See Inside Panther | Tank Chats Reloaded

this is the Panther it is regarded by many as one of the most advanced and technologically Superior tanks of World War II in this video we're going to have a look inside and out we're going to look at the crew positions the technology and also we're going to try and compare it to some of the tanks it faced things like the Sherman and the t34 this video has been made possible by our on patreon our YouTube members and our super thanks donors please join them if you can and support the tank Museum and thanks for watching from a production run of around 6,000 there aren't many Panthers left but this one is actually quite unusual because this one wasn't built by the Germans this tank was built by the British army as you can see from the plaque welded front armor this Panther was built by the British army Army Royal electrical mechanical engineers in 1945 but why because the panther was seen as one of the most technologically advanced tanks of World War II examples were wanted for evaluation so in August 1945 the Remy Royal electrical and mechanical engineers received orders to build as many Panthers as they could for evaluation the city of Hanover was in the British zone of occupation and it was home to one of the major Panther and yag Panther assembly plants from here the Remy Workshop unit salved enough parts to construct nine Panthers and 12 yag Panthers with the assistance of former Factory workers once built the Panthers were put through the standard British Army acceptance trial to see what they could do the results were very disappointing the two Panthers on trial failed to complete course and most of the rest had to be cannibalized for parts the 1948 report states that very little information of any value was obtained owing to the general unreliability of the Panther and yag Panther tanks so how did this tank that wouldn't pass a basic British Army acceptance trial get the reputation of being one of the best tanks to see combat during World War II for the Germans it needed to be the Soviet kv1 and t34 tanks encountered during operation Barbarosa in 1941 made challenging adversaries the t-34 in particular had hugely superior mobility and could knock out Panza 3 and Panza 4 tanks at 1,000 M whereas the short 75mm gun of Panza 4 was only affected at Point Blank Range and the Panza 3's 50 mil own a little better this Panther is an as forong G and that's the final production model after the asph forong D and as forong a the G was produced from March 1944 through to May 1945 hours obviously a little bit later than that and it makes up around about half of the total production run of roughly 6,000 the panther was preceded of course by the Panza 3 the Panzer 4 and the tiger one but it's very different in appearance I mean to begin with up the front here instead of three plates you've just got one long sloping piece of armor and that gives it quite an angular appearance sloped armor was a design feature that's borrowed from the t34 with the two benefits that it increases the likelihood of an incoming round Ricochet rather than penetrating and it increases the thickness of metal that around flying roughly flat has to get through the Panther's frontal plate is 80 mm of rolled homogeneous armor sloped at 55° and that gives you a line of sight thickness of 139.53413 4 at even very close range early Panthers had face hardened armor that's even easier for construction purposes because it can be more easily cut and formed but it has limited shock resistance from the later as foring DET tanks onwards rolled homogeneous armor was being used and that's tempered throughout its entire thickness and it gives improved protection the side armor of the panther as foring d and a has a thickness of 40 mm inclined backwards at an angle of 50° that gives you a line of sight thickness at the angle that it would meet an incoming round at at 62 mil that is not a great deal and you tend to find an awful lot of Knocked Out Panthers have suffered a sponson hit in here it gets slightly better with the as forong G the armor thickness goes up to 50 mil and that gives you a line of sight thickness of 78 mm the interlocking construction that you can see here uh is another Innovation and that adds quite a lot of rigidity and strength to the structure of the hole but the panther as a whole is a bit of a departure from typical German tank construction up to this point the upper hole and the lower hole have been built as separate components with the panther they are all one and you can see this Illustrated in photographs of bombed out Factory where you've got completed Panther holes piled up on top of one another the panther is a typical German design so it's rear engined but the final Drive the sprockets are at the front and that means the drive shaft has to pass down the middle of the tank under the turret and that actually makes it a fair bit taller aspects of the t34 that gave it excellent Mobility Christy suspension rear wheel drive and a diesel engine were dismissed by the Panthers design team at man in favor of the usual German torsion bar suspension and a petrol engine the Maybach hl230 as used on the tiger the petrol Maybach engine was a definite mistake I mean to begin with o to their W working they were a specialist engineering firm Maybach found it difficult to supply spares so that means there's a lower level of Frontline serviceability it's also very thirsty this maybar engine uses four times the fuel of the diesel engine on a t34 a kov V2 we also have the typical German sha alur uh assembly of overlapping road wheels that is really good in terms of weight distribution but it complicates repairs because if anything goes wrong you have to strip multiple road wheels off to get at it um and they were prone to clog with ice and mud here on the back deck you got the usual array of uh louvers access hatches ventilators uh it's a weak spot on the tank Because the actual armor of the back deck is only 16 mm thick and a British Army report suggested that it was vulnerable to air burst from something like a 25 pound a gun or a55 mil HZ now that would be a pretty good feat of Gunnery to drop an air burst over the back of a target small as a tank but to reduce the possibility the size of these fittings was B down this tank is painted to resemble a very late War example basically what's happening is they're running out of paint so what we have is a base coat of red oxide primer and then a disruptive pattern of dunal galb dark yellow the gun itself is the Rin metal borish 75 mm KW k42 L70 a bit of explanation for the non-sp specialist here kwk is the abbreviate ation of CB and canona tank gun 42 is the year of its acceptance into production and L70 is the length of the gun tube measured in calibers 70 * 75 mm equal 5,250 so the tube is 5.25 M or just over 17 ft long pan Granata 3942 apbc round which has got a puzzle velocity of 9935 M second will penetrate up to 112 mm of armor uh at a range of a th000 m with the panag Granata 4042 it's apcr round that has a muzzle velocity of 1,130 m a second and that will penetrate up to 149 millimet of armor angled back at 30° what that means is this gun could deal with the frontal armor of a t34 or a Sherman with relative ease now there's no doubt about the fact that this is a very good gun and it certainly outclasses the F34 gun on the t34 but the thing is is it not significantly better than the KW K40 which you find on things like the Panzer 4 but is bigger and heavier it's going to need a a wider Hull a bigger turret and that's going to increase weight and decrease Mobility the mantlet is of a semi-cylindrical shape and this is a bit of a design floor it creates a shop trap so an incoming round will be deflected underneath and down into the front hole and there's only 17 mil of armor there and of course you've got the bar machine gunner come radio operator and the driver sat there now a later version of the mantlet chinned version was produced to counteract that but it's not fitted to this tank it should be it's now forong G but of course this is a post-war Parts assembly if you like looking at the top of the turret uh you've got the ventilator lifting eyes uh there is a periscope fitting for the loader and then here this is the commander C uh seven Vision blocks so good situational awareness and the other thing is the hatch actually opens slide sideways now I think that's a better Arrangement than say Soviet tanks where it tend to sort of open upwards it's less obvious when the hatch is open although it does take a bit more physical strength to operate the circular hatch in the back of the turret is useful for bombing up and it enables the loaded to dispose of spent brass and this cuts down the fumes and clutter in the turret when firing so here we are inside the turret it is more spacious than some but of course the bulk of the front is dominated by the breach of the 75mm gun uh breach is actually open you can see the breach block down here the thing that's missing is The Recoil guard and that would have occupied quite a bit more space out here so it's effectively cutting the fighting compartment in two the rear hatch the circular hatch is the main entry for the loader and the Gunner and in terms of crew positions um the loader is over here uh Commander this is his seat here and then you got the Gunner with a flap down seat just below the commander commander has cast Cupa with seven Vision blocks excellent all round Vision um it's a vast Improvement on a great many tanks below him as I said is the Gunner now the Gunner has his hand controls here so that's hand elevation and Traverse uh and he's also got pedals down below and that operates the P reverse of the turret also fires the gun and fires the coaxial uh mg34 as well this is remarkable it's still here this is the ti F12 um site Gun Site very very good piece of Optics that in theory you can hit a Target up to 3,000 M away although of course accuracy goes down in range hitting targets at that sort of distance wasn't advised because it's waste of ammunition and in this tank you've only got say 70 80 rounds so you're going to have to be careful where you place them um moving over got the loadest position on this side big Advantage this tank has over its closest competitor the t34 it's got a turret basket so the crew actually go round with the turret there's none of that dancing round by the load of trying to find rounds to put in while the guy the turret actually traverses on the loader side he's got uh fitting for a periscope um he's also got the this thing this fit in the roof that's the the vertigal zaer uh that is very simple um smoke grenade and Signal flare launcher spring operated with a hinged breach there's another little refinement here I've not seen on any other world war2 tank and that's uh the fact that imagine you just fired the gun breach recoils case spent brass falls out and actually drops down into this box here drops into there and this tube actually evacuates the smoke and muck from the box and pushes it out uh through the extractor fan on the turret ceiling um so that actually actually keeps the air uh reasonably clear uh and pure which is a big advantage to tank crew another little refinement um they came up with with the panther was the fact that they used heat from the radiators to warm the crew compartment now that might sound like a you know minor consideration but if you are in the middle of Russia and it's winter and it's minus 20 30 degrees outside it's going to improve your uh ability to work and fight quite considerably but it's not just for the crew benefit the batteries wet acid batteries are actually in here under the floor and keeping them warm improves their performance quite considerably looking at the driver and radio operator's positions in front of the tank both have subrectangular hatches and they both got fittings for periscopes going inside first thing to mention about the driver's position is that unlike tiger there's no steering wheel we've gone back to lever the second is the reason it all seems so complicated is the controls are duplicated now that strikes me as being very thorough and Germanic solution and why is so the driver can use controls from either inside the tank looking through the Periscope or by raising his seat driveing his head out the hatch the tank steered by pulling up on the lever's either side of the driver's seat and those operate pumps which put pressure on the steering brakes the gear stick is on the driver's right it's fitted with two triggers pulling just the top one enables the driver to engage first operating both together gives you sixth 7th and reverse his pedals have the accelerator on the right clutch on the left and break in the Middle with a handbrake over on the driver's left the driver's instruments are on his right there the tachometer and speedometer and then the ignition key slot and starter button along with an ameter oil gauge and most importantly bearing in mind the fact this is a panther an engine fire warning blood an American tanker who drove a captured Panther reported it was much easier to drive than our own tanks on the other side of the the transmission housing we have the funka the radio operator's position I don't believe the comm's kit was ever fitted to this vehicle but production tanks had the fu5 AM radio plus the Caston pz number 20 intercom crew Communications AM radio is good in that requires less power to transmit over distance than FM but it's also prone to static interference there's also the ball mount for the bow mg34 having gone through all that I'm left thinking this is a tank with a large amount of refinement and Technical sophistication the question is how well did it work the panther was very much rushed into production and the result of that was that by the time the first 200 asong D's were committed to action for Operation zadel the KK offensive in July 1943 there were still a lot of problems that need needed ironing out after 2 days fewer than a 100 were serviceable some thre eny action but a larger number through mechanical breakdown throughout the majority of the rest of the war Panther units struggled to maintain a serviceability rate more than 35% fundamental problems involved the fuel pumps transmission and final drives the fuel pumps were a major source of engine fires exacerbated in the asphor d by a rubber waterproof lining to the engine bay which burnt very nicely in many ways the panther design was a carryover from the M vk20 series replacements for the Panza 3 and four the running gear and Mechanicals were designed for a 24 ton tank but ended up part of a 45 ton putting huge strain on the engine and the transmission this continued all the way through the Panther's Frontline service and in early 1945 Garian as Inspector Geral de panren reported that there had been 370 final drive failures in Panthers on the Eastern Front alone and the crews slightly unsurprisingly were starting to lose confidence the panther could be superb in action near kov in August 1944 a panag gunner wrote the action is short but violent some t-34s begin to burn we are favored compared to the t-34 because our armor is thicker and our 75mm guns are very accurate in the second half of 1943 Panthers accounted for round about 500 t-34s for the loss of approximately a hundred of their own but more Panthers were being lost through mechanical breakdown than enemy action and the t34 really did retain the edge in terms of mobility and reliability now some of the basic problems were sorted out as the production run went on particularly by the time we come to the as forong G but the panther still remained a fundamentally unreliable tank it's interesting that the French army which operated around 50 Panthers from 1946 to 1950 finally managed to iron out enough of the remaining troubles particularly solving the problem of engine fires in French service the panther achieved a measure of reliability and it became a substantial influence on post-war French tank design if you'd like to find out more about the panther you'll be interested to know the tank museum has produced this and this is a meticulous beautifully produced translation of the original panhe Panther feeble was created as an engaging and easy to understand handbook to break the tradition of heavy-going technical manuals sophisticated machines like this required considerable knowledge to keep them in action so commanders sought to snag the interest of young tank Crews with these light-hearted well Illustrated handbooks based on the original document has in our archive this self-published title features English text carefully set over the German original retaining the rhyming verses and the wit of the authors it includes inserts from the original book and is printed on identical paper so you an authentic feel to order your copy visit the tank Museum online shop or see the link in the description below thank you for watching hope you enjoyed this video and if you did please like And 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: cVDmZyqjuB4

Length: 21min 52sec (1312 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 29 2023