Tank Chats #106 | Panzer IV | The Tank Museum

if you do like these tank chats do please subscribe to the tank museum's youtube channel this tank chat's going to be about the sdkf said 161 known to most of us as the panzer iv and the panzer iv is that tank that germany makes the most of in the second world war about 8 353 of them are made so that's a lot of tanks for the german tank production there's one other armored vehicle they make more of ten thousand sturm gushers is made but this is that classic german tank of the um of the wartime era but actually it's also a tank that sees action after the war in other armies and the last time it sees it actually goes into combat is 1967 so it had a long old service life as well now if you've seen our earlier tank chats on the panzer one panzer ii even panzer iii we've talked there a lot about the situation in germany after the first world war and their re-armament programmes in the 20s and 30s how they went about things what their theories were so i'd recommend having a look at those um so i won't repeat everything but broadly the situation is in the early 1930s under the influence of certain german generals mainly gadarian there is a push to put panzer units panzer divisions together and they are looking at uh what they can build in terms of tanks to actually equip these new divisions and develop a new way of armored warfare now the panzer one and panzer ii in essence become the training tanks of the german military to get them used to they want to build them in a relative hurry the panzer 3 and panzer 4 are ultimately going to be the tanks that they really want to equip the new panzer divisions even though the panzer twos actually are going to be using combat and panzer ones to a certain degree as well the panzer iii guderian argues we need a tank with an anti-tank weapon on it ie a gun on the turret with a 360 turning turret that is going to be capable of taking on other tanks should they meet them but also supporting the infantry in the tack and the panzer iv is going to be a support tank a tank that will carry a 7.5 centimeter howitzer which will fire high explosives and that will be used to take out targets that the panzer 3's gun will not be able to cope with so with high explosive it tends to be things like um artillery positions buildings infantry in the open etc things like that so that would be the idea for why you need the panzer iv and as is the way in germany so it's january 1934 uh the german military issue a requirement to industry um three companies some of whom already working on developments for tanks uh krupp rymatel borsig and mann the for the third company those companies are all approached with the idea of building what was then still under because of the versailles peace treaty issues uh the the idea of being it's going to be a medium tractor um or a bw um big like vehicle bargain is basically his thing so bw accompanying vehicle so that request goes out to industry and ultimately it's crop that actually gets the contract initially the germans are interested in following one of their key engineers kneecamp his idea of the interleave road wheels because and this is another thing when we step back you can see the germs are in a bit of a hurry to get this production going they have lots of issues in terms of finding factory space skills engineering you know they're learning on the job as it were as you're seeing those other um developments in the panzer twos and panzer threes so they have issues here so one of the things that crop even though the german military likes the idea of torsion bar and interleave road wheels actually in the end crops goes for a very simple suspension system where actually either side we've got leaf springs on a hub arrangement and double road wheels and sort of four either side making a sets of road wheels each time so things like that are you can see even in the development of the pounds of four there is this idea sometimes corners have to be cut or things have to be done in a manner because quite simply they just don't have the engineering capabilities or the machine tools to manufacture everything um now very quickly it's 1936 they're already starting to say right we can start put this vehicle into series production and the else room or the model a the first major model they only make 34 of these but this idea that they what they're going through is a series of right here's what we've got to so far and then out will come the allstrom b with improvement so it's almost on the job as it were as they're building these in the factories and coming up with better solutions to some of the problems better easier manufacturing techniques etc so that house run goes through and what you're really looking at again to step back from australia at the very beginning of the production series to also j what you will really see is an increase in armor protection in firepower and later also in simplifying the design and build so they could make more of them quickly and that tends to come in right at the end of the production series so what do you get if you get announced from a or just basically the early ones it's got a five-man crew you've got three in the turret you've got two in the front of the tank you've got a driver and a bow machine gunner next to him on the right-hand side as you're facing forward you've got there as well behind in that turret situation the commander is in the center of the turret and he's given it goes through a number of changes of coppola to command from either side of him on his left-hand side again as you face forward you can see that's where the gunners position would be and on the right hand side will be where the loader's position is and one of the things that was picked up on when panzer 4s were being captured by the british in north africa one of the things was the good ergonomics was admired the fact that that commander's position seems to have been very central high up best position in terms of viewing at the back of the turret but he can also see down almost right the way through to the front and again little details like this were picked up on the by the british is very good because again we've mentioned it before in the stress of combat etc you think you know okay we've they've got throat mics intercoms they're talking to each other but sometimes it's a look it's a calmness it's a wink it's a smile it's whatever else it happens to be and they could pick that up that actually the ergonomics inside the vehicle was actually very well designed they start the early models with a maybach hl engine it's a 108 they later go to the 120 trm engine that goes into the into the main production runs of the panzer iv it's fitted in the rear they offset the turret slightly and the engine in the opposite side because the drive shaft that comes right the way through to the front has to go up the middle and if you imagine all the operations for the turret basket um below where you've got the rotary junction underneath the turret basket of course if you've got you've got to actually get that out of the way so you can maneuver this drive shaft to the front gearbox is in the front and you can see the sprockets are on the front there so in a way it's what we would consider a fairly traditional modern or world war ii tank layout in the way it's put together for armor protection as i mentioned it starts actually the very early models relatively thin you've got about 15 millimeters of armor on the front there slightly thicker armor actually on the turret but it ends up by the model j um to having 80 millimeters of armor on the front and about 50 millimeters on the turret so that progression that goes on all the way through and this again comes back to if we're looking at the history the whole of german world war two tank history the influence of hitler hitler again it cannot be overemphasized enough how much uh when hitler says something it is try it is enacted by the german military and industry and again in 1940 it's hitler who says right i want panzer threes and panzer fours to be taken from a lower category of demand for a priority for the german military into a higher category it is hitler who then in the spring or i think it's about may of 1941 he actually asked that why not try to fit the five centimeter anti-tank gun on the panzer iv now that's an important decision there or an idea there because this vehicle as we said it's a support vehicle it's supposed to have that short barreled l24 um 7.5 centimeter gun on it and that was really it could fire at other tanks it did have an anti-tank round but it was really there for its high explosive capacity so the fact hitler is now saying already you might be able to put an anti-tank gun on it and that follows on of course then there's the invasion of russia in the summer of 1941 when uh all the the kv tanks t-34 tanks and map and this idea of we are going to need thicker armor bigger guns to match these soviet tanks the better quality ones that then goes back to the german high command and hitler is reading these reports again and again the idea of the five centimeter gun is dropped very quickly and hitler then in the autumn argues um to say put a 7.5 high velocity gun so same size of the hole at the end of the barrel but 7.5 high velocity much longer gun this is going to be the l43 gun that is going to go on this vehicle um and it's developed it's actually originally cropped take a rimetail gun and develop it further and that is again at the instigation of hitler because he is now looking at the panzer iv as thinking like most tanks it's going to have to meet other tanks and therefore the support role we can do that with other methods hence stern gushertz is in other ways of being doing doing this so again it's that hitler's influence hitler again the following year in the spring of 43 he is the one when he sees the results of these uh putting schutzen which are basically finnish armor plates are standing away from the main armor of the vehicle on the side and on the turrets he then insists this can stop or it basically helps tumble russian anti-tank bullets uh and he says right put them on all tanks so straight away that's another thing that influences the panzer iv because then they start putting on shuts and on this and you can see it around the turret on this vehicle and that influences the outfrung the next models that come out because when you put the side skirts on you'll be able to see it on this turret it actually covers some of the vision ports and interferes with some of the operations of the tanks so they have to adjust for that but if hitler says it's going to happen it happens again so that again is another one of those things in the background you'll see and again in 43 where spear and hitler at various conferences they come together and they end up doing the adolf hitler tank program to see what tanks are going to be developed further and again stopping making these huge numbers of varieties let's boil it down the panzer iv they are expecting the panzer iv to be uh replaced by the panther as a medium german tank with a a powerful anti-tank gun on it before the end of the war but that was their intentions as it were but actually the panzer 4 keeps going and again stepping back a bit as well right from the early days the panzer iv was looked at as was the panzer 3 with a view that this is going to be the basis for other types of vehicles so we see bridge layers we later see anti-aircraft mounts verbal wind etc put on it we see it as being a basis for self-propelled artillery etc but that's in a way is another story um from the main gun tanks now the progression of putting that new gun onto a panzer iv that starts happening with the alf f and the initial gun is it's a 7.5 as i said anti-tank gun it'll go through uh about uh about 1 800 meters it'll go up through about 77 millimeters of armor plate with its armor piercing round that is a huge difference i think it's about 70 difference from the earlier short bowel 7.5 its capacity to go through armor you know it's it is a very effective anti-tank gun and it means again when these start turning up in north africa the british call them the panzer iv specials they actually call them at the time when they see them with a longer barrel and again in certain types of battle situations think of the desert where you might have open landscapes you can use the full range of that gun being knocked out at 1 700 meters by a pounds of four you know most of the british vehicles the best gun they had at the time this was coming in was going to be the 75 millimeter on a grant tank um so you know and that didn't have the same velocity and the same penetration as this as a new 75 on the panzer iv so that was a problem at certain times and again if you read the accounts when the new panzer falls the what they then call the f2 model so it's althrun one has a shorter barrelled house run 2 f2 sorry has the longer 75 millimeter gun with a new high velocity when they start appearing you can see the crew reports are again there's a level of satisfaction that all of a sudden they now have a a fire power that can really take on the soviets on the eastern front and the uh in the western desert as well you know the british and later the american forces as well that way that they can be be you know a very effective anti-tank gun with a good killing range so that model becomes kind of like the the really important one to have a look at that gun originally it comes out with a a round muzzle break on the end a slightly sort of bulbous shaped one that reduces the recoil of the gun by about 55 which again is one of those other issues because the panzer four when it was originally made had quite a wide turret ring what ends up happening is instead of developing on the panzer 3 which although it does go through developments it's the panzer iv that has the bigger potential for further development so that is the one that takes forward and ultimately once you've got an anti-tank gun on it it's overtaking the panzer threes roles it's no longer a support tank it's actually doing what the panzer 3 was already originally invented for and a lot of people comment as well when you think of those two tank programs the issues the germans go through what they ended up is actually two relatively similar um tanks came out at the end of it if and again you know early days when you're trying to sort of learn your different tanks pans of threes and pounds and falls you know there's great deal of similarity shape whatever the panzer iv is just a little bit bigger and because of that it has the development potential that the germans actually take up on there's a newer gun as well a slightly longer gun than l48 7.5 is fitted later the following year and that has a different muzzle break and that's the type of gun that's on this tank here behind me this particular panzer iv so armor protection is upped again hitler's influence he insists that some of the production has thicker armor on the front again he's reading reports from the eastern front where of course most german tank fighting is going on throughout the war 75 percent of panzer 4 losses are actually on the eastern front so that's where all the big tank battles are going and what happens there is you end up with the idea that the new gun has the new type of muzzle brake so that's put on there it's slightly longer than that earlier um high velocity gun so um this the the l-48 version is slightly longer that way by as the war progresses and germany is getting bombed it's having more problems with gaining raw materials and it is also again under spear he's trying to speed the production process up so the vehicles as you're going through by the time you're getting to the house from j they are simplifying them some of the simplification was done because of things like there's no point putting vision ports that are then hurled up by schutzen but other things later on they're starting to simplify just to get it through the factories quicker um because they can't wait for other components so the j they get rid of the motorized turret mechanism um they get rid of that completely and you can only turn the turret by hand wheels and that's a way of trying to simplify the production as it goes through now this particular tank's an interesting one because it shows another feature of the fans at panzer 4 production when they go through those different house runs quite often what happens is an earlier model if it has the opportunity if it hasn't been completely knocked out in combat if it goes back to the factory it is upgraded to a newer altrum standard so what we've actually got here is a relatively early tank it's actually a model alchron d um which there was only about 230 odd of those made fairly early on uh in 1939 1940 but this one has actually gone back to the factory and he's had additional armor to bring it up to a later standard you can see bolted on the front side bolted on the front it's it this when it was first issued would have had the low velocity the 7.5 millimeter gun it's now got the later model 7.5 millimeter the l48 gun there so again you can see with this particular tank that idea also another feature of the german military that idea of upgrading to a newer standard where they possibly could older model tanks when they have the opportunity to do so and this particular tank we are not 100 certain whether it early days it's all combat but it ends its career with the nsk which is basically a sort of paramilitary rac or a motoring organization that germans have set up in the 1930s that develops and goes on to provide not only transport for the organization todd it helps support troops in the front line etc this was used for driver training and nsk actually did a lot of driver training also for the german military including tank crews as well so we know the background to this one whether it's all combat as an earlier model before it was upgraded we're not too sure sort of thing but again it's one of those vehicles a number of pounds of fours captured in north africa were brought back to the uk this particular one has remained here after evaluation this was at the end of the war it's brought back to britain earlier ones that some were actually used for firing trials one earlier panzer was actually given back from the tank museum to the panzer museum in munster um decades after the second world war ended but a a fascinating obviously vehicle to be able to look at and we can just have a look at one or two of those details which i know sometimes when you you're wondering what those different bits fitted on a tank of four and uh with this vehicle it's worth a while having a closer look at them so as i mentioned this one originally it's a a model d so a relatively early vehicle that has been upgraded and we can see this need to meet what hitler has ordered on this particular vehicle such as look at the thickening the extra armor we've got extra plates put on the side that's when again it was insisted that the side armor as well as the frontal armor is increased and the frontal armor they wanted to get up to hitler says first of all it was only some of the tanks but then all the tanks now it's got to be eight centimeters or 80 millimeters thick again one of the other things we can see some of those detailing this gun originally when this model was built was the short barreled how it said the 7.5 centimeter gun now we've got that later model long high velocity 7.5 centimeter gun but one of the features that again this bar that goes out over uh the end are from the front of the turret here the bar is so that when the turret is actually slewed around that bar will catch on here which is where the aerial this is broken off sadly but the aerial goes straight up and it will actually push that aerial which is on a spring all the way down into this wooden tray to keep it safe and out the way and it will spring back up once the vehicle is actually going well once basically it's free of the the turret and the gun um as i mentioned so here we can see the shutzer again they tend to put thicker plates on this turret about eight millimeter thinner plates on the side and as i mentioned the idea there is not to actually a lot of people think it was there to detonate hollow charge weapons it has that effect but it was originally the experimentation they were firing russian anti-tank rifles and it will tumble the bullet it will actually break up the bullet or stop it hitting the main armor effectively so that's why they were applied and at the very end you will see some of the shuts and are actually down to wire mesh so they're actually using it more for that hollow charge defeating hollow charge another thing you can see on this vehicle is here where they've added extra armor on the side of the bodies that it has to work its way around the bump stop and the fixture for the suspension and again being an early vehicle it's got rubber road wheels on the top here return rollers again later in the production run to save on rubber these just become metal the tracks as well were actually thickened for use on the eastern front and they also they came up with other ideas such as a snow plow for the front of the vehicle hitler sees drawings likes the idea of a snowplow and insists that they are made available for the frontline troops and also to extend the range of the vehicle certainly in the early years in russia they're looking to think how do we get a panzer 4 to be able to travel further so they actually make a trolley for the rear that doubles the range of the vehicle so it ends up having a couple of uh drums on the rear trolley that can actually therefore make that vehicle go further some of these panzer fours were used or tested for operation sea lion the idea of the invasion of britain so it turned out to be quite a successful system where they could actually drive across the seabed off of landing craft and they have a snorkel system to give bring them ashore now obviously sea lion never takes place but we think some of those tanks those panzer fours were used in the invasion of russia to cross the bug river and so that system was actually used in operation and also as again as we come around to the rear here we can see some of the other features that changes that have gone on here is a smoke handle system that basically you could drop smoke candles at the rear but again looking at this this wouldn't have been effective with this type of exhaust muffler in place here so again sometimes the upgrades that you can see being put onto a vehicle actually negates some of the other roles they've tried to deal with it in some areas with cutouts etc in some other areas you can see actually so you would have stopped using that when they had this muffler put on here we can see that the proof that this is a very early model panzer iv this is a d model because of this bulge in the back of the turret to accommodate the commander's coppola from the e-model onwards they just move the capola forward and just have a straight back again simplifying the manufacturing and this of course is where you've got armored uh vision blocks all going around that can be lifted split hatch at this particular time so it can go up either side and again as we were mentioning that central position gives the commander a really good view forward right in the middle of the tank and also when you open the hatches and look inside it also gives that nice central position from the point of view of crew management as well been on the back of the turret um to carry things that again no room crew blankets etc and you'll see fixings all around again some of those move during the production run to carry the usual things every german tank has to carry whether it's a fire extinguisher a pickaxe a jacking block etc so you can see all of those dotted round the vehicle the panzer iv was again we see it as that classic german battle tank it was actually supplied over 300 of them were supplied to actually the nazis allies in the second world war and it has a life after the war as well because a number of countries carried on using them spain turkey finland uh carried on they were in service there for um into the 1960s and uh about we think around about a hundred just over a hundred fifty or so from czechoslovakia maybe about the same number from france panzer fours were put together and sold to syria and they actually see their last actions in the 1967 wars against israelis so there was a number of pounds of falls there and a number of uh still on the golan heights um uh dug in as it were they're still there to this day so it's a tank that also saw a long service a tank that was the only one that the germans were producing throughout the entire war um and again it's only when you look at it you realize this is that classic second world war german vehicle that saw action all around on every battlefront the germans were fighting on and proved to be uh as so many tanks that why are they successful it's because they can accept upgrades and be developed and continue to be developed that seems to be the sign of a successful vehicle in these difficult times obviously your support is really valued so please do keep following us on social media do subscribe to our channel and and if you've got the opportunity perhaps order something from our shop uh join one of our schemes like patreon or our friends organization and we'll try and keep going with giving you some content to keep you informed and entertained

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 273,094

Rating: 4.9752536 out of 5

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, david fletcher tank chats, tank chat, tank chats, tank chats david fletcher, tank museum bovington, the tank museum tank chats, panzer, panzer iv, german panzer, ww2 german tank, panther, panther tank, ww2 german armour, eastern front ww2

Id: HTRED_rmmUY

Length: 26min 58sec (1618 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020