Chieftain Talks: Tiger's Teeth

greetings all since the last talks video was on a us gun it's only fair to hop over to the other side and look into the development and installation of another famous gun the german 8.8 in the tiger for such a famous weapon and mount there's a surprising amount of misconception there too [Music] the start point is in the 1920s and like most good equipment it was a piece of equipment intended to meet a specific requirement that requirement was anti-air defense against medium and high-level bombers defined as between 500 meters to 6 kilometers of altitude and with an eight kilometer slant range time of flight at the maximum altitude and slant was to be no more than 25 seconds that meant that muzzle velocity had to be plenty fast and the shell heavy enough to maintain that momentum to counter the effective drag from the air the smallest caliber capable of meeting those requirements the germans figured was 8.8 centimeters remember smaller caliber equals lighter weight and higher rate of fire there is something of a debate in the anti-aircraft world as to whether you want a large caliber for a bigger bursting charge or a smaller caliber for more rams fired but that's the way the germans went at the time they figured that anything bigger than an 8.8 wouldn't be particularly mobile and would have to be on rail or static mounts generally speaking the projectile and cartridge case would have been taken from the navy's l45 8.8 to save on development and production expense in any case the commonly named flak 18 started getting delivered to the troops around 1934. i'm not quite sure what they were attempting to gain by the naming of a flak 18 i mean i can't imagine that folks who suddenly notice a thousand aaa guns of a type unknown before the mid 1930s suddenly appearing in service might be fooled by a name implying that they were designed really two decades prior minor improvements mainly to the fire control system in barrel followed in the flak 36 and flak 37 this was not intended to be a dual purpose weapon per se but the concept of using it against terrestrial enemies was planned for as a result two fuses were requested for the shell a timed fuse for anti-aircraft work and a contact fuse for ground targets after all even air defense guns might find themselves subjected to a direct attack as fate would have it though when the 8.8 was sent to spain it turned out that no matter what the doctrinal intent was the guns found themselves shooting at ground targets a lot more than an aircraft there was this myth that rommel himself invented the use of the 8.8 as an anti-tank gun when faced with british infantry tanks at rs not so the use of the 8.8 in the anti-tank world goes back a couple of years prior to that the first use is indeed in spain the german army at the time was giving no consideration to the 8.8 in the anti-tank rule the gun is just huge i mean for anti-tank purposes you want something small that's easy to hide easy to pull out of position and relocate now if you've got to go with an a gun maybe the two centimeter or 3.7 centimeter after all for the 1930s with ap rounds those would be quite capable against pretty much anything in service anywhere the 8.8 was just plain unsuitable however doctrine or not that did not stop the 8.8 gunners in spain shooting at tanks anyway when and they happened to be around and the fact that they had no armor-piercing round wasn't really much of a problem after all when the opposition is no more heavily armored than a t26 or a bt5 and you are firing a 9 kilogram hg shell with a contact fuse at 840 meters a second you probably don't really need an ap round still precedent was now set three further developments came about one was the creation of an armor-piercing round the primary target for this would actually be fortifications of all the various mobile weapons out there in the german army the 8.8 seemed to be the most capable against hard targets like bunkers the second was the creation of an armored shield to protect the gun crew if they're shooting at ground targets it is possible that the ground target might decide to shoot back the third was a modification to the sighting telescope that elevation can now be implied in terms of meters of range and not sixteenths of a degree after all if the primary purpose of the gun now was to be shooting at ground targets the use of the more complicated anti-aircraft aiming system which required a conversion table was probably not ideal so now we have an 8.8 centimeter gun designed primarily with ground targets in mind it's still a nomenclature system a flak 18 not a pack anti-tank gun but it's designed to be set up quickly and used in direct fire unsurprisingly and inevitably especially with more attention being paid to french tanks these systems were assigned to panzerjager or tank hunter units in heavy companies most of them were towed guns but there was a self-propelled unit they saw service in poland and france so by the time rommel's lads received the attentions of british armor the idea of using the 8.8 as an at gun was already very well established but that is just the gun how did they end up being put into tiger now for that you have to look at tiger's design requirements and you realize that the reason the tiger ended up as it was turned out to be as much fate as it was deliberate planning around 1935 there was thought put out to a heavily armored vehicle which could take on the big french tanks which looked like being adopted unfortunately at the time they were looking for about a 30 ton weight limit which meant that they could either have armor or they could have a big gun it didn't seem likely that both were possible at the same time indeed by late 1938 that concluded that the armor was more important this new heavy thirty ton tank given the name dirk brockwagon or breach vehicle puts the intent directly in its name the gun was to be the same short 7.5 centimeters found on panzer iv it was more important that the tank be able to take hits than to kill tanks this would become the vk 30.01 design there is certainly some thought that perhaps a bigger gun will be nice to have but the options turn out to be limited but the only reasonable alternative would be the long 5 centimeter gun the 7.5 centimeter l 34.5 or later l43 both of would have required a lot of work to be even able to mechanically fit into the turret and it wasn't going to be very comfortable for the crew once it was done in the end the turrets ended up being sent for useless fortifications so u.s troops did technically engage the vk 30.01 project as of two turrets present one was operational at omaha beach in the meantime the germans decided that they wanted to upgun the vk30 to a 10.5 centimeter gun making it in effect an artillery wagon this would become the vk 36.01 which despite the name would actually come in at some 40 tons when fully combat loaded now in the meantime porsche had been doing some development work of his own he also took a crack at the requirement with a short 7.5 or 10.5 however in march of 1941 crop comes along and offers porsche the possibility of creating a turret capable of carrying an 8.8 or even 10.5 centimeter high velocity cannon quite how this was supposed to fit and still remain within the weight limit is not stated but the offer was put out there happy enough to try porsche went along with the idea then hitler got involved in late may 1941 he decreed that armor-piercing punch was more important and the ideal gun for that would be the 7.5 centimeter waffa 0725 it's a squeezeboard gun subject of course to there being sufficient tungsten available to equip the tanks with enough ammunition as an alternative the porsche design could keep the 8.8 centimeter kwk l56 there was a brief discussion of the flak 41 gun but that got shot down is unrealistic thus it was decided that the 8.8 centimeter turret we are familiar with as a tiger turret was manufactured by crop and sent to porsche for installation on its electrically driven type 101 contracts for 100 units of the porsche design which seemed to show some promise followed quickly in late july 1941 at the same time orders were placed were cropped for three additional 8.8 centimeter turrets except configured for hydraulic not electric drive for trials on the henschel chassis however this turret design did not meet with the approval of the head of the army's vehicle design board he hoped a better one could be made he gave the task to writematal who was also working on the problem of creating a gun capable of penetrating 140 millimeter of armor at a kilometer or for the tiger project 100 millimeters sloped at 30 degrees at 1 400 meters [Music] eventually this gun will become the kwk 42 as found on panther but a turret was designed for it to be mounted on tiger this design being the panzerkampfwagen sex ha australian hatzrai the advantage of the smaller caliber was that the turret overall was lighter better balance and more ammunition could be carried by early march 1942 this has become the official standard that the tiger won the first 100 vehicles already contracted for would come with those 8.8 centimeter turrets from crop kicked over from the failed porsche design after conversion to hydraulic drive everything after that i tanked number 101 onwards would have the long 7.5 centimeter cannon and turret starting production around february of 1943. this plan lasted until about mid-july 42 before it changed again two things happened firstly the 8.8 l71 looked like it was going to come online as a tank gun by the end of the year and it was intended to place that into tiger secondly the 8.8 centimeter ap round fired from the l56 was modified in order to increase its penetration capability by increasing the amount of metal and decreasing the size of the bursting charge this then meant two more things firstly that the l56 8.8 could meet the current required armor piercing performance capabilities and secondly it was a little bit daft to build a hundred short 8.8 turrets which met minimum standards convert for a few months of 7.5 centimeter turrets with slightly better overall capability and then convert again a few months after that the building 8.8 71 tanks as a result the tiger h h2 idea was abandoned and all tigers were built with the 8.8 centimeter gun when it came to the long 8.8 porsche again were ahead of the game in february of 1942 they put in another request for crop for another 100 turrets this with the 8.871 the idea was that after the first hundred porsche tigers had been successfully built and sent off and do glorious combat for the fatherland the next 100 would have this longer gun krupp set about designing this turret for porsche it has ever since then been known as the porsche turret initially the hull was going to be similar to tiger 1 but changing requirements to include a realization that guns had improved a little bit in the last two years meant that an entirely new hull design was going to be needed as well the discussion of whole design is probably a little bit outside of the frame of reference here but suffice to say that though initially the idea for hinchel was going to be just a sloped armored tiger one hull with a new cropped turret on top a few more change requirements such as parts commonality with the panther ii resulted in the new henshaw 8.871 tiger hull being a fair bit different from its ancestor by november of 1942 it was clear that porsche was a bad bet for future tiger production and the 50 turrets made were converted like their predecessors from electric to hydraulic drive and then plonked on top of henchmen hulls in the meantime croup had trouble shot a few problems with the turret such as grinding the eight centimeter thick curved plates with a hand tool to make them fit is a little bit intolerable and first crop created the series production turret which was only ever going to be mounted on the henshaw chassis thus giving us the name of the henshaw turret so there you go the story of how the 8.8 centimeter went from being an anti-aircraft gun to an anti-tank gun to a gun which an over-ambitious vehicle designer wanted to stick into a tank to one which hitler himself laid out a preference for and ending up being one of the most feared weapons of world war ii when mounted on a large breakthrough tank hope you found that interesting and informative i'm nicholas morman the chieftain and i will talk to you on the next one take care you

Channel: World of Tanks North America

Views: 62,775

Rating: 4.9582167 out of 5

Keywords: World of Tanks, Tanks, World of tanks gameplay, Wargaming, World of tanks PC, Strategy Game, MMO, Free Multiplayer, Multiplayer Game, Military tanks, Tank Videos, nicholas moran wot, the chieftain wot, tiger 1, PzKpfw VI Tiger, chieftain talks world of tanks, wwII tanks wot, German 8.8cm, FlaK 18, 8.8cm KwK L/56, Panzerkanmpfwagen VI H Ausf. H2, 7.5cm Waffe, Tiger H Ausf H, Porsche Tigers, Krupp turret, Henschel chassis, Breach Vehicle, anti-tank gun, flak 36, flak 37

Id: NNovEy94ULw

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021