The first vehicle of this type was delivered in Leeds on April 18, 1966. The first truly mass-produced version was the Chieftain Mk.2, of which 532 were made. Mass-production started slowly with only 40 Mk.1 tanks being made – all these served as training vehicles for the new vehicle crews. The vehicle was officially approved for service on the with the name Chieftain. The gun backfired into the crew compartment, killing two crew members (this incident caused the gun to be modified so the gun could not be fired without the inlays. The difficult three month trials also ended with a tragedy when one loader forgot to insert insulating inlays into the breech in the heat of action. Some crews simply deactivated it and pushed the shell and charge forward manually (this later became standard after this procedure was proven safe by trials). It was operated by a light sensor that had a tendency to activate whenever any shadow fell over it and the rammer activated spontaneously – an unsuspecting loader was in danger of losing an arm to this infernal device. Their off-road capability was poor, the tank was underpowered, the radioman was a busy crewmember indeed (he had to load the gun, load machineguns and operate the radio) and the electro-mechanical rammer was very unreliable. These conditions revealed some of the flaws of the early Chieftains. We already took a look at its development history in our previous article and in this one, we’ll take a look at one of the first production variants, the Mk.2.Ī first batch of test tanks appeared in Germany in December 1962 (in the 5th Royal Tank Regiment) and these were tested in some of the worst conditions possible for a tank. A modernized version is still being used by several countries (most notably by Jordan and Iran) and even after forty years it is still a fearsome battle tank. The Chieftain Main Battle Tank is one of the most important vehicles of British armor history.
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