The Centurion Tank (Images of War) by Pat Ware & Brian Delf

Author:Pat Ware & Brian Delf [Ware, Pat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: HIS027080: HISTORY / Military / Weapons
ISBN: 9781783378289
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2013-04-18T21:00:00+00:00

Mk 3 or Mk 5 Centurion, one of a large batch (650) produced by the Royal Ordnance Factories from 1950. The main gun is the ‘B barrel’ 20-pounder (83.4mm). (Warehouse Collection)

Many of the Centurions sold to customers around the world saw no active service with their original owners, including those vehicles supplied to the Danish, Netherlands, Swedish and Swiss Armies. However, a few Centurions certainly remained in service into the 1990s, and many, including some British AVREs, were able to be maintained by virtue of the large strategic reserve of parts that had been purchased from the Netherlands government by Aviation Jersey Ltd on behalf of the NATO powers. In a huge operation, every case of parts was opened, quickly examined and then marked as fit for keeping or to be scrapped before being moved to the island of Jersey, where they were held for redistribution within NATO as required.

However, it is impossible to hold back the march of time indefinitely, and improvements in automotive performance, tank guns, and target acquisition and sighting equipment inevitably meant that the Centurion was effectively obsolete. No longer suitable for front-line service, those British Army Centurions that were not scrapped would have certainly suffered the ignominious fate of being used as range hard targets or being sold to more impecunious nations. It was the same story elsewhere, with many similarly superseded by more modern equipment and surplus vehicles sold to other nations. The situation in Denmark was typical. Many of the nation’s 216 Centurions remained in service into the 1990s, serving alongside 120 Leopard IA3 main battle tanks that had started to enter service in February 1976, but the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), signed in 1990 by NATO members and the Warsaw Pact nations, restricted Denmark to 300 main battle tanks and some 146 remaining Centurions were destroyed or taken out of commission between 1993 and 1995.

However, a handful of Centurions have survived in museums around the world, and the relatively low cost of surplus Centurions in the 1990s means that there are also more than a few in private hands.

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