Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank 1987-2006

Reviewed by John Prigent

Summary

FirstRead

This is a splendid reference for Challenger modellers to set beside the Osprey Modelling title on Challanger.

The Challenger story begins with the start of the search for a replacement for Chieftain and describes the military, technical and political sides behind the eventual decision to buy British instead of acquiring Leopard 2, Abrams M1A2 or Leclerc. The user trials and consequent “fixes” for the problems found come next, and then the remaining 2/3 of the book deal with operational deployments to Kosovo and the Gulf.

There’s a lot of information about combat in and around Basra which makes fascinating reading.

Plenty of good, clear colour and monochrome photographs show the tanks and the driver training, engineer and recovery variants though there’s no text description of them, and the colour plates – interspersed among the text pages in this book rather than collected together in its centre pages - include CRARRV in combat as well as the battle tanks.

The photos and plates give modellers a good selection of markings for their Challys, and the excellent captions tell readers exactly what they are looking at and where and when the subject was seen.

Highly Recommended.

Thanks to Osprey Publishing for the review sample