Recovering a 65-Ton Tank With No Tracks From a Swampy Field Is Hard Work

No matter how good a driver you are, or how much suspension travel, tire diameter, and low-range gearing your rig might have, chances are you will get stuck eventually. Getting a 4×4 unstuck can be dirty, ego-bruising work that can also leave said 4×4 worse for wear. But at least most recoveries don’t involve a vehicle that weighs over 60 tons, hasn’t moved in decades, and is located on swampy ground dotted with unexploded mines and artillery shells.

That was the challenge Joe Hewes, face of the Mr Hewes YouTube channel, and the staff of The Tank Museum, which houses one of the world’s largest collections of these military vehicles (and has a restoration YouTube channel of its own that’s worth checking out), set for themselves. The museum is restoring a British Conqueror tank that is missing its turret and main gun. Replacements were available, but they happened to be on a derelict Conqueror that had been used for target practice at a U.K. Ministry of Defence gunnery range. A tank like this would have weighed about 65 tons when new, and while this one was missing its engine and transmission, it wasn’t exactly a lightweight.

The tank was complete enough for the purposes of this project, except for one crucial detail: missing tracks. The tracks help distribute a vehicle’s weight, which is how tanks can move instead of just sinking into the ground. So while the tank was resting on the road wheels that help keep the tracks in tension, trying to tow it would likely just cause the massive vehicle to dig in. And given that the tank was situated in a live-fire area with munitions potentially lying just below the surface, that would have been an especially bad idea.

So the only way the Ministry of Defence would allow the recovery to proceed was by reinstalling the tracks. Just finding a replacement set must’ve been difficult (only a handful of Conquerors were built and even fewer survive), and then the tank had to be jacked up in situ so that they could be installed. To do that, Hewes brought in two military-grade Foden heavy recovery trucks. Once used by the British Army for vehicle recovery, they had to lift the Conqueror not only off the ground but out of it, as its road wheels were submerged in the earth. An Oshkosh M1070—a semi-truck used by the U.S. military to transport tanks—winched the Conqueror onto its new tracks and eventually hauled it off site on a trailer.

WE RECOVERED A 65 TON TANK ABANDONED FOR 58 YEARS!

What’s so important about the Conqueror? It’s a missing link of sorts between the two iconic British tanks of the early Cold War, the Centurion and Chieftain. In the immediate postwar period, the NATO allies sought to develop bigger tanks in response to the Soviet IS-3. The U.S. came up with the M103, and the U.K. developed the Conqueror as a bigger sibling to the Centurion. However, big-and-slow tanks like these had too many drawbacks, and technological advancements eventually made do-it-all designs like the Chieftain possible. The Conqueror wasn’t successful, but the story of British tanks that military historians seek to tell isn’t complete without it.

Thankfully, there are dedicated enthusiasts with access to heavy equipment willing to wrestle tons of rusty metal from the muck. The process of recovering this tank was just as excruciating as it appears, which is why the video is the same length as some theatrical movie releases. Give it a watch if you’re still feeling bad about having to break out the winch on your last off-road excursion.