Littlefield Tank Museum
Tanya was working weekends repairing battle tanks at the Jacques Littlefield museum, and Jacques came out bar-hopping with us a few times.
Rich Reilly pestered Jacques until he agreed to give us a private tour of the museum.
We went to Jacques' estate in Portola Valley (ten miles west of Stanford). He has 150 tanks in operating condition, plus another 30 or 40 currently in various stages of restoration in the repair shed.
Jacques showed me how to load cannon shells into the breech of some giant gun. The shell weighed 35 pounds...I picked up a tommygun and was startled at how heavy it was. Heavy armor, heavy weapons: they're not kidding. Lots of bazookas and trunion-mounted light machine guns. "Light" in a relative sense, of course.
Not just tanks, but all kinds of other specialized battlefield vehicles. Armored personnel carriers, armored command vehicles, armored radar vehicles.
He had no currently fielded US stuff, of course, but he had US tanks from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, plus British and French and Russian and East German tanks. He has the world's largest collection of WWII German armor, including several 88s and several pieces that are the sole surviving examples, including the German armored half-track that Lee Marvin escapes in at the end of THE DIRTY DOZEN.
It was so fun. Jacques doesn't care if you climb into the machines and sit in the seats and swing the 50-caliber machine guns around and look through the periscopes. He was showing us one rocket-propelled grenade launcher and remarked that it was the same kind that disabled the tank in the previous room, so Misha and I went back and searched the tank to find the quarter-sized hole in the armor. Hard to believe such a small hole knocked out the tank.
Jacques explained everything. He knows everything about each and every vehicle, of course, an endless source of knowledge.
Then when we finished looking at the final building's worth of stuff, he said, "Hey, let's start one up," and he opened the garage door and climbed into an M5 armored transport and backed it out. "The" garage door...the three buildings were each 120 feet wide and 300 feet long and 50 feet high, you could have played a football game in each building, and each long wall of each building was an array of overhead doors.
Once the M5 was outside, Misha, Maria, Rich, Allison, Jacques and I climbed into the front seat, and Jacques had Allison sit in the driver's seat and drive around the estate for a while to show us how the thing handled. Allison is his daughter, who is looking forward to her 12th birthday so she will be eligible to get her SCUBA certification. When we got back to the garage, Jacques said, "Okay, Colin, now you try it."
The controls are a couple of sticks and a gas pedal. When you pull back on the left hand stick, it puts the brakes on the left-hand tread, and the right-hand tread keeps going and you pivot around on to the left. I roared around the course that Allison had taken...at one point Jacques reached over and yanked on one of the sticks to avoid a tree. Your car-driving instincts are wrong because the fucking tank is wider than three cars. Four cars?
Then Jacques let Misha and Reid and Rich each drive the tank around the course. He offered to let Maria drive but she declined.
We walked back to the house...it was a beautiful cloudlessly clear bluesky day, and the eucalyptus smell and the mountains made it seem just like the hills in Santa Barbara. Jacques' estate is 480 acres of hilltops.
