I don’t know how it got past the increasingly powerful ‘All Germans were evil Nazis’ censors but Amazon has released a sympathetic portrait of a Tiger crew on the Eastern Front, translated, clunkily, as The Tank.

It has been criticised in some quarters for its weird twist at the end, which the genre-literate will see coming a mile off. But don’t be put off by its structural and narrative shortcomings. This is still a very watchable, gripping and sometimes moving portrait of men at war, and likely the most realistic ever depiction of a second world war tank crew. It’s far superior to the ludicrous Fury, where Brad Pitt plays an implausibly elderly tank commander, and where a single Sherman successfully takes on virtually an entire SS Panzer Grenadier regiment.

The Tank does for armour what Das Boot did for submarines. It captures the intimacy, camaraderie and claustrophobia of having to crew a mobile coffin where all that stands between you and a very grisly death are a few inches of steel. Well, 100mm of armour plate to be more precise. If you’re into your trainspotterish technical detail, you won’t be too disappointed. The tank – a Tiger Mk 1– is based on........

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