The German Tank Meme Part 1

ah he'll bonne journee poet of course a garrison [Music] this video sponsored by Skillshare providing over 28,000 courses on a wide variety of topics stay tuned at the end of the video to hear more of all the mechanised combatants in world war ii the German Panzer army is probably one of the most talked about and easily has had the most written on it out of all the tank forces of all the other combatants there's something about German tanks that really captures the imagination of everybody who was into World War two even from a young age when I was a kid back when the History Channel was basically the World War two channel I remember always looking forward to the documentaries that would focus on German tanks with all the discussion online I've noticed that that seems to be pretty typical the whole metric ton of books and media on it really seems to back this up to the point that the discussion on them has pretty much been done to death I mean even I have contributed a few nails to that coffin I mentioned all of this because it would be impossible to cover absolutely everything that could be said about German tanks in this video while keeping it in the same tone of my other ones on different countries so this video will be kind of brief but if you want to read more for yourself in the description I have a list of some of my favorite books and lectures on the subject alright disclaimer over let's get into it like well most other countries Germany's experience with tanks began in World War one after they were sprung on them by the British and their initial interest in the concept was rather small after getting over the initial shock and hurriedly placing orders for their own designs the Germans very quickly figured out that the things were not all that scary once you figured out how to kill them causing the German tank program to take a backseat to more pressing projects and with resources being tight only a handful of German models were produced in the form of the a7v in two super-heavy cave Agins that began construction but were not completed before the war zone once the war was finished and the German army was reduced to only a hundred thousand men under the Versailles Treaty German generals got together and began discussing what happened why they lost and what needed to be changed after an early assessment that was quickly deemed inaccurate of a french-style defensive doctrine for the future the German army decided that in the closing years of World War one they had actually pretty much gotten the correct concept for modern warfare down in their stormtrooper tactics this involved concentrating forces in an attack on a small area of the enemy line to break through and wreak havoc behind said lines essentially making trench warfare obsolete and this is where one of the most important figures in German mechanization Colonel general Hans von sect enters the picture von sex put a huge emphasis on maneuver warfare something that Germany would use to great success in the Second World War and really got the ball rolling on the concept in its future influence on the German army although they now had the doctrine they still lacked the integral parts to this the mechanization that would make it all possible and the key to this was tanks but there was still a big problem under the rules of the Versailles Treaty Germany was not allowed to possess tanks along with many other tools that would be needed in modern warfare in response to this von sec began implementing workaround programs that would allow the german army to become familiar and experiment with these weapons and their new concepts around the trees limitations this included a program working with the soviets to develop and test tank designs in russia away from the watchful eye of the Allies most of the tanks produced during the collaboration with the Soviets including the light tractor were dead ends excluding a few such as the Cline tractor which eventually developed into the Panzer 1 that brings us to the first generation of German tanks the Panzer 1 was developed as a training tank armed only with machine guns but due to the relatively short period of time between when Hitler took power in 1933 beginning rearmament to the beginning of the war in 1939 Panzer ones made up around half of the German tank forces at the very start of the war along with the Panzer 2 that although still a light tank was up gun with a 20-millimeter autocannon that made up another good chunk of the German Panzer force and although our memory of German tanks is made up mostly of large heavily armoured vehicles with big guns these Gen 1 tanks were what made up the backbone of the Panzer force for most of the earlier zuv success in a time when most armies that they came up against were fielding heavier harder hitting tanks and on paper this looks like it should not have worked but the way that Germany implemented these lighter tanks was what made all the difference Heinz Guderian a lower ranking officer at the time of the development of the Panzer arm who had begun his army career in communications provided Germany with a huge technical leg up against their enemies by insisting that every German tank have a radio in it so while the French polish and British were still relying on either one way radios signal flags or other antiquated forms of communication with two-way radios sprinkled around mostly to command tanks every German tank commander had a radio to communicate with his superiors and fellow tankers leading to much better coordination that when combined with this maneuver warfare doctrine would quickly overwhelm enemy formations and this seriously negated the more inferior aspects of these gen1 tanks the Gen ones in the early campaigns were paired with the ever-growing numbers of second-generation German tanks the Panzer 3 in the Panzer four developed side by side in the mid to late 30s these tanks are really what German commanders had in mind as they experimented with their earlier designs with the Panzer 3 being the anti-tank weapon first armed with a 37 millimeter anti-tank gun in the alfe's a through G variants in two variations of a 50 millimeter gun which had always been the goal for the tank to be armed with from the outset in the office F through M this tank took advantage of an extremely economic five-man crew with excellent optics for the gunner and vision Blox for the commander although appearing in smaller numbers in the campaigns of 1939 through 40 the Panzer 3 became the workhorse of the German army and Operation Barbarossa and into fall Blau with the very latest version the n mounting a 75 millimeter gun of the early panzer four's once it had been outdated by 1943 the panzer 4 armed with a short barrel 75 millimeter gun in its early variants began its life as an infantry support weapon that was later up gunned multiple times with various long barrel 75 millimeter guns ending the war is the mainstay tank for the German army and being one of only a handful to be in service from the very beginning to the very end of the war however for all the successes these tanks had throughout the war the number of variants I had to list in their descriptions begins to show one of the downsides of the German approach to tank production as a whole the Germans loved to tinker with their designs and fit in change upon change to a vehicle during its production lifespan and although this seems fairly benign on the surface as of course you would want to improve your vehicle as you come up with better ideas this can create a huge bottleneck in the production capability of your factories and the Germans are notorious for this multi-model short-run type of production with every major vehicle that it created being subjected to a long list of changes throughout its lifespan and this happened with almost every type of vehicle I'm only covering the main tanks in this video but assault guns self-propelled artillery and tanks alike would have many many different variants that were created with many of the changes being not very impactful to the overall combat performance of the vehicle now we know what comes next is probably what you've been waiting for this whole video but due to the large amount of information this topic commands I'm going to go ahead and stop here and get to the gen 3s in part two because the late war heavies are such a big part of what represents world war two to so many people I think they deserve their very own video but I do have one more thing before you go German tank designers were on their own when it came to coming up with new tank designs and back then they probably wish they could have had some where they could have gone to learn the process instead of having to figure it out all by themselves they probably would have made great use of something like Skillshare which offers thousands of classes on a wide range of topics okay maybe none that are how to create a world conquering tank force but they do provide many helpful classes to kick start your year when I first started doing YouTube I had to learn how to edit starting from scratch and had to mostly rely on YouTube tutorials hoping the person I found knew what they were talking about and a lot of them were rather hit or miss I guess they never miss huh kill yourself but since then I have taken several classes on Skillshare which were extremely helpful in learning how to edit and produce my own videos so that I am now ship posting on an academic level and with their help you can to Skillshare is less than ten dollars a month and if you use my link you get two free months of premium giving you unlimited access to high-quality courses by experts in the field I recently took a course on some of the finer details of editing in Sony Vegas and learn how to use a green screen and it was extremely helpful in fact I'm so sure it'll help you that here's some green screen footage to practice with once you take the course do your worst so sign up for Skillshare today and don't forget to use my link for two free months of premium and I look forward to seeing your academic level ship posts in the future I'd like to thank all my patrons on patreon for their generosity and keeping this series going we're about halfway through all the countries I want to cover and it's been one of my favorites to do so far on the next one we'll be taking a look at American tanks so keep your eye out for that thank you all for watching and I'll see you next week [Music]

Channel: Potential History

Views: 1,600,287

Rating: 4.8975596 out of 5

Keywords: Potential History, Meme, German Tanks, panzer 1, panzer 2, panzer 3, panzer 4, ausf, ww1, ww2, reichswehr, panzerwaffe, invasion of poland, fall of france, operation barbarossa, breakthrough tank, light tank, footage, meme tanks, italian tank meme, japanese tank meme, british tank meme, germany could not win ww2, kama tank school, leichttraktor, von seeckt, Guderian, Fall Gelb

Id: lyFk-Fo6HUo

Length: 9min 35sec (575 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Ugolado]

This video is sponsored by skillshare. Nice meme.