What time period exactly was this great tank the greatest tank ever?

When all the world was bright and new and small boys were allowed to design tanks a lot of concepts were created for lumbering landships lurching slowly across the battlefield while delivering justice and vengeance to the enemy from a series varied weaponry in multiple turrets.

More boring designs eventually proved more useful, but in this episode we explore this inter-war golden era where tanks sprouted turrets like mushrooms after rain.

Failed joint procurement programs somehow led to the one tank that a cashed up country making its own decisions would buy.

With the production lines open again it's time to revisit the Leopard 2!

The Soviets decided they didn't have a need for light tanks. And instead built a very useful light vehicle with a big gun. And they built a lot of them. And this is their story.

Vickers went out on a limb and built their own tank in 1963.

And a bunch of countries decided something tough and simple was exactly what they wanted.

India built 2,000 of them and took them to war with great success.

This episode we're going to take a look at what was going on with the Vickers MBTs and the Indian Vijayanta.

The halftime interview features @lottiethetankwhisperer !

Early war tanks on all sides were surprisingly rattly and rickety contraptions. In this episode we're going to count the rivets on the Panzer II which really proved that some tank is better than no tank as it conquered Poland and France.

The halftime interview features Graham from ‪@xacoupeguy‬ reflecting on a year spent working with tanks.

After a world war spent building very bad tanks the British got their act together and unleashed Centurion on the world.

It would fight with distinction in the Korean War, the Suez Crisis, Indo-Pakistani wars, Vietnam, and on both sides of Arab-Israeli wars.

Bruce Springsteen was probably thinking of Centurion when he wrote "Tougher Than The Rest":

"If you're rough enough for love /

Baby, I'm tougher than the rest"

Centurion was the first audio episode we tried to record remotely during the Covid lockdowns and John's technical errors made him sound like a dalek so it was a good candidate to revisit.

The halftime interview features Chris from ‪@HistoryofEverythingChannel‬ on Air Disaster Hill just outside Canberra.

Outfuelled, outmanned, outgunned. The desperate Germans needed a tank that could turn the tide of battle.

Fortunately they came up with this 190 tonne monster instead.

For all the slides and links check out: Totallytanked.net

The ancestor of all failed Franco-German military procurements the AMX-30 was a strange result of meeting the requirements of its moment precisely, while being birthed into a world that had changed from the time of its design.

Despite seeming strange to us in 2025 it enjoyed a great deal of success in markets too odious for the Germans to sell Leopards to.

From Northern France to the gates of Moscow, to the jungles of the South Pacific one tank kept rumbling slowly on. A vastly superior sequel; the Matilda II was a true tortoise of war.

This is our second episode featuring Matilda II as the expanded format of the current show made it worth coming back to.