How British Centurion Tanks Humiliated Soviet Armor in Korea

[00:00:00]Lieutenant Colonel Sir Guy Laather watched the flatbed transporters grind up the Busan Dock Road on November 14th, 1950, and counted his tanks. Three squadrons, 64 Centurion Mark IIIs, painted deep bronze green, the paint still fresh from Bovington.

[00:00:19]The eighth king's royal Irish Husars had crossed the world in six weeks aboard the Empire Windrush and the Empire Hallale, and their vehicles had spent the voyage lashed under tarpolins that stank of sea salt and gun oil. Nobody in Whiteall was certain the tanks would even fight. The Chiefs of Staff Committee had argued for a month before Atley's cabinet approved the deployment, and the Treasury had asked in writing whether older Cromwells might not do.

[00:00:48]The Centurion was less than 5 years out of the factory. Only one prototype had reached Germany before VE Day. It carried a 20 pounder gun capable of punching through 150 mm of armor at 1,000 yard, a horizontal volume suspension that let it cross broken ground at nearly 20 mph, and a fully stabilized turret that could fire on the move. A capability the T34 did not possess. But it had never been tested in combat. The Ministry of Supply had shipped it to Korea partly to fight and partly to see what happened when it did. What Happened became, by 1953, one of the most closely studied tank performances of the 20th century.

[00:01:33]It also became one of the least discussed outside armored circles because Korea was an American war in the public imagination.

[00:01:42]And because the Husars and the fifth Royal Iniskilling Dragoon gods who relieved them did their work in valleys the Americans could not name.

[00:01:52]The British armored contribution ran to some 200 centurions across the war's duration. They fought T34/85s built in Nishni Tagle driven by North Korean and Chinese crews. Sometimes supported by Soviet advisers whose presence GCHQ's forerunner at East Coat was already tracking through signals intercepts rooted via the listening post at Little Saiwan in Hong Kong. The joint intelligence committee had produced JIC5077 in September, warning that Soviet armor doctrine would be exported wholesale to the Korean theater. The paper reached the foreign office on Ernest Beaven's desk within 48 hours. Beavenon, dying of heart disease but still functioning, minuteed, "Then we had better send our best." The best was the Centurion. The alternative, the Churchill, was a tank designed for the hedgeross of Normandy, and the men at the Royal Armored Corps Center at Boington knew it would not survive a Korean winter, let alone a Chinese armored thrust. The first centurions rolled off the transporters at Busan into temperatures already dropping below freezing. Corporal Dennis Wyro of a squadron later recalled that the diesel fuel in the Bedford lorries had begun to wax within an hour of sunset.

[00:03:18]The meteor engines Rolls-Royce derived from the Merlin coughed and settled.

[00:03:24]The Hars had trained on the Lunberg Heath and on Ssbury plane. They had not trained for minus30° or for patty fields that froze into concrete slabs by December and turned to hip deep sucking mud in April. Nobody had. Within 8 weeks they would be dug in above the Imjin River and the Chinese spring offensive of April 1951 would be gathering in the hills to their north. What the h did not yet know was that their orders when they came would place three of their tanks between an entire British brigade and destruction.

[00:04:01]The Imjin battle 22 to 25 April 1951 is remembered for the Glousters. It should also be remembered for sea squadron 8.

[00:04:12]When the Chinese 63rd Army, three divisions, roughly 27,000 men, came south across the Imjin on the night of April 22nd, the British 29th Brigade was holding a 9mm front with four battalions. The Husar's Centurions were the brigade's only heavy armor.

[00:04:30]Brigadier Tom Brody's plan, approved by Sukakor under the American Lieutenant General Frank Milbour, assumed the Chinese would attack in company strength. They attacked in divisional strength. By dawn on April 23rd, the Glousters were surrounded on hill 235.

[00:04:47]The Royal Northland fuseliers were pulling back under mortifier. The Royal Olter rifles were engaged along the Kansas line. Major Henry Huth, commanding Ca Squadron, was ordered to push north up the Route 11 Valley to relieve pressure on the Belgian battalion attached to the brigade.

[00:05:05]He took his squadron, 16 centurions, up a road that had not been reconoited, past hills held by an enemy whose strength no one at brigade headquarters had yet calculated.

[00:05:17]Chinese infantry swarmed the tanks. They climbed onto the engine decks, jammed rifles into vision blocks, tried to prize open hatches with entrenching tools. The Centurions fired their beasts and machine guns at each other, sweeping the hulls clean.

[00:05:34]Hoth squadron destroyed an estimated 11 Chinese anti-tank positions and killed several hundred infantry before withdrawing on the night of April 24th with five tanks lost and the rest damaged.

[00:05:47]The withdrawal itself was extraordinary.

[00:05:50]Some centurions carried more than a dozen infantry, wounded olers, fuseliers, and men of the 170 independent mortar battery clinging to the turrets under continuous fire.

[00:06:02]Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Pike of the Royal Artillery, watching from a forward observation post, wrote afterwards that the site was the most impressive feat of arms he had seen in two wars. The tanks came back, nearly all of them. Chinese anti-tank fire, 3.5 in bazookas supplied by Soviet advisers and captured American 2.36-in weapons had failed to penetrate the Centurion's frontal armor at any range they could achieve on that broken ground.

[00:06:33]Postaction reports counted 27 direct hits on one tank alone, commanded by Sergeant Cadman. None had gone through.

[00:06:41]The Ministry of Supply received the report at Shellmech's house in London on May 3rd, 1951 and circulated it under a restricted cover to the director Royal Armored Corps.

[00:06:53]Handwritten in the margin in an unidentified staff officer's pencil.

[00:06:58]The design is vindicated. In Moscow, the assessment was different, but no less serious. The GRU dispatched two officers to Manuria in June 1951 to interview Chinese tank crews who had faced British armor. Their report later summarized in a 1955 Soviet General Staff study that GCHQ eventually obtained in redacted form through an East German source in the mid 1960s concluded that the T34/85 was outclassed by the Centurion at all combat ranges and that Soviet armored doctrine in Korea required immediate revision.

[00:07:36]The T-54, then entering series production at Ural Vagonzavod, was accelerated in response.

[00:07:44]The Foreign Office in London saw none of this at the time. What they saw in July 1951 was a request from Washington. The Americans wanted to buy Centurions.

[00:07:56]The American request landed on the desk of Sir Roger Mackins, Deputy Under Secretary at the Foreign Office on July 11th, 1951.

[00:08:05]It came through the British Joint Services Mission in Washington. The US Army had watched the M46 Persing struggle in Korean terrain.

[00:08:14]Underpowered, mechanically fragile, its 90 mm gun adequate, but its armor vulnerable to Chinese satchel charges.

[00:08:23]The M26 was worse. The Americans had been developing the M47 and M48, but neither would reach Korea in strength before 1953.

[00:08:33]In the meantime, they wanted to lease or purchase outright up to 500 centurions.

[00:08:39]Makins took the request to Herbert Morrison, briefly foreign secretary after Bevven's death in April.

[00:08:46]Morrison, who found the foreign office bewildering, passed it to Atly. Atley referred it to the defense committee.

[00:08:53]The defense committee referred it to the ministry of supply which produced a paper on August 3rd pointing out that the Royal Ordinance Factory at Barnau near Leeds was already at maximum production 30 tanks per month and that British army of the Rine requirements alone would absorb output until 1954.

[00:09:13]There were no Centurions to sell. There was also quietly a question about whether Britain wanted to sell them.

[00:09:20]The Centurion had become within 9 months one of the few pieces of Britishes military equipment that was demonstrably superior to its American equivalent. It was also, as the Treasury noted, a hard currency earner. The Australians had already ordered 143. The Canadians wanted more. Sweden, ostensibly neutral, was negotiating for a licensed production arrangement that would eventually produce the STV81.

[00:09:48]The Netherlands, Denmark, and Switzerland were making inquiries.

[00:09:51]Selling to the Americans on the terms Washington proposed, cost plus a modest margin, would undercut all of them. The compromise negotiated by Sir Oliver Franks in Washington through the autumn of 1951, was that the Americans would not receive Centurions.

[00:10:08]They would receive detailed technical specifications and Vicers Armstrongs would license certain components, notably the horizontal volute suspension design for incorporation into the M48 program. The Foreign Office Minute Recording the settlement dated November 14th, 1951, noted with unusual cander, "HMG's interest lies in ensuring the Americans understand that we retain certain capabilities they do not. The eighthars were relieved by the fifth royal inskilling draon gods in December 1951.

[00:10:44]The skins, as they were called, inherited the tanks and the mud. They also inherited the tactical lessons the Husars had written up in a document titled Notes on the Employment of Centurion tanks in Korea. 26 pages mimographed at brigade headquarters, later reprinted by the War Office as a training pamphlet in 1953.

[00:11:07]The notes covered everything from engine warming procedures in extreme cold to the correct elevation of the 20 pounder for indirect fire, a role the tank had never been designed to perform, but which it now performed regularly, using its gun as long range artillery against Chinese positions on the reverse slopes of the ridges. Winston Churchill returned to Downing Street in October 1951.

[00:11:33]Reading a brief on the Centurion's Korean performance prepared by the Cabinet Office, he is reported to have said, according to Anthony Montigue Brown's later account, that it was the best tank in the world and the Americans are welcome to know it. The remark is uncorroborated by contemporary documents. What is documented is Churchill's decision in early 1952 to accelerate Centurion production and to expand exports as a matter of cold war strategy. By then, the tank was fighting a different war on the Jamestown line.

[00:12:06]The Jamestown line, running roughly along the 38th parallel from the Yellow Sea to the Punch Bowl, was where the Korean War stopped being a war of movement in the summer of 1951 and became a war of position. It was also where the Centurion found the role that shaped British armored thinking for the next decade. The Ridge Tank dug in hull down on reverse slopes using its stabilized gun to engage targets at ranges that surprised everyone including its designers. The Centurion functioned as a mobile bunker with a sniper's precision.

[00:12:41]The fifth Iniskillings and from December 1952, the first Royal Tank Regiment recorded engagements at 2,000 yards and beyond.

[00:12:51]On Hill 355, Kowangan to the Chinese, Little Gibraltara to almost everyone else, a single centurion of Sea Squadron, one RTR, engaged a Chinese observation post at a measured 2,400 yd in November 1952 and destroyed it with the fourth round.

[00:13:12]The gunner, Trooper Hall, later said he had used the coincidence rangefinder simply because he had been taught to.

[00:13:20]The instructors at Bovington had never suggested engagements at that range were practical. The Chinese response was to bring up armor of their own. Elements of the first and second Chinese tank divisions equipped with T34/85s and a small number of IS-2 heavy tanks deployed to the western sector during 1952.

[00:13:42]British and Commonwealth armored units engaged Chinese tanks on several occasions during the last year of the war. Though the encounters were fleeting, the Chinese armor, whenever it exposed itself, was destroyed.

[00:13:57]Claims of Centurions destroying T34s at ranges exceeding 3,000 yd appear in some regimental accounts, but should be treated with caution.

[00:14:07]Historians, including Jeffrey Gray, have noted that the paperwork does not always support the folklore. What is not in dispute is that no Centurion was lost to enemy tank fire during the entire Korean War.

[00:14:20]The Ministry of Defense, still the War Office, in 1952, took possession of the afteraction reports in London and passed them to the Royal Armored Corps and to the Fighting Vehicles Research and Development Establishment at Churchy.

[00:14:34]The Churchy engineers led by Sir Claude Gibb had already begun work on what would become the Chieftain, but the Korean data reshaped their priorities.

[00:14:44]The next British main battle tank would carry a bigger gun. The 120 mm L11 was already on the drawing board and would have thicker frontal armor still.

[00:14:55]It would sacrifice speed for protection on the theory drawn directly from the Jamestown line that a tank that could not be killed did not need to run.

[00:15:05]The theory would be tested against Soviet armor in the Middle East, not in Europe and not by the British army.

[00:15:12]Israeli Centurions upgraded with British 105 mm L7 guns. The L7 itself, a direct product of a 1954 requirement that emerged from the Korean lessons, would destroy Syrian T-54s and T-55s on the Golan Heights in 1967 and again in 1973.

[00:15:35]The Indian Army would use Britishbuilt Centurions to defeat Pakistani M47s and M48s at Asalutar in September 1965 in what remains one of the most one-sided tank battles of the Cold War era. 97 Pakistani tanks destroyed or abandoned against 10 Indian losses.

[00:15:57]Every one of those battles was in a sense a Korean battle fought at second hand.

[00:16:02]The design had been proved in a country most of the crews had never heard of by regiments whose casualty roles were read out in cathedral towns in the home counties and the proof had reshaped cold war armored doctrine on three continents. In London, the man reading the reports most closely was not a soldier. Duncan Sandies became Minister of Supply in October 1951 and then Minister of Defense in January 1957.

[00:16:31]Between those posts, he read almost every significant paper produced on British armored warfare, and he concluded that the Centurion's performance in Korea had important and largely uncomfortable implications for defense policy. Sandes was Churchill's son-in-law, an artillery officer in the war, and a man who believed missiles would replace almost everything. His 1957 defense white paper is remembered for its cuts to fighter command and for its assumption that manned aircraft were nearly obsolete. It is less often remembered that it also preserved and expanded British tank production.

[00:17:09]The reasoning appears in a memorandum Sandes sent to Harold McMillan on February 21st, 1957, now in the CAB 129 series at the National Archives at Q.

[00:17:22]Sandies wrote that the Centurion had established a British industrial and technical position which cannot readily be surrendered without cost to our alliances and to Sterling.

[00:17:33]The Centurion was being sold to Australia, Canada, Denmark, India, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and West Germany. Each sale created a logistical dependency on British ammunition, spare parts, and technical training. Each sale was a small but durable node in a network Whiteall could adjust with a license decision. Sandies understood this because the foreign office had been telling him through Sir Frederick Hoyer Miller and later Sir Harold Katia that arms exports were becoming an instrument of policy in a decade when Britain could no longer afford to project power everywhere by force. The Suez debacle of November 1956 had made this brutally clear. The Centurion had performed well at Suez. Israeli, French, and British centurions all took part. But the political disaster had eclipsed the tactical success. What remained after Anthony Eden's resignation and McMillan's arrival in Downing Street was a British defense industry that could still sell worldclass armor to allies and to non-aligned states that Whiteall wished to influence. The GRU noticed Soviet military attaches in London and in the Commonwealth capitals filed regular reports on centurion exports throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

[00:18:58]The KGB's London residency at the Soviet embassy in Kensington Palace Gardens tasked several agents specifically with centurion related intelligence gathering.

[00:19:09]One of them, John Vassel, an Admiral T.

[00:19:12]Clark recruited in Moscow in 1955 and unmasked by M15 in September 1962, passed material relating to naval matters and armored vehicle specifications alike. His conviction under the Official Secrets Act came shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Radcliffe Tribunal that followed examined, among other things, how much the Soviets had learned about British tank development.

[00:19:41]The answer redacted in the published report was enough.

[00:19:46]Enough to matter, at any rate, in the calculations that Soviet planners were making about a European war. They still in the mid 1960s believed they might have to fight. The British Army of the Rine, four divisions strong on the North German plane, was equipped principally with Centurions until the chieftain began entering service in 1966.

[00:20:07]The Soviet Third Shock Army opposite them at Magnabberg was equipped with T-55s and from 1968 T62s.

[00:20:18]Both sides knew the Centurion could kill the T-55.

[00:20:22]Neither was entirely sure about the T62 until the Yam Kapor war of October 1973 provided answers in the Sinai and on the Golan. By then, the Centurion was almost 25 years old. It was still in 1973 the tank the Israelis chose to hold the ridge at the Valley of Tears. The Valley of Tears is a phrase that entered military historioggraphy through Israeli sources. But the tanks that fought there, the Shokcow variants of the Centurion, upgraded with L715mm guns and American diesel engines, were direct descendants of the vehicles the Husars had unloaded at Busan in November 1950. In October 1973, some 160 Israeli centurions of the Seventh Armored Brigade held a Syrian assault of roughly 500 T-55s and T62s along the northern Golan for 3 days.

[00:21:19]The Syrians lost around 260 tanks. The Israelis lost heavily too, but they held the ridge. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Avagdor Kahalani, commanded from a Centurion.

[00:21:32]British defense attaches watched the aftermath with unusual attentiveness.

[00:21:37]The defense intelligence staff at the MOD produced a report in early 1974, DIS 748, examining the performance of Britishes armor in Syrian and Egyptian hands.

[00:21:51]The report is still partially closed at Q, but its conclusions have been discussed by historians including Lawrence Freriedman.

[00:21:59]The Centurion in its modified form remained competitive against the most modern Soviet armor 23 years after it had first entered combat in Korea.

[00:22:09]This was by the standards of Cold War military technology an extraordinary achievement.

[00:22:15]Few weapons systems designed in the 1940s remained combat effective in the 1970s.

[00:22:21]The B-52 was one. The Centurion was another. The report also raised a more difficult question. Why had the chieftain, which had been designed specifically to replace the Centurion and which was now the standard tank of the British Army of the Rine, proved so mechanically troublesome. Chieftain's Leland L60 engine, a two-stroke opposed piston compression ignition design chosen for its supposed multiffuel capability, was notorious in BAR for breakdowns. Availability rates in some regiments were below 40% during the late 1960s.

[00:23:00]The Iranians who had bought chieftains in large numbers complained bitterly.

[00:23:05]The Israelis offered chieftain in the mid 1960s under a joint development program cenamed Tenac had eventually walked away and continued upgrading their centurions instead. The MOD's master general of the ordinance, Lieutenant General Sir John Gibbon, ordered a review. The review chaired by Sir William Cook examined why British armor design had lost the coherence that had produced the Centurion.

[00:23:31]Part of the answer uncomfortably was that the Centurion had been designed under wartime conditions with clear operational requirements and minimal Treasury interference by a team at AEC Southall and at the Department of Tank Design that had known exactly what it needed to build.

[00:23:50]The chieftain, by contrast, had been designed under a peacetime committee system that had tried to satisfy too many requirements at once and had accepted the L60 engine over Ministry of Supply objections in order to keep British Leland's Newton Lillow's factory in work. The lesson was not lost on Margaret Thatcher when she took office in May 1979. Her defense review conducted by John not and published in June 1981 as command 8288 addressed the chieftain successor program. What would become Challenger 1?

[00:24:26]The specification was tightened. The requirement for a proven reliable engine was made non-negotiable.

[00:24:32]The result Challenger entered service in 1983 and served with distinction in the Gulf War of 1991 where its Chobam armor and 120 mm L11 gun destroyed T72s at ranges the Iraqi crews could not match. The line ran unbroken from Busan to Bazra. 40 years of British armored engineering tracing back to 64 tanks unloaded on a Korean dockside.

[00:25:00]The men who had unloaded them were by 1991 mostly retired or dead. Saggy Lauder had died in 1980.

[00:25:09]Major Henry Hut had been kned in 1988.

[00:25:12]Trooper Hall, the longrange gunner from Hill 355, had left the army in 1957 and worked for the rest of his life at the Vauxhall plant at Luton.

[00:25:23]The eighth king's royal Irish husars had been amalgamated with the fourth queen's own husars in 1958 to form the queen's royal irrishars.

[00:25:33]The fifth royal iniskilling dragoon gods had merged with the fourth/7th royal dragoon gods in 1992 to form the royal dragoon gods. Regimental identities like the tanks themselves were consolidated by attrition. At the tank museum in Boington, one of the original Korean veteran centurions was preserved. It carried in the paint scheme applied by the Husars in 1950 the name Kohhu after a Grand National winner. The tank had been restored in the 1970s under the supervision of Major General Nigel Duncan, a former commander of the Royal Armored Corps who had served on the Imjin. Duncan wrote in a 1981 monograph, the story of the Centurion, that the tank's Korean service had been the making of a design that Britain owed to the war it hoped never to fight. He meant the Third World War. He did not live to see it not fought. The war Britain had prepared for on the North German plane never came. British Army of the Rine reached its peak strength of some 55,000 personnel in the late 1970s and began drawing down after the intermediate range nuclear forces treaty of 1987 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

[00:26:50]The options for change review of 1990 announced by Tom King in the Commons on July 25th cut Bao R further.

[00:27:00]The four armored division at Herford, one of the great armored formations of the Cold War, was disbanded.

[00:27:07]The Centurions were long gone from the Rine, sold or scrapped or displayed on plinths at regimental depots. Their chieftain successors were being replaced by challenggers. Their challenger successors would fight in Iraq.

[00:27:21]The Cold War ended not with a battle, but with a series of political decisions taken in Moscow, Warsaw, Berlin, and Prague.

[00:27:30]The armored formations that had faced each other across the inner German border for four decades stood down without firing at each other. This was in one reading the ultimate vindication of the deterrent posture that the centurion had helped establish in the early 1950s.

[00:27:47]In another reading, it was simply a very expensive avoidance of catastrophe. Both readings coexist in the historioggraphy.

[00:27:55]What is clearer historically is that the British army came out of the Cold War with a reputation for armored warfare that traced its origins to a specific place and a specific set of engagements.

[00:28:08]Busan, Imjin, Jamestown line, Hill 355.

[00:28:15]These were the training grounds. The Centurion had done what British designers and British crews had said it would do. It had done more than that.

[00:28:24]It had at ranges no one had predicted in weather no one had prepared for against enemies no one had briefed the men to expect held ground. The rest of the cold war was in armored terms a long continuation of what had been proved on the Imjin between 22 and 25 April 1951.

[00:28:43]The proof survives in the archives at the National Archives at Q. The W308 series contains the war diaries of the eighth HAR. the fifth inkillings and one RTR from Korea. The papers are thin, fullcap mostly, some carbon copies faint enough to require a magnifying glass, and the entries are the work of agitants writing at the end of long days in tents. They are not literature. They record fuel consumption, casualty numbers, ammunition expenditure, mechanical failures, and the weather.

[00:29:17]They also record in the driest possible pros the actions of tank crews who had been asked to do something for which their training had not fully prepared them and who had done it anyway.

[00:29:29]The DEF5 and DEF7 series contain the Chiefs of Staff Committee papers and the Ministry of Defense policy files from the period.

[00:29:40]They show how the Centurion's Korean performance was assessed at the strategic level and how the assessments fed into procurement into arms exports and into the shape of the British Army of the Rine. The CAB 128 and CAB 129 series contain the cabinet minutes and memorand including the Sandy's papers of 1957 and the exchanges with McMillan about defense priorities.

[00:30:09]These files are open to public inspection. They have been used by historians including Peter Hennessy, whose work on the cabinet system in this period remains foundational, and Christopher Andrew, whose authorized history of MI5, the defense of the realm, published in 2009, examined the counterintelligence dimension of British defense technology in the Cold War.

[00:30:34]The Imperial War Museum at Lambbeath holds the Centurion Mark III serial 06BA36 which served in Korea with the eighth Hous. It also holds oral history recordings made in the 1980s and 1990s with Korean veterans including tapes made with former troopers of Ca Squadron who spoke about the Imjin action 40 years after it happened. Some of the men wept, some did not. All of them remembered specific tanks by name and specific crew mates by rank and surname.

[00:31:08]At the tank museum in Bovington, the archive contains the design papers of CLA Gibb and the fighting vehicles research and development establishment.

[00:31:18]These trace the evolution from the Centurion prototype of 1945 to the Chieftain of 1963 to the Challenger of 1983.

[00:31:28]They show a design tradition that was not always coherent, but that produced at intervals machines capable of holding their own against anything the Warsaw Pact could field.

[00:31:39]The Centurion is the founding member of that tradition. It is the tank against which the others are measured.

[00:31:46]Britain's finest hour in the Cold War was not on the Western Front an hour of combat. It was four decades of preparation for combat that did not come. But in Korea briefly the preparation was tested. 64 tanks, three regiments in succession, roughly 200 vehicles in total across the war.

[00:32:06]Against them, Chinese and North Korean armor built to Soviet designs, supported by Soviet doctrine, opposed by British steel that had been engineered in the last months of one war and proved in the first years of another. The centurions came home. Most of them eventually went to museums or to friendly armies overseas. A few remained in service with the British Army into the 1970s, employed as bridge layers and armored recovery vehicles.

[00:32:36]The design outlasted the Cold War it had been built to deter, and the men who had fought in it lived to see the Berlin Wall come down. The tanks in the museums are quiet now. The archives are open.

[00:32:50]The story is there for anyone who wishes to read