EXPLODING A FEW MYTHS ABOUT WORLD WAR II ARMOR
By Stephen ‘Cookie’ Sewell
Museum Ordnance Magazine
September 1993
Sitting at a table on behalf of The Ordnance Museum Foundation, Inc., here at Aberdeen Proving Ground on Armed Forces Day 1993, I noticed that a great number of people are believers in myths that surround the German Army of World War II. Many of the people who stopped by had a number of negative comments about the perceived “lack of interest” by the museum in their favorite German tanks and the reasons they were so significant. (It must be noted that the charter of the ordnance Museum is to preserve the history of the development of American ordnance and armored vehicles, and to include significant foreign developments where possible.)
I believe it was Abraham Lincoln who is credited with the quote. “It is easy to defeat a lie with the truth; it is much harder to kill a myth.” Of the many comments that were made to us about the mythology surrounding the German armored vehicles, I would like to address certain issues from other points of view in this short article.
Myth #1
The Greatest Tank of the Second
World War was the Tiger I.
Oh? Why? Maybe the best KNOWN overall, and the most notorious, but far from the greatest. This tank was designed as a 30-ton tank (later upgraded to 45 tons) but still came in between 56
and 62 tons; it was underpowered and poorly suited for any kind of mobility battle. Tanks are weapons of the offensive; this tank was not equipped for that type of warfare (remember Blitzkrieg?), nor was it well suited for “cornfield meets” at 500 meters or less.
The Russians were very respectful of the Tiger, but they were also under no illusions as to its combat potential. Their tactics - charge until you are inside the 500-meter range where the T-34’s 76mm gun could penetrate the sides or rear of the Tiger - were born out of the desperation of having many more tanks than the enemy but with a less powerful cannon (until 1943) that forced them to adapt. Once the T-34/85 and the IS series of tanks appeared, the Tiger was treated as the dinosaur that it was.
Tanks like the Tiger were designed to combat tanks like the Soviet KV series. Were it not for the KV, it is doubtful the Tiger, as we know it, would have ever developed.
Myth #2
The Panther was the Best All Around
Tank of the Second World War.
Strike Two. The Panther only came about because the German leadership suffered a bout of “NIH” syndrome (Not Invented Here) and ignored the pleas of commanders like Guderian to simply reverse-engineer and adapt the T-34 for German production. As a result, it had a higher silhouette than any Soviet tank, a gasoline engine, and a very weak running gear system that plagued the tank during its combat career.
To give the Panther its due, it carried the hardest hitting 75mm gun of the Second World War; this weapon contributed heavily to French thinking after the war and was the basic weapon chosen to be developed into the 75mm autoloader cannon in the EBR 75 and AMX 13. Its armor was thicker than the T-34 and the Sherman, but it was not well designed; D and A models had a marvelous shot-trap beneath the mantlet that was used to ricochet AP shells down into the thin roof where they would kill the driver and bow gunner.
Reliability was poor - the vehicle was not noted for its ability to conduct long road marches, and the Soviets enjoyed the fact that they could not get captured models to make a simple 200-kilometer road march without breakdown. This was partially due to the poor suspension design (interleaved road wheels) and partially to the conditions under which the tank was used. This tank was also over its targeted weight limit and to the Soviets was a joke - a medium tank that weighed only one ton less than their heavy tanks and did not have the mobility, reliability, or overall useful firepower of the IS-2.
Tanks excel based on balance: the Panther had superior firepower, good armor protection, and poor mobility. That’s not balance.
Myth #3
The Tiger II was the Most Influential
Tank of the Second World War.
On what and by who? The Tiger II was a desperate design of overkill that combined the design of the Panther with the concept of the Tiger and wound up with a 68-ton tank that had the worst deployability of any tank of the war (one has to keep things like bridges and roads in mind when designing tanks!!).
If the Tiger II was so influential, then what was its legacy? Surely no tanks were designed to copy its features. It used the classic German balanced layout of transmission front-engine rear which all other countries ditched for either cross drive or “guitar” transverse engine and transmission layouts. It used massive weight of armor for protection which only added to its troubles; being “Sherman-proof” from the front does you no good if you can’t catch the little devils.
The Tiger II was also a victim of the late war German economy. It had no real reliability due to the fact that its rubber-hubbed wheels tended to flex under load and, placing uneven strain on the tracks, tended to snap links at the hinges. Like the Tiger I before it, this is a desperation defensive weapon that did not give them advantages.
Finally, even the Soviets had no fear of this tank. The first one they encountered in combat during 1944 was immediately knocked out by a T-34/85; the Soviets made capital over the fact that one of Porsche’s sons was the commander of the vehicle and was killed instantly by the shell. (They felt at the time he was most responsible for the Tiger series; it was only after the war when the captured the Nibelungenwerke that they found out Edward Anders of Henschel had more to do with heavy tanks design than Ferdinand Porsche.)
A far more influential tank of the war was the Soviet IS-3; this inspired much more Cold War mythos of its own and was directly responsible for a number of US and foreign designs, as well as the US Ml03 and British Conqueror programs to defeat it on postulated European battlefied
