The 41st Centurion was a British high-speed tank of the Second World War and the Cold War, sometimes classified as a main battle tank. The first prototypes of the vehicle were built in 1944, and serial production continued from 1945 to 1962, culminating in the production of 4,423 units. The Centurion was powered by a 600 hp Rolls-Royce Meteor V12 engine. The main armament of the vehicle was one 77 mm HV gun, one 20 mm Polsten gun and one 7.92 mm Besa machine gun.
The Centurion was developed as a result of the experience of armored clashes in North Africa in 1942-1943. In 1944, the first mock-ups of the machine and its prototypes were ready, and in 1945 several copies were delivered to the British troops fighting in Germany, but they did not manage to take part in the fighting. When designing the Centurion, the emphasis was placed on high mobility, the best possible armor and the use of a gun that could fight even the heaviest German, and later Soviet, vehicles. During operation, it also turned out that the Centurion was characterized by a low failure rate and a high tendency to modernization. All this made it one of the best tanks of the Cold War period by many analysts. During serial production, many modernizations of this successful machine were carried out. One of them was the Centurion Mk. 3, which received a 20-pound (caliber 86 mm) gun, or one of the most successful versions - the Centurion Mk. 5, armed with a 105 mm gun. The Centurion tank also successfully participated in many armed conflicts, including: the Korean War (1950-1953), where it surpassed American and Soviet developments, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, the Six-Day War (1967), the Yom Kippur War (1973) and the Lebanon War of 1982. It was also widely exported, in particular, to Austria, Australia, India, Israel, Kuwait, South Africa and Sweden.
