Ten Worst?

I've grown weary of the "Ten Best Whatchamacallit" shows on the Military Channel. Actually I can't watch them at all because I tend to screech at the TV - what do you mean, a Tiger is better than a Comet, are you smoking crack or what? And perhaps as an antidote to them, I'll now offer my analysis of the worst production tanks ever made. Note the word production. It would be all too easy to tee off on freaks like the Tortoise or the Tsar and populate the list with one-off weirdos, so I'm going to stick to tanks that actually had a production run.

1. The worst production tank ever made: The Soviet T-62. On paper it sounds pretty effective: transverse V-12 diesel engine, hemispheric turret, 115mm smoothbore gun, torsion bar suspension. But the tank contained more design flaws than the Turbo Yugo and was so badly manufactured it proved to be one of the most unreliable tanks ever built - one NATO officer noted that a T-62 regiment tended to lose one tank every two miles during a road march, usually to clutch problems. The need to elevate the gun for reloading meant that it was constitutionally incapable of firing aimed second shots, and... Oh, that'll do, I reckon. There were certain Warsaw Pact countries that, when offered T-62s, said "No thank you, we'll stick with our T-55s, thank you very much."

2. The whole Early Cold War Heavy Tank spectacle, including the IS-3, T-10, M103 and Conqueror. At least the M103 and Conqueror were competently executed, and the T-10M arguably competently executed, but it seems laughable in light of the development of the Vickers 105mm L7 tank gun that the notion of the "heavy tank" lasted as long as it did. It bears pointing out that IS-3s were easily dealt with by US-made and Israeli-crewed M48 Pattons during the Six-Day War, and those only had 90mm guns.

3. The Convenanter. It seems too easy to pick on this drab, unimpressive vehicle. The British took the classic but under-armored A13 cruiser in hand for a redesign, and somehow the resulting vehicle, the Covenanter, was worse than the A13. Then came the A15 Crusader, which was functionally nothing more than an A13 with a slightly different shape, and... Oh, no wonder the Cromwell ended up being two years late.

4. TOG. The only sane reaction upon viewing this thing has to be "Someone is joking, right?" One variant of the TOG even had the gall to carry the excellent 17-Pounder OQF gun, which is more or less the same as serving fresh apple pie on a paper plate made of horse manure. Oh, but TOG never got past the prototype stage, did it? I seem to be a hypocrite, but I'm just clearing the way for:

5. Maus. This was a German super-duper-heavy tank that they wasted time with in the closing days of the war. They built five of them and none are believed to have seen combat, but that segment of the modeling/wargaming hobby that reveres all things Wehrmacht believes that two of them saw combat against the Russians and could have singlehandedly altered the outcome of the war if they'd only had more ammo. In fact Maus was just another in the line of overly large, overly-heavy, overly-optimistic boondoggles that the Nazis seemed to specialize in. My theory is that if the Nazis hadn't wasted so much time and money on super-heavy tanks, ballistic missiles, rocket fighters and the like, the war might well have lasted another year.

6. Pzkw-II Lynx. Oh yes, dogpile on the Germans. Here we're at the other end of the scale, dealing with a light tank that the Germans spent way too much time and effort on. A complete waste of metal, time and money? That's a roger, especially since the Lynx couldn't do anything that Germany's highly satisfactory family of eight-wheel-drive armored cars couldn't do better, cheaper and more quietly.

7. Medium Tank M3 (AKA Lee/Grant). The Lee and Grant (same tank with certain detail differences) played a major role in combat in theaters ranging from Libya to Tunisia to Burma, but the tank was really a ghastly mess. The fact that it was used in such numbers, and with such generally favorable results, speaks mainly to the lack of acceptable alternatives. The tank was huge, had limited traverse for the main gun, wasn't easy to get into defilade, and required a crew of seven men. The Soviets were so unhappy with it they nicknamed it the "Tomb for Seven Brothers", and the Americans and British used it only for as long as it took for vastly superior Shermans to arrive. (One thing one can say about it, though, is that it was pretty reliable.)

8. ARL-44. The French felt the need to resume tank production as soon as possible after the Liberation, partly as a matter of national pride and partly because they wanted to do their part to help defeat Nazi Germany. In view of the fact that the Americans would have given the French all the Shermans they wanted free of charge, the new French tank needed to be bigger and heavier and better-armed than the Sherman, otherwise there was no logic in building it. So they took what amounted to the 1940-vintage Char B chassis and plopped a new turret armed with a 90mm gun atop that. The result was a bizarre mishmash of prewar lack of mobility with postwar upgunning.

9. XMBT-70. XMBT stands for "Experimental Main Battle Tank". This technological wonder was supposed to establish a new benchmark for tank design that would last into the 21st Century, and the wonder isn't that it failed, but that it got as close to success as it did, considering the obstacles. It was a joint German-US venture, and the two sides never could agree on the gun (the Germans wanted a 120mm smoothbore gun; the US wanted a 152mm combined gun-missile launcher). The tank was a wonderland of features, including variable-height hydropneumatic suspension, a very high power to weight ratio, advanced armor, advanced fire controls, and the aforementioned gun-missile system. But it cost a fortune and eventually they killed the program before it bankrupted both countries. The Americans later "rescoped" it (as they say) and called it the XM803, which proved to be almost as good a money incinerator as the original XMBT-70.

The large amounts of money invested in the XMBT-70 and XM803 probably had a lot to do with the US Army having to soldier on with M60s for about ten years longer than they should have - the XMBT-70 probably delayed the M1 by a decade. But it must also be said that with the first-rate M60A3 TTS in its inventory, the US Army could afford to wait.