WI: British Twenty-Pounder Tank Gun Is Deployed In WWII

You give me six Centurions and it might not change the course of the war but it'll sure rip the guts out of any Wehrmacht armoured assault.

I'd take a Centurion Mk. 3 over 3 Panthers or Tigers any day of the week.

Too often in these sorts of comparisons, the role of the crew and commander are ignored. A really good crew and commander can win an engagement with a popgun if faced with incompetence and complacency. A poor crew and commander will never win, no matter how good their tank is.

The Centurion was not a super tank. It was a good, well balance AFV. It never had the FCS it should have but that was a consequence of the belief hat conscripts could not be trained to use an advanced fire control system. The ranging MG was adequate and nothing more. If they'd installed a good coincidence rangefinder and trained the crew to use it properly, the Centurion could have truly shined but they never did.
 
Because obviously we're speeding up the Centurion production by like...six months or so. (squeeeeeeee...)You do that, and you could have the equivalent of Centurion Mk. 3s in the Battle of the Bulge. :D

Great. Now I've got to change my pants.

Ok I'm back.

Getting the Centurion into service six months earlier may not be as simple as it sounds. By introducing the 17lber and 20lber earlier you take British tank development in a quite different direction, one that could avoid the policy and design decisions that resulted in the OTL Centurion.
 
You give me six Centurions and it might not change the course of the war but it'll sure rip the guts out of any Wehrmacht armoured assault.

I'd take a Centurion Mk. 3 over 3 Panthers or Tigers any day of the week.

Damnit! Will you stop saying things like that, I've only got so many pairs of underwear. :mad:
 
The Centurion was not a super tank. It was a good, well balance AFV. It never had the FCS it should have but that was a consequence of the belief hat conscripts could not be trained to use an advanced fire control system. The ranging MG was adequate and nothing more. If they'd installed a good coincidence rangefinder and trained the crew to use it properly, the Centurion could have truly shined but they never did.

That sound you just heard outside your window? It's not thunder, it's an ominous rumbling from the direction of iowa.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
Too often in these sorts of comparisons, the role of the crew and commander are ignored. A really good crew and commander can win an engagement with a popgun if faced with incompetence and complacency. A poor crew and commander will never win, no matter how good their tank is.

The Centurion was not a super tank. It was a good, well balance AFV. It never had the FCS it should have but that was a consequence of the belief hat conscripts could not be trained to use an advanced fire control system. The ranging MG was adequate and nothing more. If they'd installed a good coincidence rangefinder and trained the crew to use it properly, the Centurion could have truly shined but they never did.

What we're talking about here with putting a 20 pdr on it is essentially a Mk. 3 in 1944 or 1945.

Take a look at what the Mk. 3s were doing in Korea: the Australians could call in fire from British Centurions on hilltops a halfmile away and be "confidant we'd put the fire within 10 yards of them." That's not me saying that, that's an interview with a British tanker quoted from The Korean War by Max Hastings.

To say that the quality of the British armoured corps in Korea was in any way superior to that of the British armoured corps in the Second World War is a bit of a stretch, I think. We're talking about introducing these tanks to the front in...November or December 1944. By then, any unit they're introduced into will have a fair amount of battlefield experience.
 
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What we're talking about here with putting a 20 pdr on it is essentially a Mk. 3 in 1944 or 1945.
Not quite. The Mark 3 did have better stabilization and armor then the Mark 1.

According to Wikipedia, the Mark 1 had only 78mm of armor. For a comparison, the Panther has 80mm(hull) and the Pershing has ~102mm(hull).
 
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