David Fletcher | Bottom 5 British Tanks | The Tank Museum

one thing I would say if you don't agree with me then just keep it to yourself hi I'm David Fletcher and I've been asked to give you a talk about my five worst tanks I'm not doing the best because that's been done before I'm gonna do the five most awful tanks we've got because we're doing it in the tank museum and because it's mainly British tanks in here that's what you'll see I can't do foreign ones because we haven't got any really awful foreign tanks in the collection but for British ones we've got some hideous things and I hope you'll enjoy watching them if nothing else now this is my number five in it's the British charioteer it was actually a post-war tank but just so that you know it's this yellow one on my right not this thing on my left which is the AMX 13 somebody's put in it we've had to come into a dark and dingy corner of the VCC to see it and you'll see that the tank itself has been shoved up against another tank here you can't move down the side of it you can't get behind it and the turrets been reversed apart from that it's perfect but that's just the way I want to talk about it now the charioteer was built in a hurry and it was an improvisation at the time Major General Duncan was direct to Royal armoured Corps and he was very concerned that we would soon be at war with the Russians he never said the Russians but since we're very rarely likely to be at war with anybody else we assumed it was the Russians now he therefore decided that the Cromwell tank would have to go into action again after the Second World War but the Cromwell had a 75 millimeter gun which wouldn't even have scratched heavy Russian tanks so general Duncan suggested that he wanted the 20 pounder the new gun for the Centurion and he wanted that on a cromwell chassis now he went to various people like if the rde who were the designers and told them what he wanted and left it to the technicians to design the tank and charioteer was the result in fact it's a horrible thing the turret besides being enormous and it has to be enormous because to give the gun any sort of elevation you need to have it all about the level of the hull they didn't large the turret ring I don't know how they did that without I'm setting the tank but they managed to enlarge the turret ring but still not enough to get the gun to go up and down so the turret had to be bigger so the gun could do that now the turret itself would have weighed so much that it would have ruined the tank so the turret has armor 1.5 inches thick at the front which isn't really much at all but it's even worse at the solids the sides of this turret or one inch thick that's about 25 millimetres it's nothing and it means the thing is virtually destroyable by anything that cares to fire at it and sending it out even with a bigger gun wasn't much of an advantage because it was whatever happened it was gonna get hit and the crew were gonna get killed they'd done away with the front hull machine gunner although they sometimes set a man in there in supreme discomfort and otherwise it was a did the ordinary cromwell chassis powered by the rolls-royce meteor engine and christie suspension it had it was quite an automotive li quite a good chassis but this turret and gan rue ended the gun is what we called the 20 pound him in those days it's about 84 millimeters caliber and it was a very powerful anti-tank gun but in this thing and this mounting up so useless now you could say that charioteer was a tank destroyer like the american vehicles because they were often quite lightweight and designed to destroy tanks and not worry too much about incoming fire the trouble is that chariot has got a coaxial machine gun and with a cock that's a machine gun alongside the main gun and anything with a coaxial machine gun is automatic a tank and they these things were issued to the British territorial army as their only tank available to defeat the big Russian tanks and they wouldn't stand a chance but that's how it was done and it was really the turret that makes it such an awful tank and that's why it's on my list but I'll tell you a bit of the story about chariot here apart from being seeing a bit of service with the territorial army they were mostly sold abroad countries like Austria and Finland bought them and they were supplied to the Lebanon and Jordan as tanks they weren't all that effective but in those days we didn't worry too much as long as someone brought them and got him off our hands we were quite happy got rid of the ruddy tanks and that was all that mattered this one was actually kept as a sample and that's why we've got in at Bovington we've since painted it up in the markings of the Arab Legion so it's shown as a Jordanian tank but it never was it never left this country this particular one and it really is one of the most dreadful tanks that's ever been produced they one of the problems they found with it was that the when they fired the gun it produced such a huge dense cloud of smoke that the commander couldn't see what he'd hit or followed it so quite often if he could manage it the commander dismounted walked to one side or the other to where he could see and had the fourth man the chap who was sat down here hauled into the turret and made the gamma he fired the gun he couldn't see what he was firing at but the commander could but you're not supposed to do things like that with a tank it's silly but that's the sort of thing they had to do to make charioteer effective and if the russians had allowed us to do that fine but they wouldn't of course they had powerful tanks that he could knock out our tanks easily and this was the easiest one of all to look so that's really why I've elected to include it in my list of the worst tanks now Black Prince is on my list of worst tanks and you may wonder why you may think it looks pretty good it comes at the end of the war it's got a powerful gun and you may think yourself well this is crazy but there was a reason and I'll come to it in a minute Black Prince was designed by Vauxhall Motors which is why it looks very much like a Churchill in fact it was originally portrayed as the large Churchill before the people at Vauxhall decided to call it Black Prince and I was going to say it may have been known as Black Prince to its friends but never had any friends so I don't see how they could do that but anyway that was what they did it's really a Churchill but what they've done is made it wider and of course heavier because they wanted to get a 17 pounder gun in it's got the 17 pounder mark six gun can actually mounted with the bees on the top they own the turret and a slightly lower front end they thought that by lowering it they'd improved the drivers view I don't really know when they did or not but that's what they were trying to do at the time now the tank itself was pretty heavy to start off with it weighed 50 tons which was as much as really anyone wanted to tanked away at that time of the war at the end of the war really and 40 was considered heavy enough and that applied to the later Churchill's but 50 was a little bit over the top but they decided they wanted an infantry tank with the 17 pounder they'd already got the a 30 they were designing the Centurion which had the same gun but in a slightly better turret so quite why they did built this at all I have no idea but they built six of them as prototypes and this is the only one that's left this is number four in the series as you can see it's got a church or type suspension but running on wider tracks because obviously it's carrying more weight but the armor is actually no thicker at its thickest and the armour on a number a mark seven Churchill its 152 millimeters at the front which is six inches which simbad but they could have made this a lot thick a lot heavier but the real reason why I think this is such a dreadful tank is because in the back it's got the same bedford twin six engine as the Churchill and when I said that it's the same engine it's the same horsepower 350 horsepower as you've got in a Churchill yet a church always 40 tons and this thing weighs 50 and what they discovered of course was that that engine in a 50 ton tank would only drive the tank at 11 miles an hour which is pathetic really I mean even a tiger could do more than twice that but this thing could only do 11 miles an hour on a good day with a following wind uphill it was even worse so that was the one reason that I've elected this tank to be one of the most awful tanks we produce why they didn't put a bigger engine I don't know they reckon they could have put the rolls-royce meteor in the rolls-royce meteor is 600 horsepower and probably would have driven this tank at about 22 miles an hour which is quite respectable but it would have meant installing the engine slightly leaning over you'd have to do it an angle because I hadn't left enough room for it and in around the engine covers at the top there but that isn't impossible you could have done that and it would have worked perfectly well like that but they didn't do it for some reason and then the thing goes with this old engine and nothing nothing else in the back we've tried to drive it and you find this is exactly the same problem now even the gearbox is quite novel it's a 5-speed gearbox whereas the original Churchill he'll do the Churchill's the 708 had a four-speed gearbox and with the gearbox they found that they had five gears running pretty close together and what they did was made sure that the driver changed gear quickly if you change gears slowly with this weak engine pushing you along the tank would stop in one and a half seconds that was all it took to bring this tank to a grinding halt and you'd have to start from first and work your way through the gears again so as you went up the gearbox it was crucial to change gear quickly so that the tank still had some momentum when you got up to the next gear and that's one of the other failings with it but the real failing and the thing that is hardest to explain is why they fitted it with this idiotic old engine the meadows of the Bedford flat 12 was really considered a bit out of date by then anyway so why install it in a new tank but they did and that's why it's on my list of really dreadful tanks it doesn't need to be that slow but it is this is number three and I've chosen this because it's an amphibious tank in fact it's the only truly amphibious tank we've got in the museum it's actually l1 III the vickers-armstrong amphibian that came out just before the war and the reason that I'm selecting it for one of my most awful tanks is because it suffers in the same way as all these light amphibious tanks do from the conundrum if you like that in order to float it's got to be as light as possible which means very thin armor but in order to resist an D tank fire it needs to have reasonably thick armor and it's a conundrum that they can't really sort out this particular tank actually has a hull of very thin armor inside and it's surrounded by these floats which are sort of kapok filled made of aluminium and they're supposed to keep it buoyant in the water but really the whole thing is is a joke of a tank it's not bulletproof in any the word apart from with the revolver maybe for a while from a distance but that's really what I want to show you is the whole fact that all the amphibious tanks although they seem to be incredible because they can go on land and water are in fact almost completely useless the other trouble with these vehicles is they're good enough at going on land they're very fast on land in fact in the water they're pretty good and I'll show you why in a minute but it's getting out the water they have a problem with if they they can choose where they go in that they can't always choose where they come out and if where they come out is very muddy they're likely to get stuck if there are loads of reeds there they're likely to get snarled up in them and not climb up the bank so that's always a drawback with all these amphibians they're good enough on land and good enough in the water but absolutely hopeless when it comes to getting out the water now I'd like to be able to show you the amphibious nature of it it's not that easy but you've got the drive sprockets at the front on each side and the drive sprocket drives a shaft from each drive sprocket the shaft goes back to the propellers the propellers are in one owners quart nozzles the propeller is surrounded by a rudder it's like a tin shroud if you like and the two propellers go left and right as you'd expect and the brother goes with them so for steering it's actually very effective in the water but that doesn't really solve the issue the fact that out on the water they're completely and utterly useless as tanks it's armed with a single Vickers machine gun which is probably better than spitting at people but only just and that's on the side in this case because we've turned the turret around and it has a crew of two a driver in the front here and a commander in the turret but although it may look the part it really is utterly useless and you wonder why they bother to produce them this vehicle came out before the war as I say it was tested they weren't very happy with it they put it away while they had a war they thought they'd sort of test it afterwards in 1945 it was dragged out again and started up and they gave it another test but they never got any further with it they only built the one they never built more than one thank goodness and this is it just one really horrible and pointless tank built for for no good reason by the fact that they could build it I think and that's it really it's not a lot it's powered by a Meadows engine so it's actually quite powerful but absolutely hopeless as a fighting tank which is what they're really meant for so it seems silly right we're going to look now at the Covenanter this is number two in my list and it's done for a reason because it is really an awful tank by general consensus as much as anything else to start off with the tank was built originally by the London Midland and Scottish railway company who weren't actually probably the ideal people to design the tank but they had help from the department of tank design and oddly enough I mean it's such a good-looking tank then it's difficult to see how it could be so awful but it is originally when it was designed they decided to make it the first all welded tank it was gonna be constructed of armour plate but welded together so it didn't require any internal frame now the trouble was the LMS company the railway company this building it didn't have welders they had riveters and they persuaded the Department of tank design to have the tank riveted with riveting you need a frame to rivet the armor to and that immediately puts up the weight the next problem was the wheels the original idea was to make these wheels of aluminium alloy because that was lighter and they've discovered to their horror that the Royal Air Force had put an absolute ban on anyone else using alloys except themselves because they needed it for aircraft construction for that reason the wheels are made of armoured steel they're good and strong but they put the weight up again and in fact but the time they'd finish doing all this the extra framing and the extra weight of the wheels they'd already reached the limit of what this tank could support as far as weight is concerned and they did nothing towards putting that right they just hoped for the best it's powered by a horizontally opposed 12 cylinder Meadows engine which is in the back of course behind the turret and it's got the radiators here at the front and we'll come to them in a minute but first of all the weight is the big problem the fact that they designed it as a welded tank gone over to riveting and that had really brewing the tank to start off with the rest of it mediocre at the best it was really too small the thing was that the design was terrific and this amazing selection of horizontal Armour was tremendously good because she the one thing you don't need is any vertical face of armor that will absorb fire you want it as horizontal as you could get it and with the hull they had done that they made it almost flat all the way back it's hardly a vertical face on it with the turret it's slightly different you've got a vertical face at the front but notice how the turret comes out at the sides it sort of appears to bulge out now the reason for that was because they've lowered the hell there's sort of Headroom in it they wanted as much room as possible for the crew to use their elbows there's three men in that turret and they needed room so that if they moved an elbow to pick up around or something they'd have room to put it without banging the sides that's why the turrets this weird language shape at the top but the real mistake with this tank was placing the radiators in the front and the engine in the back there are two radiators under this armored louver here and they're both there to cool the engine now the engine as I say is a horizontally-opposed 12 cylinder by meadows quite an effective engine in its own way but you don't if you're designing a tank at home don't Kevin say put the radiator in a different place to the engine it's just not meant to go there the result is that you've got the radiator at the front and every single one of these tanks when they left the factory had developed a serious cooling problem usually with the radiator boiling or something like that and it was all to do with where it was they did try and remedy it they kept trying to change it they kept changing the layout of the cooling fans on top and everything else to try and make it work a bit more reasonable but it didn't it just continued to be a fault and it meant that of over 1200 of these tanks built none now at all were ever accepted for combat they were only ever used for training and that at a time when in this country we were desperate for tanks the Covenant had got pushed aside and became a training tank I've had it suggested to me that had we put a bigger gun in later on it would have made a good and quite reliable reconnaissance tank but really this is a tank designed in 1938 and it's got all the faults over 1938 tank it just isn't fit for a battlefield of 1944 so that idea went out the window straight away the tank had a 2 pounder gun in the turret and that was all it was capable of carrying couldn't carry anything more if they wanted to so that was that but this is the real problem with his tank is putting the radiator at the front it meant that all the coolant all the pipes carrying coolant passed around the side of the fighting compartment so that whatever the man lives out and touched he was liable to scold him because it was pretty hot and it meant that the turret itself got very warm which is okay in a cold climate but not so hot in the desert you don't want a warm tablet when you're already been roasted by the Sun otherwise it's quite a reasonable tank and it's got a Christie suspension it's quite fast but its trouble is not always gonna go very well and when it breaks down which this thing did regularly it's nothing but trouble they were originally gonna put a full Wilson transmission in here but that's something else they decided not to do so the tanks got an ordinary crash gearbox and Meadows gearbox and then two and botan units of epicyclic drive by Wilson on the side and that's all it's got it hasn't got a proper sort of modern transmission at all and there they had better ones available at the time so that's the Covenanter it doesn't look bad but it is it really was a dreadful tank not the worst not quite but nearly so and certainly as far as the army was concerned in the Second World War one of the worst tanks of all because it was only fit for training they were never used operationally and that's a bad a quite an indictment by itself right now what we going to look at next is a 38 valiant and this is the top of my list for the tanks that are really awful there is nothing in the whole tank museum more dreadful than this thing and I mean that quite sincerely but we'll talk about it anyway for a start it was designed as a heavy assault tank it was designed to have 114 millimeters of frontal armor which it's actually got but it's such a large ugly car slump as you can see because it was built rather like the old Matilda - we've bolted together castings but this thing here this sort of molded section was an absolute trap for the driver it meant that once the driver got in he was in severe danger for a start if he moved the gear leaver over to first gear he got trapped behind the battery box and actually needed a crowbar to get it out again which doesn't sound very ideal for changing gear they also had an arrangement whereby to use the brake he had to use his heel rather than his toe and there was always a danger that his foot would slip between the two pedals and one of the results of that was that if the foot slipped he got trapped literally the man couldn't get out they said the only way really to get him out was chop his leg off which doesn't sound all that healthy either the third thing was that he has a seat which raises and lowers here now the trouble with it is that in the raised position it ends up with him sticking his head out of this hatch here and the back of the armor clouding him on the back of the head all the time and they said that the only time they ever tested this vehicle which was a suspension test across country Drive the driver got out after a while and said if he stayed in any longer he be crippled and that was one of the worse things about it but the whole design is awful I mean this huge turret which designed to take a six pounder or a 75 millimeter gun also although you can't see it so well from here at the back that's we'll get a close-up in later on the back of it is only nine inches off the ground and that really is too low it means that the tank going over a bump is going to bottom on whatever it hits and each of the suspension arms it's based on the Valentine really built by are designed by Vickers when are built by them the suspension arms are on wishbones and each one is fed by its own type of oil and liquid to keep it going and those bits and pieces underneath the tank are likely to get wiped out when it's going over any sort of rough ground at all so it means if this tank is traveling over say Goss or anything like that the chances are a half the suspension is going to be ripped off inside and that's not all that convenient either so all in all it really is a dreadful tank it's powered by a GMC Diesel same as a Valentine but it's so much heavier that's also chronically slow so it hardly got a thing going for it really this thing it really is a dreadful design and as I say that officer in charge of the trials called the trials off because the tank was so awful and made so many mistakes that he hauled the crew out of it and took him home and decided not to go on with the test at all the tank is really unpleasant and uncomfortable to travel around him and that was used after the war as an example the what was then called the armoured school used to get a load of young officers and line them up and then as a special treat a 38 valiant used to drive past them and they'd watch it go by and then it would stop and their job was to go over it and find out how many awful things they had going for it they there's no record as where anybody found them all but it's quite enough things in this tank to make it absolutely horrible and really when you think that it was produced at the end of the war it was actually built by Rustin and Hornsby limited in Lincoln but it was a Vickers design because it's based on the Valentine and when you think that this is at the end of the war we've made enough mistakes up till then so why we came up with this dreadful thing I have no idea so here we are it's the worst tank in the world as far as I'm concerned and that is why I've elected it to be my number one tank it's got all the faults that you can hope for in one vehicle and really is an excellent example the most awful kind of tank you'll find anywhere right thanks very much for watching don't forget to subscribe to YouTube and to support us on patreon because we really do need that it helps us a great deal thanks very much you

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 1,766,772

Keywords: tank, tanks, bovington, tank museum, the tank museum, museum, documentary, bovington tank museum, history military history, david fletcher, david willey, tank chat, tank chats, chat, Top 5 tanks, the tank museum top 5 tanks, tank museum top 5, top five tanks, history, charioteer, black prince, valiant, covenanter, L1E3 amphibian, british tanks, worst british tanks, ww2, worst tanks

Id: GF0hRJ09Q-E

Length: 29min 24sec (1764 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 06 2018