Last Crusade German Tank Pursuit
In Hatay, Indy fights a Nazi convoy and a tank to rescue his father and Marcus Brody before the Grail temple.
The tank chase of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade takes place in Hatay in 1938, before the Grail is found. When the Nazis, following the map, head for the Grail, Henry Jones Sr. tries to rescue the captured Marcus Brody and is captured too, and Indy attacks the Nazi convoy. With Henry and Marcus he destroys it, and Standartenführer Ernst Vogel goes over a cliff with his tank.
Lore & Background
Indy and Vogel struggle on the back of the tank until Indy pins Vogel's arm and hammers his face into the turret, before the tank goes over the cliff; Vogel is killed when the turret he grips breaks off and rolls over him. In an early script, Walter Donovan, then named Walter Chandler, was to die in Hatay when the tank fell off the cliff. Spielberg felt he could not surpass the truck chase of Raiders, because the truck was much faster than the tank, so he made the sequence more story-based, showing Indiana and Henry helping each other.
Reader's Guide
The tank was built for the film on the model of the Tank Mark VIII, over the framework of a 28-ton excavator with tracks driven by hydraulic pumps on two Range Rover V8 engines, and a turret gun was added to the historical design. It moved at only 10 to 12 mph, which made it hard to film Indiana riding a horse against it while making it look faster. The chase was filmed in the Tabernas Desert in Almería, Spain, and a quarter-scale model was driven over a 50-foot cliff on location.
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