this is the British Army's chieftain main battle tank the tank that saw
service with the British Army from the late 1960s right the way through well
into the 1990s it took over from the Centurion which was a tremendously
successful design Centurion went into service just at the end of the Second
World War and was up-gunned and up-armored so a very successful tank
the Centurion even though it was considered a great success they worried
about the tanks it might have to fight against including tanks like the js3 and
the t10 the bigger heavier Russian tanks went into service just after the Second
World War so in Britain they decided to put an
even heavier gun on a tank and they built a super-heavy tank called the
Conqueror and that was supposed to complement the Centurion it was supposed
to be in what would nowadays we call an overwatch position they take on the
bigger Russian tanks whilst hopefully the Centurions would be perfectly able
to deal with tanks like the t54 in the t-55 now what they realize as soon as
they were putting the Centurion into service they knew they had to start the
process of building its replacement so they looked at the idea of the 120
millimeter gun that had been placed on the Conqueror let's combine that
firepower with the mobility and the tactical handling of the Centurion if we
can put those two things together we all have that ideal tank and that's the part
of the thinking that goes behind chieftain chieftains also it's worth
looking at because it's a an obvious indicator of what British tank designers
had picked up from the Second World War and when they put the specification
together in the War Office they were adamant it was going to have firepower
first that was the British great lesson we had to have a tank with superior
firepower than the enemy's then it was going to be armor protection we wanted
our crews we wanted survivability for the crews in there we spend a lot of
time and energy on training a tank crew we want those guys to survive an
engagement and only thirdly came over now other countries after the war looked
in very different directions Germany famously with a leopard tank they ended
up going for mobility first firepower and then armored protection so the
thinking behind that Second World War experience led to this huge great big
120 millimeter gun and this whole tank don't forget like most tanks is really
built around that fire perished for that gun to accurately get around on to the
target and again for NATO countries certainly in Britain in America we were
looking at the fact we were going to have to rely on our technological
advantage in this generation of tanks rather than sheer numbers so the gun 120
millimeter for the first time it's using what we would now probably call two-part
ammunition technically with three-part ammunition the round is loaded first as
a separate component to what comes behind which is a bag charge of whopping
great big bag of explosives the third part of the ammunition is actually a
cartridge which ignites that bag charge to fly the round out at supersonic speed
out the end of the barrel it's a rifled barrel gun it tended to fire two main
types of ammunition hash that's high explosive squash head that has an armor
penetrating capability it pancakes on the side of an armored vehicle detonator
second after pancaking and creates a shockwave that goes through the armor
and that causes a scab to fly off on the inside of enemy armor it also has very
well just as high explosives so it's very good for firing at targets in the
open artillery positions buildings second type of ammunition was
armor-piercing discarding sabot a pot with a tungsten slug in the middle and
that pot would fly away when it's left the end of the barrel leaving that
tungsten slug going at supersonic speed towards the enemies tank now later in
the development when the British government got worried about the
developing Russian tanks t-72 t-64 they decided to develop a new type around and
that was the discarding sabot things stabilized round which is
a long metal dart with little fins on the end to keep it straight that was
made a tungsten or later depleted uranium and cue us by again its sheer
kinetic energy this massive long dart would burrow its way through the enemy
armor quite often through and out the other side so tremendously powerful gun
and very accurate to keep the gun accurate they did a system called the
muzzle reference system which on to the end of the barrel there's a cap a rubber
cap under that cap is a very small polished mirror and the light is shone
from just above the barrel into that mirror it's bounce back and a red dot
appears on the Gunners side and that means he can kick if the barrel gets any
group on it or any Bend because of a cold wind blowing on the side and again
that helped with accuracy early versions of the tank were citing their guns using
a 50 caliber ranging gun so basically they'd fire a few rounds watch the
tracer which burnt out about 2,000 meters see that hopefully hit the target
and then they knew they were on target you could fire that gun out to further
distances because you they put an explosive tip on the bullet so if it hit
the target you would exceed that explosive tip make an indication and
then you again you knew you're on target but in the early 70s that was replaced
by a bar and stroud rangefinder which was a laser rangefinder and that could
accurately measure distances out to about 6,000 meters and again when you've
got those sort of combinations you've got a tremendously accurate gun fully
stabilized which means they could lock on to a target and it didn't matter
where the hole was going the gun remains locked onto a target and a well trained
crew inside this vehicle we're getting ridiculously high first-round hit rate
up to out 98% out to about one and a half kilometers that's tremendously
accurate compared to really the second world war generation the tanks where
quite often it was one round over one round under and then hopefully you'd be
about on target with the third round round now for armor protection a very
heavily sloped steel frontage you ended up with about fifteen inches equivalent
of metal protection on the front here with an angle they managed to put and
when the first models came out they actually hit that frontage with a metal
bin so people couldn't work out exactly the angle it was at that was part of the
secrecy procedure they also put round the man cleared because there is no
mentally the needle arrangement at the front of the tank holding the gun they
put a canvas around that as well again to hide what it actually looks like in
the very first model or so again there was that sense of secrecy surrounding
this vehicle because it was developing things in new areas so armor protection
when the t-64 came out with his hundred and fifteen millimeter gun they're
looking to up armor this tank and they put together a package by a colonel
still and a chap who's working a movie at the time Breuer and they put this
package together they call it steel Barama
and it adds extra armor to the front plate and to the front of the vehicle so
a car murdering its um its service life marks one to five are really the
production marks and after that in british army service it goes way up to
mark eleven but those marks are really just
improvements all the way through over a thousand improvements go on in the
chieftain during its service life so very thick armor protection very
powerful gun then we have to come on to the famous a ol sixty engine this if
anything with a thing that let chieftain down in the 1950s when they're
developing the tank they go to a couple of companies to look at what could we
come up with to meet the latest nato requirement for a multi fuel engine nato
in fifty five came out and said look we need were worried about petrol and
diesel supplies we need an engine on most nato vehicles that could use either
fuel source so Leyland gets the project to develop the L sixty engine Rover who
were the other people looking at the issues dropped out Leyland l60 it was a
horizontally opposed double stroke engine it had huge problems in its not
only its development but when it went into service and it was consistently
being worked on I'll improve it problems such as liners
that would leak and so there would be massive clouds of white and blue smoke
coming out the back of the engine decks and that would give you a position array
which is a real worry it didn't quite meet the bhp the horsepower that was
expected of it by the end of its time in service it was almost getting there but
famously that was the thing that caused chieftain crews the most trouble it had
something called a 1012 gearbox at the rear which was very good
Horseman's suspension these are bolted in pair wheels on the outside the
advantage of that type of suspension is really that you're not taking up
internal space so it's very good in the sense of keeping the internal space
areas down and can be relatively quickly replaced so a unit can be unbolted and
replaced rather than the trouble of taking a torsion bar out which really
does take time one of the other issues the crew had to face up to in this
generation a tank is a possibility of nuclear or chemical warfare so on the
back of the turret there was a large filtration box that would suck in the
air and the inside could be over the tank could be over pressurized so in
other words air was sucked in cleaned scrubbed and then anything that would
leak would only leak from the inside out because that's where the pressure was so
nothing would come into effect the crew and again if you look inside of
chieftain its that generation still of tank where it's almost all the kiddies
on the walls of the vehicle and of surrounding you armored charge bins
liquid propellant protectors so in other words the bank charges were put in
plastic containers surrounded by liquid and the idea there again it would
suppress if there was a penetration hopefully you wouldn't end up getting a
secondary fire as that explosive charge detonated again we've hung some of the
equipment the CES equipment that a tank would take into action with it all the
sort of bits and pieces everything from barrel cleaning equipment to inside the
tank the little boiling vessel that was very popular with the crews good men you
get a hot drink or some hot foods very very quickly and
the tank stops and some of that other equipment we tend to forget about all
the time as well simple things like personal weapons
grenades map-reading equipment all sorts of stuff this is a generation where they
had infrared equipment on the vehicle for sighting but they also had detecting
equipment that could work out whether you were being lasered or an infrared
cameras on you so again this might give you notification that you're about to be
attacked so again a vehicle of this generation the amount of equipment
inside is quite staggering so overall a very heavy tank it was aimed at about 45
tons it ended up coming in just under 60 slow 19 miles an hour on the battlefield
cross country a fair bit more on the open road but not certainly as mobile as
some of the other generation tanks of coming out at this all the time but in
many ways that wasn't its problem the problem it was facing up to all the time
was the idea that it had to fire this gun very accurately at what it thought
to be if the Cold War has gone hot numerous targets of advancing Soviet
tanks and in that undoubtedly this was a very successful tank that gunnery was
superb on the vehicle now it had a four-man crew driver supine position
almost laying on his back that helps keep the profile down you've got three
guys in the turret you've got the standard loader gunner and Commander
sitting behind overall I would consider this historically a very successful
design it never had to fire its gun in anger in British army service so in
essence it did its job sitting out there with those crews out in Germany keeping
an eye on the borders all that period of the Cold War and so in that sense it did
very well it was sold on into the Middle East the Israelis helped with the
development of this tank they were at one point it looked like they were going
to by the British government at the end of the 60s decided it was siding with
the Arabs more than the Israelis at the time decided it wasn't going to sell the
chieftain and that their general towers the Israeli Defense Forces to go on and
build the Merc of a tank and that's in service but it was sold to a number of
middle Eastern countries and it does see action
in the 1980s in the iran-iraq war where again British engineers went out to look
and how it had performed and that's one of the other reasons they were very keen
on the upper armory process that went on at the front of the tower so a
successful tank in one ways a good export success into the Middle East but
fortunately for many of the crews inside it never actually had to fight
you