Vehicles

...After its sister ship R100 had made a rocky and harrowing transatlantic crossing to Canada, Lord Thomson, Labour's first "secretary of air," attempted in 1930 to inaugurate regular dirigible service between London and India...

...What happened to Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler's first cars, the Me262 jet fighter, and the classic BMW twin-motorcycle—not to mention the Bismarck and a host of other German planes, trains, and ships—is a mystery...

...S imilarly ridiculous is the chapter on Donald Campbell, son of land- and water-speed record-holder Sir Malcolm Campbell...

...Perhaps Hawkes is still pouting over the Luftwaffe's raids on Coventry...

...While Charles Lindbergh gets full coverage, the Wright Brothers are dismissed in a few hundred words...

...Not only does English sagacity permeate the world of literature, politics, philosophy, and medicine, but according to London Times science editor Nigel Hawkes, the anointed of Old Blighty also dominate the realms of technology and high adventure...

...The little feat created a considerable stir among the aristocratic motorists of the Royal Automobile Club, but was soon forgotten by all but the most devoted aficionados...

...We also learn of the British dirigible R101, a 732-foot behemoth designed to overtake the Germans who, thanks to Count Zeppelin, had long enjoyed a lead in rigid-airship design...

...His book Vehicles recounts, according to its own jacket blurb, "the most extraordinary achievements since the invention of the wheel...

...While I demur from implying that the Brits are mountebanks and fibbers, one cannot forget the observation that the sun never set on the British Empire because God did not trust them in the dark...

...Ettore Bugatti, whose machines are artistic and engineering masterpieces, VEHICLES Nigel Hawkes Macmillan/240 pages/$39.95 reviewed by BROCK Y ATES The American Spectator September 1992 61 was heard to sniff, "Bentley builds the fastest trucks in the world...

...Given such standards, one wonders why Hawkes chose to ignore such epic triumphs as Amelia Earhart's wide miss of Howland Island, the Titanic's maiden voyage, Scott's Antarctic trek, and the brilliant French employment of their Maginot Line...

...Many of the subjects, accompanied by superb maps, photographs, cutaway drawings, and diagrams, are autoBrock Yates is the author, most recently, of Enzo Ferrari: The Man, The Cars, The Races (Doubleday...

...V ehicles is a weird and illogical pastiche of human adventure and technological advance divided into five sections: the sea, automobiles, rail travel, conventional aircraft, and space...

...This he succeeded in doing—without, by the way, the proprietors of the Paris, Lyons, and Mediterranean Railway having the vaguest idea they were in a contest of any sort...

...Even keeping in mind the English penchant for self-worship, Hawkes soars to heights that might redden the cheeks of the most pukka grenadier...

...But other chapters seem to have been added solely to propagandize the reader with the idea that England was the major player in the technological rough ride through the centuries...

...Chauvinists of other nationalities might blanch at the omissions, but Englishmen everywhere will hoist one to Mr...

...Although Americans are generally treated well, some might puzzle over the inclusion of a Civil War incident in which a small band of Union soldiers stole a Confederate train and ran it from Atlanta to Chattanooga, burning wooden railroad trestles along the route...

...Truth be known, the Bentleys were—and remain—overweight arks that rely on brutishly large engines for performance...

...Hawkes deals, for example, with the British clipper Cutty Sark, which was surely a magnificent vessel, but notes only obliquely that the clipper ships were American in origin and that Yankee versions like the famed Flying Cloud dominated the seas until steam power and Suez ended the glory days of sail...

...Two other German offerings, the Volkswagen Beetle and an early '30s steam locomotive, make the addenda at the back of the book...

...The little skirmish was based on an informal wager that Barnato, three-time winner at Le Mans and chairman of the Bentley company, could not only beat Le Train Bleu from Cannes to the Channel, but could be at his club in St...

...The book's British provenance no doubt prompted Hawkes to stress the Far Eastern seaplane route of Imperial Airways—begun in 1935 with Short S-23 C-Class Empire flying boats—over Pan Am's fabled Pacific Clipper service, which started a few years later...

...On the oth-er hand, Russian readers might reach for another liter of vodka when they read Hawkes extolling Nicholas II's imperial fleet's 16,000-mile voyage into the battle of Tsushima in May 1905, considering that the Japanese sunk thirty-four major Russian warships and killed 4,830 crewmen while losing but three torpedo boats and 110 sailors themselves...

...Only the 1955 Mille Miglia–winning Mercedes-Benz 300SLR receives the ink it deserves, probably because itwas driven by English superstar Stirling Moss...

...Loaded with dignitaries who rode in an elegant two-deck gondola hung beneath five million cubic feet of explosive hydrogen, R101 departed into the teeth of a rising gale...

...German cars get amazingly short shrift...

...Hawkes waxes eloquent about Sir Thomas Sopwith's America's Cup challenger Endeavour 1, which he describes as "the most graceful racing design for the America's Cup" while dolefully noting that, like legions of hapless British challengers for over a hundred years, this aesthetic triumph was waxed by the American defender...

...Young Donald, who may epitomize the old canard, "Give an Englishman a piece of metal and he'll do something stupid with it," set out to one-up his late father's two records, and did...

...It wobbled over the storm-tossed Channel at about 30 mph, then nose-dived into the rain-soaked French countryside near Beauvais and exploded...

...Inevitably, trying to select the most significant, monumental, pivotal, earth-shaking of anything—be it the world's grandest hotels or the greatest double-play combinations or best opera tenors or finest pizza parlors—only causes arguments...

...What Hawkes has selected—narrow, quirky, and wrapped in the Union Jack as it is—is neatly packaged and brightly presented...

...So much for Britain's enthusiasm for dirigibles...

...Jaguar's 1989 victory at Le Mans—its first in thirty-two years—is described in terms befitting a moon landing, while Porsche, which owned the event throughout the 1970s and '80s, is barely mentioned...

...Particularly "extraordinary" is that twenty-three of his fifty-two listed triumphs originated in the United Kingdom, and most of those in England...

...The boat was ten years old, hopelessly outdated, and a good 30 mph beyond its design speed...

...Hawkes lavishes considerable verbiage on a 1930 race from Cannes to Calais between the legendary Blue Train and a Bentley Speed-Six coupe driven by gentleman racer Woolf Bamato...

...That eight of the expedition's leaders were hanged and the rest imprisoned would seem to impose certain limits on the mission being described as an "achievement...

...After crashing numerous times and bankrupting his successful machine-tool business, Campbell managed to careen across the Big Finish Line in the Sky in January 1967, when he nose-dived his jet-powered Bluebird into Lake Coniston at an estimated 320 mph...

...James's before the old huffer pulled into Calais...

...matic qualifiers for every such anthology: Magellan's circumnavigation, Joshua Slocum's similar singlehanded voyage in 1895, the USS Nautilus's first subpolar voyage, the 1907-08 Paris-Peking and New York–Paris auto races, the Lindbergh flight, Chuck Yeager's breakage of the sound• barrier, Yuri Gagarin's brief ride, and the Apollo 11 lunar landing...

...Hawkes...

...Forty-six of those on board were killed, including Thomson...