Classified The Reverse Art Of Tank Warfare Now
But fragments survive. In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israeli tank commanders—many trained by American advisors—were observed reversing their M60s up prepared ramps to fire from behind berms, then dropping back to reload. In Ukraine, 2022, drone footage showed a Ukrainian T-64 reversing down a tree line, firing at a Russian column that was advancing eagerly into a crossfire. The Russians kept coming. The Ukrainian kept reversing. The tank’s gun never stopped firing.
A young U.S. Army major named Harold C. Reynard, a former art historian turned armored warfare analyst, noticed something strange in after-action reports. In the few engagements where outmatched American tanks survived against heavier German armor, they had often done something the manuals explicitly forbade: they had retreated in a controlled, aggressive manner —firing while reversing, using reverse gear not as panic but as a primary tactical posture. classified the reverse art of tank warfare
One anecdote, declassified in the 1990s, tells of a young lieutenant who trained under Reynard. During a live-fire exercise, his Sherman reversed into a ditch. The crew panicked. The lieutenant keyed his mic and said, calmly, “We have now achieved hull-down reverse defilade. Resume firing.” They survived the exercise. He later commanded a tank destroyer battalion in the Bulge. The memorandum was never widely distributed. After the war, most copies were recalled and destroyed. Official histories of armored warfare mention reverse movement only in footnotes, usually as a footnote to a footnote about the retreat at Kasserine Pass. But fragments survive
In the annals of military doctrine, most manuals are about doing . They teach you how to advance, shoot, communicate, and protect. But in the winter of 1943, a slim, olive-drab folder appeared in the hands of a handful of American armored commanders. It had no title on the cover—only a single red stenciled word: REVERSE . The Russians kept coming
Conventional wisdom: momentum favors the attacker. Reverse art: controlled backward movement forces the enemy to advance into your killing zone. A tank reversing at 8 mph along a prepared route can fire more accurately than an enemy advancing at 25 mph over unknown ground. The manual included rare data from captured German gunners, who admitted that advancing against a retreating but shooting enemy induced vertigo and rushed shots.
The most chilling theory is that the reverse art was classified not because it was dangerous to the enemy, but because it was dangerous to one’s own soldiers. Reynard himself noted in an unpublished memo: “A crew that learns to love reverse may forget how to go forward. The art must be unlearned after the war, or it will corrupt the soul of the armored corps.” The Legacy Today, “classified the reverse art of tank warfare” has become a quiet legend among military historians and wargamers. It is whispered as a what-if—a parallel doctrine that might have changed the calculus of armored combat had it been fully embraced.
Reynard coined a term that would never officially appear in any unclassified summary: retrograde offense . The classified memorandum laid out what Reynard called the “Four Inversions” of conventional armored thinking. Each one read like a koan from a Zen master who had survived a dozen tank duels.
