Tiger 131: Inside & Out | The Tank Museum

there are some objects that come to define the richness of a museum's collection we tend to call these hero objects things like the Mona Lisa for the Louvre the rosetta stone the British Museum and potat Newseum one of these is Tiger won 3-1 now it's not technically necessarily the most important tank in the collection this not necessarily the best tank in the collection for some of us it's not our favorite tank in the collection but it is the most famous taken collection in this video we're going to look at why Tiger 131 is not nearly the most famous tank in the museum but arguably the most famous tank in the world now many of you watching this video will know that the reputation of the tiger is as much based on myth and appearance as reality but this vehicle embodies the key messages of the Nazi propaganda machine of Hitler's obsessions with with size and scale and strength and power what the German tank design is revealed on hitler's 50th birthday certainly looked the part and it sent a shudder through the Allies when they saw this monstrous new machine featuring in Nazi newsreels of April 1942 now there's no doubt that the British were alarmed by the scale size and power of this new German vehicle but it was going to be a year before they could get their hands on one of the real things in Tunisia in April 1943 Tiger 131 was abandoned after an engagement with the Sherwood Foresters and 48 roll 10th regiment it was the first Tiger to be captured intact by the Western Allies and was considered a really important prize so extent where is it inspected both by Churchill and King George with six while it was still in Tunisia and then shipped to London where it's displayed on Horse Guards Parade Tiger crews had ordered the destroy disabled tanks rather than let them fall into enemy hands it remains a certain amount of mystery around why Tiger 131 was abandoned but recent research by the Bournemouth University forensics Department suggests that because of the way the tank was damaged fitted to its open hatches at least three of the crew were probably wounded the engine was recorded as later on as easily overheating so the engine was probably broken and probably not working at the point where the tank was abandoned and the last straw was when the turret was disabled follow me around jamming between the turret and the hull the crew gave up and went to the rear and that meant that the Tigers captured intact and its secrets could be revealed but with hindsight perhaps the tiger is a tank that never lives up to its hype it's a tank where these upsides are outweighed by the downsides yes it has a tremendous psychological impact on the battlefield just by being out there somewhere it indeed has the best done in the world in this tremendously powerful 88 millimeter at the time has the best Armour in the world and it's mobility is perfectly adequate but there were just too few Tigers for this to be a war winning weapon and these tanks are an economic disaster zone and they are so expensive and weapons like this are so expensive that they lead to a direct contribution to the downfall of the Nazi regime the propaganda around the tiger was highly successful he kept a like Cruz in a permanent state of what was known as Tiger terror of a fear of encountering one of these ferocious machines and could an argue that the ripples of that Tiger terror of that effects on our soldiers then make us now remain victims of Nazi propaganda even 75 years later there were just too few of them and they were too intensive from their maintenance requirements to them to ever dominate the battlefields of the Second World War you have to ask yourself if Tiger tanks were so good how come so few survived to this day no one chose to remanufacture these things after the Second World War no will chose to operate them and of over 1300 produced only six of which Tiger 131 is one of them survived to this day of those six it's the only limb that still runs and this was after a major and complex and expensive project to return the tank to running condition compare this to the large number of t-34 and Sherman's still in good running order after all these years yes there were more t-34 and Sherman's so the spares availability is better but there's more to it than that and we should know the tiger tank takes an absurd amount of maintenance and it's difficult and expensive to fix when something goes wrong today we run Tiger 131 twice a year to take part in our Tiger Day events and Tiger Day attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world to see this unique vehicle inaction is something you cannot see anywhere else no other tank in our entire collection can carry a show on its own like Tiger won three wandered and thrust as a museum it's great to see the enjoyment and the engagement that this tank brings but most people never get a chance to see what goes on behind the scenes to make that kind of event possible it is over engineered it is complex in ways but at the same time it is it is wartime technology but yeah you can't just go to the main back dealer said oh can we have some new cylinder heads yeah it has it a little bit more complex than your average t-34 or Sherman but I guess that also makes it a bit of an engineering challenge so you build a knowledge of the vehicle and how it behaves and you can react to it and you start to notice fairly quickly if something is out of sync with how it normally runs so you build up knowledge operating in that way of course mike and some of the others were involved with the engine overhaul the engine that's running it now so a lot of more you have a lot better knowledge once you help assemble and build that motor you can more easily identify a problem because you know exactly how it works so we take it out before it goes out to Tiger Day these days we service the vehicle if needed and we run it up the temperature to make sure everything performs for the following week for the big event one obviously several thousand people standing the arena and last thing if she wants is to find out there's a problem there and dance when I first drove it I'd be lying saying I wasn't nervous who won't be nervous driving you know the seven-year old tank the only running one in the world and all eyes are on you so yeah I was nervous actually it's really nice to drive the only thing is the restricted vision you've got off someone on the ground that you can really trust where where Mike was been involved tiger so long so we've always had an understanding inside when you're driving it is so noisy really noisy because you've got the transmission right next to you it's quick for an old tank it's very quick and you know I can get it up into sixth gear and it feels like you're doing 100 miles an hour really but it was quite scary inside yeah but it's a quick bit of kit we found with the tiger after driving it you know there's things that need adjusting because this is quite finely tuned for this gear change to operate and what I've learnt in the past I just give it a little bit of clutch just assist because if you get it wrong the tank can rear up and it can snatch the tracks and we're the tractor we've only got the one set of tracks and tiger we can't afford for them to take in that much pressure you know and damaging the tracks and the final drive I've got to drive it right and to make it look good because Tiger days everyone's got a camera they want to see it perform they want to hear it they want to hear it change gear they want to see it maneuver and so yeah it is it is an experience to drive around and get it right it's all for the visitors really and for us you know we're all tight nuts at heart so it's just an enjoyment like with most historic machinery it makes such a month I always keep saying it makes you three dimensionally if you once you see it running but it's so unique and it brings it to life you start thinking what was it like for these guys on the eastern front or whatever they operated the vehicle in this case of course North Africa as well what was it like for these guys on one three one they would have heard that exact same engine sounded of exact same vehicle so it makes not only a link to the past but it gets you to understand what these weeks are about not only as an impressive engineering feat of engineering but also quite a sinister and impressive weapon and that would be a different experience but just sits there we'll get that so once you see doing a lap in the arena it is impressive especially when it goes out by itself because it's just this one machine in the arena and you think very few other vehicles will have this real dominance of the territory always the museum has made the vehicle famous and we continue to build this year the vehicle people come to the museum just to see the tiger it is impressive and of course we want to share that with people that's our job as a museum we want to share history and that also means the history of the object and how it operates but it's the only survivor intact with this combat history so you want to make sure that it's being looked after we will try 200 percent effort to make sure we can save the original rather than replace it and that's why this balance of keeping it running with keeping the original components is very important to us and I think it also will be to the visitors because they want to know it's the real deal we're losing the veterans now unfortunately we have done the last sort of obviously in the last few years on 4G with these great individuals and in some ways the machinery outlives them and their memory and maybe that's part of remembering them as well when it's well it comes down to operating these machines despite all the work we do in servicing and maintaining and repairing the vehicles we obviously realize that one day we may have to park the vehicle up in the museum and let it live the rest of his life in retirement so Tiger 131 was originally returned to running order for tank fest in 2004 for having a huge internal and external restoration and it made it around the arena just this was an immensely difficult project but we were feeling our way in the dark through the unknown we didn't have access to anyone with experience of operating and maintaining the vehicle we had to learn for ourselves indeed some of the 2004 work got revisited in 2010 and we continued to improve the way we look after the vehicles we learn more about it I mean there is no Haynes manual for the tiger vent although by a happy coincidence there is now and this handy guide will help you do your own Tiger rebuild products in the future and there are a few rebuild projects currently underway so Tiger once everyone won't be the only running tiger tank forever but none of the other ones will have the authenticity of Tiger 131 because what makes Tiger 1-3-1 such an important piece for our music is it storing its that story and the continuity of its existence which is at the core of its value as an artifact just look at Tiger 131 and you can see what makes it different to the other Tigers because it still bears the scars of its final battle it has the field modifications made by the crew even have a photograph of them although to this day we don't know who they were and we know what happened in its final fighting moments giving this tank a very human dynamic we know that in the advance of tunas infantry from the shoe at foresters regiment took a hill known as 0.174 from the Germans the inevitable German counter-attacks culminated in an assault of German armed among which was Tiger 131 the infantry at this point were exhausted and was surely set to be overrun but 500 yards behind them 9 Churchill tanks from 48 Royal Tank Regiment and 114 royal armoured Corps arrived on the battlefield just in time to fire on the advancing enemy tanks in a dangerously precarious situation and unaware of the Churchill's taking up position behind them the Sherwood Foresters turned an abandoned German anti-tank gun and prepared to fire at Tiger 131 and in the following exchange of fire a Churchill tankers motion and Tiger 131 ground to a halt having been hit multiple times almost 80 years on Tiger 131 is no longer a feared weapon of war but a treasured artifact but our story doesn't stop there because of its story and because it's the only running example in the world Tiger 131 has become more than just a museum exhibit if you take a look at YouTube and search for Tonica 131 you'll see literally thousands of videos which have been viewed millions of times and this makes it one of the most visible and viewed artifacts of any kind in any museum anywhere in the world this level of Fame that when the movie director David Ayer wanted a real tiger town to feature in the film fury a brief Google search was all it took to find Tiger 131 and Tiger 131 can add itself to the distinguished list of Hollywood performers who were also World War two veterans this appearance brought yet more Fame and Tiger 131 subsequently then became immortalized even in pixels being a tank you can play yourself in the World of Tanks game and then bricks and then a whole range of fan merchandise Tiger 131 drools new admirers every day and the fascination it generates brings visitors to taint Museum and draws people to our subject area of armored warfare the cultural value of Tiger 131 is far in excess of what you would expect from an individual vehicle the tanks popularity and the way in which we've got a harness directly enables us to tell the story of tanks and the men who fought in them preserving this tank doesn't mean that we're glorifying either the tiger or the regime that made it in fact quite the opposite preserving this tank in the to open up a chapter of history to tell the stories of those had to overcome this regime of the nature of that regime itself and the way in which tanks like the tiger and extraordinary expense helped to bring it down so that benefit of all of us 75 years later even a question that crops up very often that Saigon 131 and certain about some of the other tanks that you run on the arena so in tankfest days and other times do you really think you should be running them considering the age and the fact that let's face it there is going to be one day a stage where one of these breaks and probably a Castro 'fuck you know it's not going to get repaired you have got the parts for it yeah it's a tricky one because I come from a fine art background looking after fine artworks and galleries and everything and there's a a really strong convention about how you're supposed to preserve look after restore works of art for 20th century mass-produced industrial items we just don't have that same set of guidance so you may have been going to a clock museum and not seeing any mechanical clock in that museum working you might feel a bit shortchanged so there's some areas of technological history we're used to seeing working there's other areas where you know the aeroplanes is a classic area where we've got real real problems of if a plane fails it not only drops out the sky but you lose a pilot as well and there's lawyers you know worth losing just for that sake of trying to put things in front of the public so you know so there's different element ank's one of the things we know that running a tank is really important to helping people understand some of those issues about it but let's not kid on ourselves you know we're not using the guns we're not firing at ranges we're not doing all sorts of things so we're only explaining some of the things by running in and we do also know one of the other problems we've all got as well is we know that by running it we're damaging it what we are trying to do though is we know all these objects were looking after on a downward curve they are going to sort of return to base oxide one day in the future all were doing is slowing that up at points by speeding that up by running the vehicle doing certain things to do with it by but by bringing so many people to the subject and you know another one of these issues if we hadn't run the tiger when we did we would have lost those people who were there when it was cat who knew a volunteer knew some of the stories etc so again running these vehicles in 20 years time it'll be a very different it will have even gone from living memory so there's a whole host of issues that you come into and my own feeling is that some organizations criticize other ones for running things etc my own thought is look at that particular organization look at its remit look at it what it's there for you know we try to do it with the least wear and tear as possible but equally what are we trying to save what's significant about that vehicle host of really complex issues there but think about that as well of a viewers which is you know what are we trying to do when we when people are saying all run this run that that's not all complete a you know running is part of it but that's you know it's also preservation we are a charity here at the Tank Museum so if you can support us please do consider joining our patreon scheme or becoming a member of the friends any donations will go directly towards the Tank Museum and its activities

Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 122,970

Rating: 4.9273753 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, tiger, tiger tank, tiger 131, tank museum tiger, panzers, german ww2, tankfest, tankfest online, tankfest live, tank museum director, german ww2 tanks

Id: fhj9Mzp0-eA

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020

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Bonus Tiger I animation gif:

http://larsbecher.blogspot.com/2011/09/tank-animation.html