Reynard’s ghost, still reversing, still smiling.
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.
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 Reynard himself noted in an unpublished memo: “A crew that learns to love reverse may forget how to go forward.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. classified the reverse art of tank warfare
By the 1950s, tanks were faster, stabilizers were better, and the need for reverse-gear tactics seemed obsolete. (It would return, brutally, in the urban battles of Grozny and Fallujah, where reversing out of an ambush became survival.)
Standard: cover protects you from fire. Reverse art: your own dust cloud is the finest smoke screen. By reversing deliberately, a tank can lay its own visual barrier while keeping its optics clear. The manual called this “the snail’s gambit”—retreating into your own dust while the enemy advances into clarity. Reynard’s ghost, still reversing, still smiling
There are three theories.
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. The crew panicked
Why was such a potentially valuable doctrine classified and then buried?
