups, that the most recent film of tanks
firing their cannons (now I know what they're called) in actual
combat is from Israelis in Lebanon, 1982. For other conflicts,
two books were suggested, "Vietnam," by Stanley Karnow, and
"Battle for the Falklands," by Max Hastings. There were a couple
of interesting anecdotes from someone who knew tank personnel,
one from WW II, the other from an unspecified time in Israel. 

One person mentioned the conflict in Sri Lanka of 1989 as a
probability, and I decided to use this as a test case for press
reports because it was recent and would be easy to follow in the
NY Times Index (because not tied up in larger conflict, e.g.
Mideast) When I began reading the Times articles about the
military action, I realized that I wouldn't learn anything
because journalists were denied access to the area and therefore
were just passing along government reports to the effect that
"tanks and artillery were used," etc. No further details. I 
guess this is probably true generally for recent conflicts. 

