12 Facts About Leopard 1

Leopard 1 is a main battle tank designed and produced by Porsche in West Germany that first entered service in 1965.

Leopard 1 quickly became a standard of many European militaries, and eventually served as the main battle tank in over a dozen countries worldwide, with West Germany, Italy and the Netherlands being the largest operators until their retirement.

Since 1990, the Leopard 1 has gradually been relegated to secondary roles in most armies.

Leopard 1 project started in November 1956 in order to develop a modern tank, the Standard-Panzer, to replace the Bundeswehr's American-built M47 and M48 Patton tanks, which, though just delivered to West Germany's recently reconstituted army, were rapidly becoming outdated.

The Leopard 1 was being purchased from Germany by a number of NATO members and other allies, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Italy, Denmark, Australia, Canada, Turkey and Greece .

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Since then, almost all users of the Leopard 1 have applied similar changes to their own vehicles, and in most ways the 1A5 can be considered the "standard" Leopard 1 today.

The project was ended in 1987, as the Leopard 1 2 was in widespread service at this point and the 1A5 offered a more reasonable upgrade path for a fraction of the cost.

Almost as soon as the Leopard 1 was introduced into service in 1965, Porsche was awarded a contract to study further improvements to the existing design, while awaiting deliveries of the MBT-70 in the mid-1970s.

In 1971, the minister of defence, Helmut Schmidt, decided to abandon the Eber-project and build 17 prototypes of a Leopard 1 2, based on the Keiler design, which had a turret with spaced sloped armour.

The Leopard 1 was operated by the 1st Armoured Regiment and was officially withdrawn from service in July 2007.

The first regiment to receive the Leopard 1 was the 4th Lancers, followed by the 1st Lancers, 2nd Lancers, 3rd Lancers, 8th Lancers, 1st Guides, 2nd Guides and finally the 2nd Mounted Rifles.

Canada operates the Leopard 1-based Beaver armoured bridgelayer vehicle and Taurus armoured recovery vehicle, bought with the original Leopard C1, and the Badger armoured engineer vehicle with a dozer blade and excavator bucket, which entered service in 1990.