British Battle Tanks: Post-War Tanks 1946-2016

306 Pages·2020·63.857 MB·English

by  Simon Dunstan

colour

H
BATTLE
S
I
T
TANKS
I
R
B
POST-WAR TANKS 1946–2016
SIMON DUNSTAN
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OSPREY PUBLISHING
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First published in Great Britain in 2020
This electronic edition published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
© Osprey Publishing Ltd, 2020
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. XX constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Some of the material in this book has been previously published as: NVG 23: Challenger Main Battle Tank 1982–
97; NVG 68: Centurion Universal Tank 1943–2003; NVG 80: Chieftain Main Battle Tank 1965–2003; NVG 112:
Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank 1987–2006. Artwork on pages 29, 43. 47, 51, 53, 54, 67, 69, 77, 81, 85, 86, 131,
140, 145, 148, 149, 155, 163, 167, 179, 185, 189, 191, 193, 213, 214, 220 by Peter Sarson, © Osprey Publishing
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pages 57, 59 top and bottom, 60, 61 top and bottom, 62, 92, 97, 95, 100, 103, 106, 109, 112 are reproduced courtesy
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ISBN: HB: 9781472833365; eBook: 9781472833358; ePDF: 9781472833341; XML: 9781472833372
Index by Sandra Shotter
Front cover: Author’s collection (top); MOD Open Government Licence (bottom)
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DEDICATION
Dedicated to Samuel
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CONTENTS
FOREWORD 4
INTRODUCTION 6
Chapter 1. CENTURION 10
Chapter 2. VICKERS BATTLE TANKS 114
Chapter 3. CHIEFTAIN 128
Chapter 4. CHALLENGER 174
Chapter 5. CHALLENGER 2 226
AUTHOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 291
INDEX 296
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FOREWORD
BY MAJOR GENERAL PATRICK CORDINGLEY
DSO OBE D.S . FRGS
c
As a cavalryman, it has always intrigued me that the British should twice in their
history have produced the weapon that diminished and finally eliminated the role of
the horse on the battlefield. At Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, English archers caused
slaughter among the French mounted knights; then gunpowder superseded the
longbow on the battlefield. During World War I, at the Somme, Cambrai and
Amiens, the appearance of the tank consigned cavalry to history.
In the 1930s, the British Army successfully undertook the transition to
mechanization but tragically did not have sufficient tanks to create a coherent
armoured doctrine to thwart the Blitzkrieg tactics of the German Panzers during the
campaigns in France and North Africa. In the early war years, British tanks were
woefully lacking in firepower, armour protection and reliability until the arrival of
the American Sherman medium tank in 1942. Warfare in North-West Europe in
1944–45 was determined by the mass of materiel from West and East leading to the
defeat of Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, there emerged a tank that was to epitomise the
very ethos of British tank design after six years of bitter conflict.
Centurion served the British Army with distinction and was the progenitor of the
main battle tank concept, which emerged with Chieftain and its powerful L11
120mm main armament. Thereafter the British adopted a policy of evolution rather
than revolution with Challenger and Challenger 2, which fought in two Gulf Wars.
On both occasions the British concept of tank design, with the emphasis on armour
protection and firepower over high-speed mobility, was successful in the particular
circumstances that prevailed.
Within days of arriving in Saudi Arabia with the 7th Armoured Brigade Group
in October 1990, I decided to command it from a tank. My Challenger was crewed
by members of the Royal Scots Dragoons Guards and a Royal Anglian officer, and we
named it ‘Bazoft’s Revenge’. For nearly six months, I lived, worked and slept either
in or near to the tank. It became a reliable friend but I cannot ever claim it was
comfortable.
On 25 February 1991, we crossed the line of departure into Iraq leading the US
VII Corps, the largest Corps in the history of warfare. It was a cold overcast day and
we were nervous because none of us had done such a thing before. But we felt
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5
confident in our tanks and this was not misplaced. Challenger was exceptional. Its
firepower was devastating, with enemy tanks quite commonly being destroyed at
F
3,000m range. We advanced 302km in four days and destroyed some 350 Iraqi tanks
o
and APCs. As we arrived north of Kuwait City 92 per cent of my 117 Challengers r
e
were fully fit – and that figure is remarkable. I am proud that I lived for six months
w
and then fought for a brief time in my tank. I always thought that Challenger was
o
built for war and not competitions. r
d
This volume by Simon Dunstan describes in considerable detail the design route
from Centurion to Challenger 2. Despite serving for many years in Chieftain, being
involved with the termination of MBT 80 and then the requirement for Challenger
1, I learnt fascinating aspects about these ‘workhorses’ of the Royal Armoured Corps.
The stories of their deployments in wars since 1945 are also remarkable. They have
fought with the British Army in Korea, Suez, the Rafan, Kuwait and Iraq. With other
armies they have been used extremely successfully in the Indo-Pakistan Wars, the
Arab-Israeli Wars, in Vietnam with the Australians and in Angola by the South
Africans. Their stories are told here by many of the participants in a truly engrossing
way. This excellent and most readable volume makes one feel proud of our tanks and
their designers and above all of the men who served in them.
As Colonel Commandant of
The Royal Dragoon Guards,
Major General Patrick
Cordingley poses in front of
a Chieftain Mark 5C with a
Guard of Honour and the
Regimental Colours.
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INTRODUCTION
BY MAJOR GENERAL SIR LAURENCE NEW
CB CBE
I first met Simon Dunstan on 16 February 1978, when I was Colonel (OR) 17 in
Whitehall. At the time he was undertaking research into the Centurion tank for an
excellent book that was published in 1980. To this day, it remains the standard reference
on that exceptional British tank. It is thus some 41 years almost to the day as I write the
introduction to this thoroughly researched book on British battle tanks since 1945. I
identify with it closely, having been intimately involved with the events and tanks
described for most of the years from 1952 to 1985; latterly as Assistant Chief of
the Defence Staff (Operational Requirements) Land Systems and as a Colonel
Commandant Royal Tank Regiment from 1986 to 1992. It was axiomatic that the
failures of British tank designs during World War II, of inferior firepower and inadequate
armour protection, would not be repeated in any British post-war tank.
This review of the development of our main battle tanks from Centurion to
Challenger pinpoints many of our successes and equally some failures. The former
explains our achievements in battle, notably in the Gulf; the latter go some way to
explaining our poor showing in international competitions and our failure recently
to sell our tanks abroad, while the German Leopard 1 and 2 have been sold to
numerous nations. By contrast Chieftain, despite its excellent protection, firepower
and cross-country mobility, was sold to just six nations, the principal reason being its
mechanical unreliability. The inclusion of an untried and inadequately developed
horizontally-opposed two-stroke multi-fuel L60 powertrain was disastrous. In August
1968, I was stationed in Germany as Brigade Major of 20 Armoured Brigade. We
had three armoured regiments including the recently amalgamated Blues and Royals
that was the only one equipped with Chieftain. On their first foray to the Soltau
Training Area they suffered the breakdown of 40 tanks in ten days, eventually leaving
only three operational. If it was not cylinder liners, piston failure, overheating of the
TN12 gearbox or failing air cleaners, it was something as simple as stripping fan
belts. In 1972, as the CO of 4 Royal Tank Regiment, I commanded the first Battle
Group to train on the extensive BATUS live firing and manoeuvre training area in
Canada. The sick joke emerging from the subsequent Medicine Hat exercises was
that they were not so much to benefit armoured battle group training as for the
REME to refine their sustenance of Chieftain.
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7
A tank must have a balance of protection, firepower and mobility, but none of
these qualities matter if it does not also have availability. Mechanical unreliability, as
I
Simon makes clear, has been our Achilles heel for most of the period under review. It n
was not always so; we produced some 4,423 Centurions in the years 1946 to 1962, t
r
with almost half being sold to the USA, Australia, Canada, India, South Africa, o
From the 1960s onwards, d
Sweden, Switzerland, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, New Zealand and most notably
the Royal Armoured Corps u
Israel. One of the additional features of Simon’s book is his explicit description of retained its faith in the c
how the Centurions sold to Israel were upgraded into their spectacularly successful concept of rifled tank guns ti
o
Shot Cal. In 1973 these tanks enabled the IDF to defeat a Syrian armada on the in the belief that they could
n
Golan Heights equipped with some 1,200 Soviet-made main battle tanks, including fire a wider range of
ammunition than
the latest T-62. Initially there were some 50 Syrian tanks for every Shot Cal and at no
smoothbore weapons. In
stage less than 15 to one. I spent three years in Israel as Defence Attaché immediately
particular, the British
after the Yom Kippur War and I can assert with some authority that Simon’s favoured the High Explosive
explanation of those extraordinary events is the most comprehensive in print. The Squash Head (HESH) round
that remains a highly
IDF enhancement of these Centurions, reminiscent of the Soviet practice of making
effective battlefield HE
incremental improvements, is surely worthy of this study.
projectile against troops in
Fundamental to the IDF success on the battlefield was the standard of gunnery the open and under cover;
within the Israeli Armoured Corps; a legacy of General Israel Tal. This superiority field fortifications;
was in large part due to the superlative L7 105mm gun that was one of Britain’s finest soft-skinnned targets; as
well as having a useful
contributions to armoured warfare in the late 20th century. Indeed, the 105mm gun
capability against AFVs.
remains in frontline service to this day; some 60 years after its introduction. Another Here, a Challenger 2 MBT
was the development of Chobham armour that has markedly improved survivability of 1st Royal Tank Regiment
of MBTs on the battlefield. The lead engineer on that project was Julian Walker at engages targets during a
Firepower Demonstration
MVEE whom I had got to know and he impressed me greatly. However, the
on Salisbury Plain in April
FV4030/4 Shir 2 did not meet the General Staff Requirement for our new main
2009: the Chinese Eye
battle tank, notably in protection and reliability, both being thought to be capable of symbol on the turret side
enhancement. In the event they remained a weakness in Challenger 1 but were solved originated in the Great War
in Challenger 2. Commercially it would provide employment for the Royal Ordnance and became the insignia of
4th Royal Tank Regiment:
Factories which had lost the Shir contract through no fault of their own. There was
the regiment commanded
significant reluctance to abandon years of work on MBT-80 and there was an by Lt Col (later Maj Gen)
informal lobby within the Royal Armoured Corps to purchase Leopard 2. We in OR Laurence New
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17 and the RAC hierarchy were against the foreign buy for predictable reasons, not
least that we would have lost the British L11 120mm rifled gun which optimised a
HESH round and had a higher chance of a kill at longer range than the smoothbore-
type gun fitted to German and American MBTs. The government was against a
foreign buy for commercial and ‘national’ reasons. The hitherto time-consuming
insistence that we should work with our allies to produce a multi-national tank was
mercifully abandoned because the Americans, French and the Germans were now
beyond that point in their MBT development cycle. Very significantly the brilliant
Master General of the Ordnance, General Sir Hugh Beach, (in effect the military
Head of Procurement) could see how a tank based on Shir 2, but heavily modified,
could be procured effectively and speedily. The decision was taken in July 1979 to
commit to the newly named Challenger programme. Even so, both the Americans
and Germans fielded an MBT protected by a variation of Chobham armour before
the British Army.
One of my lasting memories was the acquisition of thermal imaging or TI for
Challenger. Over the years, Royal Tank Regiment has produced several technical
geniuses such as Major Ralph Bagnall-Wild who was the guru on gun control systems.
In the summer of 1978, we were comparing the GSR for MBT 80 with that for Shir/
Challenger. Ralph had by then been lured from the Army by the leading optical
manufacturer, Barr & Stroud. One evening we both happened to be at Bovington at
HQ DRAC for a planning meeting. At that stage almost all night-vision equipment
relied on image-intensification technology and we were committed to that for MBT
80. Ralph asked me to see a project that he was working on; he had set up a
demonstration model on the roof of the building to demonstrate his idea of a thermal
imager incorporated into the gun sight. It was very impressive, and I recall dragging
DRAC out of his office to come up and see it. The cost would be huge but it was so
superior that we persuaded DRAC there and then to put his weight behind it. To cut
a long story short, once we had come to terms with the likely cost it was included in
our stated requirement for Challenger and in due course became the Thermal
Observation and Gunnery System or TOGS.
In December 1982, I was promoted to major general and went back to the
fraught world of operational requirements as ACGS (OR) and later ACDS (OR)
Land Systems. It was said to be one of the most grindingly difficult jobs in the MOD,
with a budget that was ever-decreasing and an imposition to talk constantly with our
allies, especially the French, Germans and Americans, in the pious belief that we
could thereby secure economies of scale. The irony for me personally was that I was
confronted inter alia by each of the programmes I had struggled with as Colonel
(OR) 17. Challenger was brought into service in 1983 prematurely, following a
dangerously brief trials programme and consequently suffered some unreliability
problems, compounded by insufficient spares backing. It had a good power-to-
weight ratio derived from its Rolls-Royce Condor CV12 TCA turbocharged diesel
engine, developing 1,200hp. It also had significant improvement in protection from
its Chobham armour. It had the extremely accurate L11A5 rifled gun with an
excellent laser rangefinder giving a high first-round chance of a kill with APFSDS
ammunition out to well over 3,000m and a very effective HESH round out to
5,000m. During Operation Granby a Challenger destroyed a Russian-built tank at
4,100m. Only 420 Challengers were built and it was phased out of service in 2000.
Its successor Challenger 2 was procured in even fewer numbers, yet it represents
the culmination of British tank design, a lineage that stretches from the first Mark Is
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