Tank Chats #33 Panzer III | The Tank Museum

this is the tank museum's Panzer 3 this particular house room or executional model we might call it is an L model so quite far into the production line the Panther 3 is that classic German tank of the early years of World War two it's a tank we often see in the images that we associate with what we now know is blitzkrieg but it actually had a very troubled birth don't forget that after the first world war Germany because of the Versailles peace treaty is allowed no tanks at all it's limited to an army of a hundred thousand men not even an armored car is allowed but behind the scenes the German army very quickly starts experimenting looking at producing its own tank in the future and how it's going to try and protect itself against tanks so very early on they come up with the 37 millimeter anti-tank gun that they put on a small wheeled chassis that can be horse-drawn and later that gun is actually used on the first models of the Panzer 3 Germany in the 30s that we go on to see the development of the tank but in the 20s they try to work out how to actually build tanks and what engineering skills and how they might even use those tanks now at the end of the first world war Germany sells a number of LK 1 and then LK 2 almost tanked kits to Sweden after the first world war they send some of the engineers to Sweden to practice the art of putting tanks together the engineering that's required behind it and getting people I can't follow who helped develop the a7v in the first world war a German engineer he learns his trade further in Sweden they also tie-up with the Russian something we forget with the Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 Germany and Russia and Soviet Russia this now is their the prize of Europe they get together and there's a secret clause in that treaty saying they're going to cooperate about in military matters and in 1929 at Kazan out in Russia a base is developed where German officers not in their own uniforms go out and actually train and look at some of the issues to do with tank warfare and they send out their some of their early models their test model vehicles to trial now Germany as well is as an industrial base they have problems they don't have a massive motor car industry so when the German army are thinking about how we're going to develop this new weapon that we want to be able to use we've been receiving in in the first world war they're looking around for the best industrial concerns that have skills and perhaps techniques take these forward and they start off in the 20s by going to crop Rhine Mattel and Dame 'la and getting them to build something that was called a grouse trying to a large tractor a couple years later they do a light tractor and these companies get a skill set together about how an armored vehicle might be built what are some of the main concerns what are those issues things like transmission tracks armor plating in the 20s the Germans actually work out an effective method of welding armor plate which again is a brilliant idea because if you rivet on the plate you need a framework to rivet that on the plate to by welding it not only are you actually making the armor watertight so you can deep wait but you're saving they worked out about four tons on an average-sized armored vehicle just by not having the framework and the rivets which are caused there's another problem with rivets if they're hit by oncoming fire they can actually share off and become a projectile inside the tank as well so all this is being experimented with it's only in the early 1930s when Hitler comes to power that actually they take some of these earlier experiments and in 34 Hitler puts out an order to those same three companies to come up with the panzer 3 and what was going to become the plans are for now the difference between those two tanks is the German army realized it wanted the Panzer 3 as its breakthrough weapon the weapon that will then exploit and continue to a gap if you've broken through a frontline and they wanted it unlike some of the other European countries to have a gun that would knock out other tanks they did for C Panzer threes bumping into enemy tanks and therefore needing to engage them the Panzer 4 was really a support vehicle for this Panzer 3 it was going to have a short-barreled 75 millimeter gun that can fire high explosives so it can take on prepared positions but it really was supporting this vehicle not as in the Western countries we tended to think of them as infantry support vehicles that were going to help the infantry onto a target so they're designed by the three companies Dana wins the competition that's put together for the Panzer 3 the panzer 4 interestingly they end up looking very very similar much argument afterwards about why did they bother creating two designs which in the end had very very similar features was it worth it and this shows in one sense the influence of actually the German High Command they are quite happy to actually step in at certain times in tank production and say we want you to go down this route transitory it has many teething troubles in its development the first four models are really just to get the suspension system right they want it the German army wants it to have a 50 millimeter gun but the 15 millimeter gun is not actually developed yet so it starts off having the germs of standard German anti-tank under 37 millimeter gun so early models really trial affairs to get the technique right and another issue we have to remember as well as Hitler is putting most of its resources into the Luftwaffe and to the Kriegsmarine the Navy tanks rowing a very small part between of their overall budget between 37 and 41 only four point seven percent of German money on arms manufacture goes into tanks the German war plan of 1930 flat five is putting together about 69 divisions of infantry three of cavalry and only three of tanks so we mustn't fall into that trap of later German propaganda when Hitler sees a success of the tank in 1940 he constantly digs up the propaganda bigs up the use of the tank all the time actually before the Second World War it's only a part of how the Germans a small part of how the Germans think they're going to be facing up to future conflict now the production of Panda 3 is very very slow it doesn't come out at the rate certainly that Hitler once and by the beginning of the Polish campaign in September of 1939 there's barely a hundred eighty of these tanks are actually ready so the early part of the war Germany is really using its training tanks the pans ones and the Panzer twos what kinds of threes and Panzer falls are available but being backed up enormous ly by captured Czech tanks so the 35 38 T tanks like that they're the tanks and actually really help bolster the German forces of that period the German military and the production side think they're going to be ready for a major war in about 1943 Hitler as we know he influences German tank design in the summer of 1940 when he sees a report about the poor performance of the 37 millimeter gun on the early Panther threes he insists the long barreled 50 millimeter gun is fitted in actual fact is 18 months before that gun actually gets on a panther 3 and that makes him furious because if the long barreled 15 millimeter gun which has a much better Armour penetration capability at being on the tank earlier it probably wouldn't have suffered so much when it bumps into tanks in July of 1941 tanks like the kV was and the t-34 so Hitler again he's influencing tank design he's looking at where he thinks design is going in the future and don't forget it's only after those summer victories that the Hitler then starts turning around and saying this is what helped us win in the summer amazing summer 1940 against France it's the tank that then he concentrates some of his propaganda on and then he takes credit for some German Panzer generals using these Panther threes to great effect now this particular model it's an L model this one comes later in the production run they stopped making Panzer threes as gun tanks in August of 1943 its earlier design it's about mobility it's for the attack and that mobility means they keep the armored protection levels down it's about thirty millimeters of armor plate on the front Hitler again in the summer of 1940 when he sees again these bigger guns being used he starts investigating up armoring his tanks and some of that comes later as [ __ ] sandwich er side plates add-on armour that a place there and also in here we've got what they called war Panzer an extra twenty millimeter frontal plate put across just in front of the drivers and the bow machine gunners position that up armoring the vehicle but there was a point that transitory wasn't going to go beyond they put on the hate shell the Maybach HL 120 engine in the back later to a Maybach trm engine to try and up the horsepower up the power but really this was a tank that when Germany gets to being on the defensive you can't carry on adding too much armor protection and the turret size they start with that 37 millimeter Ganton they then go on to a short-barreled 50 millimeter then the long bound is we can see here 50 millimeter gun the standard is a 5 centimeter anti-tank pack gun and the very last model the model outrun n actually goes back to having the short barreled 75 millimeter gun that was going on the panzer 4 but the panzer three can't be developed any further so they stopped making it as a gun tank they carry on making it because it's actually got lots of other very useful roles so they carry on making it as a chassis for the famous stone bishops and we'll look at stone blue shirts in another little film so this particular model that shipped out to Benghazi in North Africa it's noted as being there it's been issued to the frontline troops it we think it's captured at the Battle of Allen house though which is Rommels a lot of the tents attempt to push through the British lines to get it Egypt and it's captured in relatively good order we've got photographs of it being D bombed out there in in North Africa before it was sent back to Britain for analysis with a number of other captured German tanks so we've got all the reports and some of those reports in the British side of things they pick out things they liked about this tank such as its roomy turret with the commander at the back right in the middle so we've got good visibility going looking forward and he'd also got line-of-sight to his gunner and his loader and almost through to the front of the vehicle where you've got the driver and the bow machine-gun and radio operator so that was picked up as being very good they liked they thought some of the technical details even then they were picking up but they seem to be a bit over engineer to what they were doing and but one thing interesting they did see a worry was the weld and even though the Germans had come up with this way of welding on the plate those welds made the tank felling vulnerable at certain times if the worlds weren't up to scratch that was where the tank if it was hit would tend to split and certainly if you look at images of internal explosions that's where again quite often you will see that the the cracks are going along the seam lines of the world other issues they looked at this is torsion bar suspension the early models different companies Dane the went for torsion bar crop when they were putting their proposal together because crop had a railway backed at ground they were actually looking at using double bogies on the vehicle so you've got what they call trailing arms with torsion bar suspension a shock absorber at the front one of those simple little problems though with the complexity of some of these vehicles the German troops found it actually hard to get the liquid that was due to go in the shop absorbers out to the front line all the time drive sprocket at the front engine at the rear advantages and disadvantages of having the drive at the back this debate goes on very often but the advantage you can see here is there's a long track run going all the way before it reaches the drive sprocket and that means things like mud and sand is shaken off so that by the time it gets the drive sprocket you should have less wear and tear on that front drive sprocket I've mentioned the armored plate 30 millimeter front of standard an extra 20 millimeter added here and they were also they put a framework over the front mount fit of this L they were going to add more extra armor plate over that as well this particular version didn't have that extra armor added and again later in the war you'll see shoots and we mentioned side plate they were first put on to help try and tumble solid shot if it hit the ships and away from the vehicle it may not have the full impact when it hit the face hardened armored plate on the front on the sides where it's even thinner they also found of course later with hollow charge weapons if it detonates it away from the main body of the vehicle you've gotten off what they call standoff distance to dissipate the effect of hollow charge weapons such as a bazooka or peer ground so they were added as well armed with mg 34s in the front and as a coaxial and as on this vehicle you can see with one for anti-aircraft defense as well and it was a very good relatively reliable tank it had so many teething troubles like tanks before it and no tank is reliable in the way perhaps comparing it to a modern car they break down all the time it has a good power-to-weight ratio it had good mobility early on but by 1943 the Germans have realized themself this is now an outclassed vehicle so it's it's converted into other roles some are made into munitions carriers some are made into recovery vehicles they'd already got a flamethrower version a command version an artillery observation up version but the most of them end up carrying on being produced as sturmgeschütz is where they were very very effective cost wise you could build three sturmgeschütz is for two of these pans or two so there's a lot more technicalities going into this one so a classic vehicle of the early war German Victor but also an interesting vehicle because it helps us understand perhaps a little bit more about how the Germans got to that the tank in on the battlefield position and how they were going to use or how they thought that we're going to use that tank and again let's not forget the German propaganda that makes up that sense of the use of the tank only after those victories in May of 1940 in France Belgium Holland you

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 846,345

Rating: 4.9471025 out of 5

Keywords: Panzer 3, Panzer, German tank, Tank, Bovington, The Tank Museum, Tank Museum, David Fletcher, David Willey, Tank Chats, Panzer III, Second World War, World War Two, world war two, ww2, second world war, wwii, world war 2, world war ii, the second world war, tank, tanks, bovington, tank museum, the tank museum, museum, documentary, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, tank chat, tank chats, chat, wot, tankfest, panzer iii tank, panzer iii tank chat, german panzer iii

Id: ZQdlJIKLmlI

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/ggorgg]

I highly recommend visiting the Tank Museum. I visited last year and was amazed at the condition of the vehicles. Seeing a vehicle up close reveals much about its design.

[u/WorldwideTauren]

Thanks for posting this, some of the Panzer III variants are my favorite tank looks.

[u/farmersboy70]

He should have fact-checked his piece first; that's an Ausf L, which means it's frontal armour is 50mm thick, not 30.

Still, I have the Haynes manual they produced on the Pz III, and it's one of the best I've read so far.