Chieftain: Britain’s Flawed Masterpiece

by Richard Kent

This book provides the reader with the full and unvarnished story of the origins, development, decades of service and combat history of the Chieftain Main Battle Tank. The text is interspersed with numerous photographs, many published for the first time, alongside color profiles and scale plans, including those of rare and unusual variants. It also relates the experiences of the crews who lived and worked on the Chieftain, often described in the irreverent style typical of British Army humor.

240 pages, Paperback

Published July 26, 2019

Reviews

[Shrike58 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best studies I've ever read about a specific armored fighting vehicle and that is due to the author's intimate experience with the machine in question, and their willingness to give an unvarnished appraisal of its faults. The real guts of this work is Kent's overview of how the Chieftain MBT came to be saddled with a totally inadequate drive train, the details of which are truly mind-boggling. Having read about chronic procurement malpractice across the British Army, the Royal Navy and the RAF during this period it would seem that there is room for a study of how the British became so bad at technology management post-1955; assuming the skeletons have not been buried so deeply that they'll never be found.

Originally written: January 15, 2020.