The Centurion, introduced in 1945, was the primary British main battle tank of the post-Second World War period. It is widely considered to be one of the most successful post-war tank designs, remaining in production into the 1960s, and seeing combat in the front lines into the 1980s.
According to this source, in 1981, the BAOR had 300 Centurion main battle tanks in reserve.
You can imagine that if World War III had started as imagined in the book by Harold Coyle that the British Army would want to use all the tanks they had access to when faced with the might of the armoured formations of the Warsaw Pact.
So though the Iron Maiden rules don’t cover the Centurion tank and no (British) models have been released I still thought it would be nice to have some Centurions on the gaming table.
So I tried to order a couple of Sho’T models from the Flames of War Fate of a Nation range and will paint them up as British Army Centurions for use in Team Yankee games.
These look like really nice models. Alas they never arrived, as supplier was unable to supply the models, as Battlefront have made them a direct-only order item.
Another possibility was to use my own British Civil War background and use them as Royalist forces, or as their Republican opposition.
I did consider getting the ANZAC Centurion Mk 5s from the Vietnam range, but they don’t have skirts. After operating for a few weeks in Vietnam, the tanks crews soon learned to remove the protective armoured side skirts from both sides of the tank, to prevent the vegetation and mud from building up between the track and the mudguards.
I did think that in a World War III scenario such modifications or battle damage would still mean the models could be used, but as the Israeli Sho’T models already come with skirts, I decided to use them.