Despite having designed the first practical tanks during the First World War, the British War Office did little to consolidate its position in this respect during the immediate post-war years and during the 1930s the initiative for tank design passed to Germany. British tanks of the interwar period were generally inferior in most respects to their German counterparts, lacking, particularly, in firepower and protection. Even during the Second World War British tanks were scarcely a match for the German Panzers and it wasn’t until the appearance of the Centurion in 1945 that Britain was able finally to produce a world-class tank … and one that, incidentally, might have stood some chance of matching the mighty German Tiger.
There was a brief period of hurried mixing and matching of turrets, guns and hulls that led to the appearance of some unsuitable machines, but the immediate postwar period was generally a fertile one for British tank design. The exigencies of the escalating Cold War saw the emergence of two superb machines in the shape of the Centurion and the Chieftain and, while the monstrous Conqueror was rather less than successful, this should perhaps be attributed to an over-reaction to the development of the Soviet IS-3.
Between them, the Chieftain and the Centurion clocked up nearly forty years’ service, with the two machines serving alongside one another for six or seven years. But, when the time came to replace the Chieftain, politics once again reared its ugly head and, as in the 1920s and 1930s, defence spending was put on hold. When it finally appeared in 1983, the Challenger 1 was actually little more than a reworked Chieftain with a new turret, the design of which had already been paid for by the Shah of Iran in the shape of the Royal Ordnance Factory’s Shir 2. The Ministry of Defence had been planning to replace the Chieftain with the Anglo-German MBT-80 but, when this fell through, it was fortunate that the Shir 2 design was available following its cancellation as a result of the 1979 revolution in Iran. The new design saw its first combat service during the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, before going on to serve in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo.
Britain’s current main battle tank, the Vickers Defence Systems’ Challenger 2, is a wholly new design, more than adequately armoured and possessed of considerable firepower. The Challenger 2 should be considered among the best tanks in the world, able to hold its head up high in the exalted company of the US Army’s M1 Abrams, the French Leclerc, the German Leopard and the Israeli Merkava. Beyond its name, it owes very little to Challenger 1 and has acquitted itself extremely well in various peace-keeping missions, as well as being used in combat in Iraq, where it provided fire support for the British troops in Basra. To date, despite a request by the current head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, to deploy Challenger 2 in Afghanistan in 2006, the MoD has decided the terrain there is ‘not suitable for the Challenger’.
We must also address the vexed question of what actually constitutes a tank. Strangely, there seems to be no official definition beyond the broadest description which states, for example, that a tank is ‘a self-propelled heavily armed offensive vehicle having a fully enclosed revolving turret with one major weapon’ … a definition that would exclude many of the machines which have fought as tanks since the first example appeared, lacking any form of ‘revolving turret’, in 1916. However, most would agree that a tank is a tracked armoured fighting vehicle (AFV), designed primarily to destroy enemy ground forces by direct fire; such a definition dictates that we must also consider the British Army’s CVR(T) and the Warrior MICV as tanks. Finally, it is also customary to describe armoured engineers’ vehicles as ‘tanks’ simply because they tend to be based on tank chassis; for this reason the book also includes armoured recovery vehicles, engineers’ assault vehicles, bridgelayers and other similar vehicles.