Evolution of WW2 German Tank Destroyers

with the second world war firmly establishing the tank as a major player on the battlefield it was perhaps inevitable the tank destroyer would emerge to counter it in this video we're going to look at the German Army's tank destroyers whereas the tank is an offensive Weapon It's a weapon of attack the tank destroyer is defensive in concept and whilst tank destroyers are not tanks their designers still had to Grapple with the IR triangle of Mobility far power and protection to develop vehicles the necessary capabilities and characteristics Germany would fi 18 different types of tank destroyer during World War II and that's compared to seven or eight uh used by the Allies we're going to have a look at which was good which was bad what worked what [Music] didn't the first German tank destroyers entered service in 1940 the paner 1 was built on a Panza 1 aseron B chassis mounting a 4.7 CM pack t a check designed anti-tank gun built by scod it was initially designed to deal with the heavily armored French sh B1 Beast that German tanks were expected to struggle against it was reasonbly effective at the time the 4.7 CM pack could penetrate 69 mm of armor up to 500 M it could even penetrate the armor of a British Matilda 2 up to 400 m and it would cause destructive spoiling at longer ranges but the vehicle itself had a high profile for its size and this made it something of a Target its thin armor with open rear and top provided very little protection for the crew so just 202 were converted before better designs emerged the panaga want would set the p for German tank stores being based on the chassis of existing Vehicles now to start off with this is because of the availability of captured tanks and also obsolete German designs later on it's expedient to do this because of the limited capacity of German industry and German Finance when France fell Germany found itself in a number of French military vehicles at its disposal and it set about repurposing these for its own use the mar 1 began its life as the French Lorraine 37 l which was an armored carrier designed to resupply French tank units fitted with a 75mm pack 40 it became a potent tank destroyer despite being a makeshift solution it added considerable Firepower to German efforts on the Eastern Front from 1942 having been unprepared to meet the more heavily armored t34 and kv1 tanks firing the panag Granata 39 it could penetrate up to 80 mm of 30° sloped armor and up to 1,000 M the ma 2 and three will be broadly similar based on two different but effectively obsolete light tanks in the German Arsenal the m 2 was based on a heavily modified Panza 2 chassis and the ma 3 on the check built Panza 38t around 2,000 MERS of all types were built up to 1944 now the majority of those are mounting the pack 40 but there were a few hundred equipped with the Soviet 76.2 mm anti-tank gun quite a few of those have been captured in the early stages of the war the M was very capable but in terms of survivability it suffered from similar problems to the panega one it's got a high silhouette so it's difficult to hide uh thin armor and the fighting compartment is open this made them vulnerable to indirect artillery fire Small Arms fire grenades so close combat operations for the mder are very risky indeed now the best way to avoid that is to ensure these vehicles don't get into close combat situations this massive anti-tank gun was the solution this is the 88 mm pack 43 firing the panag Granata 4043 round this gun could penetrate 193 mm of 30° sloped armor at up to a th000 Metter and that means it's capable of defeating any Allied tank of World War II at extreme range the German Army's desire to mount an 88 mm gun in a tank had increased considerably since they met heavily armored enemy tanks like the Shah B1 Beast and the Matilda 2 in 1940 and of course an 88 mm gun had been used on the tiger one but this much more path version would be mounted on the King Tiger and also the nasorn the elephant and the AR Panther three much more substantial tank destroyers the NZ horn was created by mounting the pack 43 in a heavily modified composite Panza 3 Panza 4 chassis first seen combat at the Battle of kusk in 1943 it was suited to the open country of the Eastern front and its ability to be effective at distance negated the limitations of high-profile light armor and its open fighting compartment which blighted the MERS conversely it was found to be much less effective in Italy where opportunities for long range engagement were limited by the landscape another way to overcome the vulnerabilities of tank destroyers was to massively increase the armor the elephant then known as the Ferdinand also enters combat for the first time at k in 1943 now what this is is an attempt to use the 100 or so Porsche VK 4501 chassis which have been rejected for the tiger uh and on top of that you've got a gun in a massively armored casemate whilst the pack 43 again proved its value at long range it performed less well when the tide turned against the Germans and the vehicle found itself fighting rear guard actions again being ill equipped for close combat most significantly the vehicle was simply too heavy and this manifested itself in mechanical breakdowns following which the vehicle would in many cases have to be abandoned so the job was given to di Benz of mounting the pack 43 on a panther chassis the result is what a lot of people regard as the best tank Dore of the war the sdkfz 173 is better known as the Y Panther the glassy plate is 80 mm thick sloped at 55° giving 138 mm of line of sight protection which is very good where it matters the 45 mm of armor on the sides is frankly less so but the need to limit weight was important given some earlier observations 4133 were built and although quite a few of the problems of the temperamental Panther design had been D out there were still issues and quite a lot were lost through through mechanical failure um final drive engine fires that sort of [Music] thing so this is the interior the fighting compartment of the yag Panther this is quite exciting for me because I've been around this museum for you know quite a few years on and off uh but I've never actually been inside this vehicle before um it is quite roomy but slab bang in the of course there is the massive uh pack 43 gun and uh this gun itself recoil cage it splits the the fighting compartment in two right down the middle uh gun breach the recoil cylinders and then looking down uh you have got the Traverse gear um there's a limited Traverse so you can actually swing the gun round um fighting Department itself you have got the Gunner over on this side he would have had a periscopic site sticking out through the roof bit of a survival here that's the N vertigo Vala that is the um smoke grenade launcher uh you can provide yourself with a Lo localized smoke screen with that and then over on the other side is the whole machine gunner coming towards the rear it's I suppose it's deceptively roomy because most of the ammunition racking is missing but of course rounds on both sides so that would cut the space space down quite a lot then uh big Square rear hatch that's a big solid lump of armor plate but it has a torsion bar Spring in it so it's makes it a little bit easier to open and shut the thing next door to that is um a small circular hatch and that's for the disposal of spent brass in the roof here that is the uh ventilation fan that's supposed to take some of the muck out when you fired the gun and the fting compartment is full of acrid you know cordite smoke uh smoke when you open the breach those notoriously didn't work very well so I suspect um if the crew is not in close contact with the Enemy they most likely have the rear hatch open and that way the loader could actually just fling spent cases out um bounce them off the back deck it is a Pity that um it's a little bit stripped out it's a Pity that we've got this Cor but even so it's a mighty impressive vehicle to be in y Panthers were formed into sh panega ab tyan and they were crewed by artillerymen rather than tankers and that's something that's common to stuts uh as well we'll go into that a little bit later on most were deployed to the Eastern front uh but some also saw service in France and the Arden but in the west particularly in the Normandy bokage yag Panther was not really at its best despite having characteristics that would favor fighting on the defensive the close nature of the countryside neutralized its ability to engage targets at long range bearing in mind Allied air and artillery dominance Crews were told to minimize radio traffic and also to scout Ambush positions on foot before committing in the right circumstances the Y Panther could be extremely effective in an engagement near Kom on July the 30th 1944 three yag Panthers from Sha panaga abtong 654 knocked out 11 Churchills from third tank Battalion Scots guards in 5 minutes but two of the three had broken down and were abandoned on seeing a yag Panther a Scots guards officer wrote it was a stupendous equipment a very long 88 mm gun stuck out from a very heavily armored sloping front plate long sloping sides extended for 3/4 of the length of the vehicle the gun appeared to have about 20° of Traverse on top were two exit hatches for the crew all around was a length of wire in which camouflage could be hung camouflage which would not interfere with the rotation of the turret as in a tank this video has been made possible by our supporters on patreon our YouTube members and our super thanks to donors please join them if you can't and support the tank Museum and thanks for watching as the war enters its final phases the German industrial machine and Hitler in particular obsessed with the need to build even more massive vehicles and one of the best examples of that is this this is the yag tiger sort of Big Brother to the yag Panther based on lengthened King Tiger chassis and mounting the immensely powerful Pack 4 4 128 mm gun it boasts frontal armor of 200 mm and weighs 72 tons and that makes it the heaviest armored Fighting Vehicle World War II if we have a look inside the uh tiger it's a bit stripped out but you do get a good feeling the sheer mass of the vehicle inside the fighting compartment this is quite a large space but of course it's utterly dominated by the breach and The Recoil cage for the pack 44 gun this is a hugely powerful tank gun this will knock our Target up to 3 and2 km away 2 miles because the round is so large it needs to be loaded in two parts so you have two loaders I mean talking about the pack 44 round just the H projectile weighs 28 kg so first of all the projectile goes in then the propellant charge as I said it looks sort deceptively uh roomy in here but of course a lot of this is stripped out you have to imagine uh these racks either side uh are full of charges and then of course you've got the crew two loaders back here over on this side of the gun you have the Gunner he aims the weapon using a periscopic site up out through the roof of the tank and over here is is the tank commander and he's got a pair of rabbit ear binoculars uh in order to con the tank and also to obviously identify targets that is all the good news the bad is that the ug tiger is really very very underpowered it struggles to maintain a top speed of 12 1 half miles an hour and that's on the road now the reason for that is it's still powered by the 600 horsepower Maybach hl2 230 engine that is the same engine you find in the Panther and the King Tiger they're both much lighter Vehicles it also puts huge strain on the transmission the final drive so when it breaks down and it will the even worse news is they haven't got anything that will recover it it has to be blown up with demolition charges in situ on the battlefield facing a yag Target would have been a terrifying Prospect for Allied tank Crews a yag Target commander on Peter CS wrote Americans attack lant finers destroys five tanks on offitzer haglin knocks out three but then felo blows up his vehicle in B but in reality it was highly unlikely only around 80 yag Tigers were built and in service by the end of the war and the problems associated with transporting those around on a rail system that's under constant Allied Air Attack were just about insurmountable but there were far more effective tank destroyers available and the first of those is this one here this is the heter and you could almost describe it as the smaller brother of yag Panther its proper name is the yag Panza 38t it was developed in early 1944 by the Czech bisha Marisha Machin and fabric Factory part of the huge boost to the German war effort enabled by the occupation of Czechoslovakia like the maada 3 it's based on the Czech LT VZ 38 light tank chassis or be it slightly modified the tank that was adopted by the ver Mark as the Panza 38t the head's main gun is the 75 mm pack 39 this is the armor piercing round at fires the vehicle itself has 60 mm armor on the front uh but it's sloped back so you got a thickness of about 100 Mil down the sides though it's a lot thinner it's basically just proof against Small Arms fire the heads are only weighs 16 tons it's got a top speed of 40 km an hour and its small size makes it quite easy to conceal against that it is hideously cramped inside for a crew of four and the situational awareness is actually very poor indeed this right hand side is just about blind the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to apologize for this camouflage scheme we know it is not correct and at some point we will get around to redoing it as you can see the gun is offset and that is necessary to allow space for the crew inside the vehicle it has very limited Traverse 11° to the right and 5° to the left one refinement is the remotely operated mg34 but this has the disadvantage that once the 75 Round magazine is empty somebody has to get out and reloaded quite remarkably considering the problems caused by material shortages and Allied bombing in the last few months of the war 2,612 of these were produced the hetza was mostly used by anti-tank battalions attached to infantry divisions giving the Infantry a bit of anti-tank capability in spite of its shortcomings the heter was a useful little vehicle and it continued in use postwar with the Swiss and Czech armies but the most effective tank destroyer of World War II based on some very impressive kill statistics is this the stug 3 theum gut 3 based on the chassis of the Panza 3 in a previous video I was roundly upgraded for describing one of these Aug as a tank destroyer it's a stuts it's an assault gun I was told well fair enough in its original configuration with the short barreled 75 mm stook 37 it was designed to provide far support for infantry assaults but up gunned to the longer Barrel 75 mm stuck 40 and that's basically the same as the pack 40 the thing you find on the mder it becomes a very very effective tank killer it's also the most produced German fully tracked vehicle of World War II over 10,000 of these were built asdou 3 is an as4 G Built between August 1943 and September 1944 as you can see it's in quite an original state it's missing some of its tin work but it retains a lot of its waffle zimmerit zimmerit was an anti-magnetic paste made of barium sulfate Sawdust and PVA glue and it was meant to stop magnetic mines being attached to Vehicles the waffle pattern was only used on stug 3 and zimmerit was only applied from September 43 to December 44 such a rare Survivor the stug had an ideal Ambush combination low profile good armor protection up to 80 mm and an effective gun the 75mm L48 stook 40 the stook 40 firing an AP CBC round would penetrate 80 mm of 30° sloped armor at 1,000 M it was very effective liutenant Gert Albert ofum gut Brigade 276 wrote that fighting on the denipa in 1943 our maneuverability Optics and accuracy were superior to the Russians we were able to knock out every opponent we saw without suffering casualties ourselves this is the fighting compartment of the stug um in terms of condition there's a fair bit of corrosion it's been left out in the open uh before it came to this Museum but it's also still quite original in terms of its paint workk its labeling um it's quite as it would have been crew positions you have got the Gunner here commander and I'm actually standing uh in the loaders position over on this side in the center of course is the uh 75mm gun with its recoil cage um Gunner has a periscopic site you can see there's his elevation handle Traverse handle there's a limited Traverse mechanism down here underneath the gun and then the site itself would have gone out through there's a slot in a small hatch just in front over on this side um the loader has got ready racks here to his front and then interestingly around here is a folding ammunition rack so that is for ammunition storage but it also folds back in order to give the loader room to work the commander has a circular hatch in the ceiling with what looks to me like a sort of Fairly crude Vision block Copa so he can uh obviously com the vehicle see what's going on and of course up on the top the loader has got a two-part hatch and immediately in front of that there is the armored guard so the loader can also double as a machine gunner with an mg34 that's a bit of a hangover from when these things were being used as um in their true role as stut as an assault gun and down there to the left um is the driver's position U bearing in mind this is based on a Panza 3 it's it's actually very similar to the layout that he had in the turreted version of this vehicle the stug has sometimes been credited with as many as 30,000 tank kills during World War II but that figure is is really impossible to verify postwar like the heter it continues in service and it serves with the Syrian Army in the six day and yum Kapur Wars against Israel the German tank destroyer story tells us quite a lot about about how the war was going for Germany at different times and you can see there is a problem solving mentality mounting larger guns on captured obsolete Vehicles as Battlefield realities dictated this with the modification of existing inservice tank designs makes a lot of sense when your industrial base is a lot smaller than that of your enemy it also explains the large number of different tank destroyer designs in with the verar during World War II as the war goes on Germany is far more on the defensive and the use of more tank destroyers makes a lot of sense because they are extremely useful in terms of ambushing an overconfident enemy and without the production complications of turrets tank destroyers like the stug were much cheaper and quicker to produce but things could go wrong when yag panzon used as substitutes for con ventional tanks they didn't have traversible turrets and in many cases didn't have adequate armor protection so they're at a huge disadvantage and in the Y tiger you can see an example of Hitler's Obsession in building bigger and more sophisticated Vehicles the vunda vafa that would win the war the trouble is this is a massive distraction for German industry at a time when they are effectively losing the war but they could be devastatingly effective when used right hold down in a good defensive position and as many Allied tank Crews found to their cost when encountering a heter stug or yag Panther the retreating vermar still had a sting in its tail thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video please like subscribe and if you can support us on patreon

Channel: The Tank Museum

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Keywords: Bovington, Dorset, Tanks, Tankfest, tanks, tiger, chieftain, tank museum, second world war, world war two, top five tanks, tank chats, david fletcher, british army, tiger 131, royal armoured corps, tank regiment, RAC, tank museum bovington, tanklife, bovingtontank museum, military history, ww2, ww1, armoured car, tankchats, army, veteran, wwii history, world war 1, world war ii, war history, royal navy, ww2 history, royal air force, wwii museum, wwi, ww2 tanks, ww2 weapons

Id: mRKDb5zkz6A

Length: 24min 59sec (1499 seconds)

Published: Fri May 03 2024