Worst tank in the world?

[Manny Leung]

Ouch! That hurts!!

[Stephen White]

Thanks Manny, I enjoyed that, Rob Bell knows his engineering and is good to listen to. Four of his five were easy to agree with. Chieftain - well, he has a point but on balance, it doesn't deserve to be in any worst list. Why do I say that - because in the school of hard knocks, it's best to ask those who had to fight it. As one, I can truthfully say that amongst its contemporaries, it was the tank I was most prepared to go to war in, for twenty years. Yes, it was unreliable but not catastrophically so. It unarguably had the best protection and firepower of all its contemporaries and, crucially, it was ergonomically by far the best. For a tank crew, vision, optics, responsiveness, low silhouette, comfort (including tea) are all very significant factors in whether you can continue to fight effectively when wet, cold and lacking sleep.

We trialled the S Tank and found the three man crew and the lack of a turret were show-stoppers. The T-64 was effective but so cramped that after 24 hours, the crew were done in. The US M-60 was the opposite, so large and cathedral like that it was impossible to conceal, which gave you a feeling of vulnerability. In company with the Leopard 1, it only had a 105mm gun, not effective against the latest Soviet armour. The Leo was good at dashing around the battlefield at high speed but its armour was no match for the opposition. The French AMX-30 was even worse, you could go through the side with a power drill.

So, if I had to chose any NATO tank as an alternative to Chieftain, the only one I'd have been happy to go to war in was, unsurprisingly, the Centurions which the Danes and the Dutch had. And that's not me being jingoistic, it's my, as near as dammit, attempt at objective professional judgement.

Of course, knocking Chieftain makes amusing YouTube videos and of course the World of Tanks Wonks are obsessed by it. Ask a crewman though, and you'd be hard pressed to find any who didn't think Chieftain was pretty good. And it had a boiling vessel for tea.

[John Clarke]

Being an arm chair pilot it's easy to spot another. These chaps on Youtube spouting their ill gotten knowledge, crisply removed from books on the bookcase always crack me up.

These guys (not me this time) try to rewrite history with distorted facts and recycled anecdotes.

This Fighting Vehicle Chieftain and their crews, faced a Super Power and it's best FV's for over twenty years. the top brass at NATO knew Chieftain was the best they had. A fact that seems to elude most of the so called "experts".

Calling Chieftain one of the worst tanks shows just how dim the light burns. Or how desperate they are to get feedback.

Chieftain was built for a purpose, to be a reasonably mobile slugger and that's exactly what we got.

Chieftain excelled in two of the main categories that make a great tank, just like Tiger 1 and Panther, are they the worst tanks ever too?
(Neither were that reliable).

Sure Chieftain should have had better motor and transmission (it was available). But that wasn't the tanks fault, that was the treasury holding the purse strings and politicians trying to appease NATO at the same time. Very tricky.

There is a fourth and most important "what makes a great tank" category, and again Chieftain excels

Best looking Tank ever.

So I say take these so called "experts" for what they are, Their just looking for their next free lunch and laugh at their loony choices.

[David M Wilks]

Another TV leg-end in his own lunchtime .

[Kevin Hunter]

Given the chap’s surname, are we sure that should be leg-end?

[Mark Heaps]

Chieftain was no worse for breakdowns than Challenger 1 or Challenger 2, or any other british AFV during the 22 years I spent fixing then & looking after them.
The main reason for breakdowns was lack of use, causing seals to dry out and then leak, causing minor or major problems,

Every exercise we ( the REME fitter section ) would be going non-stop fot the first 3 or 4 days fixing breakdown after breakdown, and after that had very little work to do till Endex.
The REME Chieftain variants, ARV & ARRV, were in my experience very reliable, not because we looked after them better than the tank-crews did their tanks, but because they were in almost daily use.

[Charles A Stewart]

Good evening all.

I know I am not an expert on operating armoured vehicles of any kind. I never served in the army, I do however have a hobby interest in AFV's.

What I do find irritating are these TV experts, a lot younger than me (most of us, possibly): Is that they have not actually served in our armed forces.

I personally don't have a grudge against Doctorates(PHD's), whatever their field. However transferring their views to Tv and then telling us this or that is a fact. I don't necessarily have to agree.
EXPERTS
Cheers Charles