War Factories | Season 3, Episode 4: The Tanks of Porsche | Free Documentary History

foreign [Music] [Music] the real story of how the world wars were fought and won it may sound strange but modern Wars they're not won by battles they're won by factories and the other side with a tide of mass production and those factories would shape the modern world and Brands like Porsche skoda Rolls-Royce they all honed their Craft on the research and development that was needed to win Wars [Music] think Porsche and you immediately think of high performance muscle cars Porsche is an icon it's a bioword for power speed performance load of the ground it's all about power when I think of Porsche I think of fast cars Boxster Spyder 911 I mean these are really iconic cars so it might come as a real surprise to learn that the father of the poor sports car brand was the designer of some of the slowest vehicles in the world Ferdinand Porsche founded the dynasty that bore his name with his son in 1931. together they designed the Volkswagen Beetle the elephant and the Panzer 8 Mouse the largest tank ever conceived in history because during World War II the father of the muscle car was obsessed with a different kind of muscle military muscle Porsche has an obsession with power and during the second world war the German military asks him to design very powerful vehicles and that will ultimately determine the fate of the German military during the second world war Porsche was one of the great disasters for the German war economy he squandered Nazi resources these are war-winning Vehicles they just helped us more than they helped them [Music] looking at his modest beginnings no one could have predicted that the name of Ferdinand Porsche would become synonymous with speed power and massive super tanks Porsche was born in mathisdorf that's near the northern Frontier of what is now the Czech Republic at the time it was basically part of the austro-hungarian empire he shows an interest in cars but not as a great manufacturer one of his first jobs is actually as a driver before the first world war Porsche was Bran's ferdinand's driver that by the way is the Archduke who was shot the assassination of which was the touch paper for the implosion of the first World War [Music] horse's father wants him to take over the family tin Smith business but the young Porsche has other ideas he was a boy with his toys as Obsession was the transformative phenomenon of that era electricity and it's thanks to him his family home was the first in their town to actually have electric lighting and by his twenties you have the young Porsche being the test center manager of the electricity firm Bella eggerenko in Vienna there he met a man who would change his life he comes across a man called ludukloner who is one of the early austro-hungarian pioneers of Coach building Ludwig Lerner was absolutely convinced there was a market for these electric powered coaches among the Vienna Elite so what he does is to persuade Porsche to come and work for him of course has the opportunity to now design his first vehicle what do you get you get the C2 feet on it's the most extraordinary looking creature you ever did see the first vehicle ever designed by Ferdinand Porsche it has this really compact electric engine that weighs just 130 kilograms and it could reach speeds of up to 25 kilometers an hour once you've charged it it can pot along for 49 miles and it actually wins a significant road race in Berlin smashing all the other competitors Not only was it one of the first vehicles ever registered in Austria it was also one of the world's first electrically driven cars and that wasn't the only first that the Porsche Lorna partnership would achieve of course from the early on shows that he's an innovator in the industry he and Lorna and pushed forward many of the important firsts in automobile design together these boys cook up one of the first ever front wheel drive cars your first ever four-wheel drive car and a century before you get your Hybrid Toyota Prius you've got hybrid gasoline electric vehicles all thanks to Lona and Porsche by the time he moves on to Daimler in 1906 Porsche was designing racing cars that would go on to win some of the most prestigious competitions in Europe and often with Porsche himself at the wheel not content with World beating racing cars Porsche designed a series of military vehicles which Saw Service in the Austrian army during World War One the most successful of these was called the Goliath which was aptly named it's this huge 10 ton tug with these big cleated Wheels which are almost about a meter and a half across and what they're designed to do is to drag a massive mortar gun through the mud of No Man's Land so it was perhaps the success of this that helped convince Porsche where military equipment's concerned bigger equals better [Music] bigger was certainly better for Porsche's career there's a great big car merger that takes place in 1926 the fruits of which are still roaring up and down our motorways today Daimler bends out of which you have the car brand Mercedes-Benz Porsche was now being backed by Germany's largest automobile manufacturers which gave him much greater resources and the ability to try out new ideas and you've got these Mercedes-Benz racing cars designed by Porsche winning the German Grand Prix three years in a row by 1931 you have Porsche setting up his own design consultancy with his son Ferdinand Anton otherwise known as fairy Porsche Ferry grows up surrounded by the glamor of these race cars and all this engineering and he's kind of Basking in all this reflected Glory of his father's Fame so frankly it seems only natural for him to inherit some of his father's engineering genius and it's the alchemy that they produce together from the 1930s onwards which is going to be so instrumental for the brand Porsche and of course for that German war machine [Music] the two Porsches father and son would work in tandem from then on refining ferdinand's designs at the same time they were joined by the third leg in the Tripod of talent that would cement Porsche's Fame Carl Raba was an engineer who had worked really closely with Porsche joined Dana in 1913 and when Porsche goes on to form his own company rabba comes along and becomes his chief designer it's a post he's gonna remain in until he retires all the way through to 1965. these three together are the brand Porsche which will be courted by the most powerful men on Earth in 1932 Port is visited by this delegation from the Soviet Union and it's actually Joseph Stalin no less who's heard of Porsche's Fame and he wants him to help put the Soviet motor industry on the map what Stalin does is to ask Porsche to become the general director of the Soviet Auto industry if you look at fairy his Memoirs his father does actually consider the offer but decides that the language barrier would be too much and he actually turns Stalin down by then it was 1933. and Paul should caught the eye of another Rising dictator who was much closer to home Adolf Hitler thank you in 1933 Adolf Hitler made a speech at the Berlin Motor Show where he extolled the prowess of German racing cars and vowed to place German Automotive Excellence at the at the Forefront of his regime slogan was full gas forward horse promptly writes to Hitler complements a speech and the two men meet shortly afterwards at the kaiserhof hotel and it's there that Hitler asked Porsche to work with him to promote the German motor industry he's a player he's not just an engineer Porsche he's a guy with an eye for the main chance and lo and behold Hitler invites Porsche to help him put German Motors at the center of his political plans Porsche wasn't just a brilliant engineer he was also an astute political operator so Porsche is like the zelig of the Nazi automobile industry if ever there's a photo of Hitler grinning near a car port is somewhere in the picture with him they were together through much of the time in the world when you see Hitler expecting Vehicles Hitler going to certain social events Hitler doing War Maneuvers Porsche was often there to be seen clearly he liked being around Hitler he enjoyed being known as Hitler's favorite engineer his son certainly said that his father was one of only a very small handful of people that could really speak their mind to Hitler and you cannot dispute that Hitler held Porsche in very high regard Porsche is determined to establish a relationship with Hitler in the Nazi regime what he does very early on is he teams up with another German Auto Union to come up with some designs that he hopes to win over the new Nazi dictator they have two proposals they want to put in front of the right Chancellor so what Porsche does is to broker a meeting with Hitler where they pitch him with their ideas the first idea is a car for the people not just the elite everyone every man on the street needs to be behind a wheel this is going to be the original Volkswagen and the second now that's for a racing team and that's going to be called the silver arrows and that's made up of Auto unions really successful racing cars who are they designed by it's by Porsche both ideas fitted Hitler's agenda but there was a catch Hitler's priority is to have Porsche to work on the Volkswagen he wants for domestic purposes to show the German industry will create benefits for the people Porsche actually had been thinking about building a people's car or an affordable family car for years one of the reasons he breaks with Mercedes-Benz is Mercedes wants to focus on the high performance high-end automobile where Porsche understands that there's a market for the average family to have its own call and since then porsche has been working with a couple of companies one of which was part of the auto Union to design this two-cylinder car so in Hitler comes along and proposes that Porsche takes over the Volkswagen brief he's got no real compunction in ditching Auto Union going it alone Porsche was now free to design the people's car but as War loomed in 1939 it became increasingly clear that Volkswagen was not being designed purely for the people the phrase the people car is somewhat deceptive yes it was to build a car that could be marketed to the German people and show that the benefits of the Nazi state was providing for them if you could succeed in making a cheap versatile vehicle it would have profound military uses it well in 1938 you have the German Army commissioning Porsche to convert the Volkswagen chassis into this military transport vehicle that should be capable of carrying up to four fully laden soldiers across any Terrain it's very likely this is always the plan and that Hitler discussed the military applications the VW designed with Porsche from perhaps as early as April 34 but in any case what's apparent is that Porsche is losing no time in converting the people's car into the German Army's equivalent of the Jeep the result was the kubol wagon the Cooper wagon is a remarkable piece of engineering because it provides the German military with an all-terrain vehicle that's extremely rugged and extremely Dependable until all of a sudden you basically had a combat beetle it could go on land and mud up hills off-road the kublwagen saw its first action in the invasion of Poland in 1939 where it proved very successful except for one tiny detail the vehicle's slowest reliable speed was about eight kilometers per hour well that's a problem because the average marching speed of the German Soldier was about four kilometers per hour and because of that the German military ultimately asks Porsche to slow the kubavagan down so that those speeds match think about that for a second the German Army has taken the greatest race car designer in the country he's designed this excellent staff vehicle and what does the German military do they go Dr Porsche we love it it's a great design but could you make it a little bit slower for us only in the Army could they ask a race car driver to design a slower vehicle slowing a car down is not as easy as it sounds it's about getting the right ratio between the gears and the wheels and Porsche manages to solve this problem by increasing the size of the wheels and installing a second gearbox which he calls a reduction box what this is effectively is a low ratio gearbox like you're going to find in a modern 4x4 but what Porsche was doing was revolutionary he was using it the late 1930s so once again he's massively ahead of his time the kublwagen was manufactured in a purpose-built factory at Wolfsburg which would go on to produce the Volkswagen after the war the story of the kublwagen in production terms is not dissimilar from that of Germany in the second world war they make what seems like an impressive number 50 000 Cooper wagons were produced between 1939 and 1945 and they fight in every theater the German Army uses them for multiple roles so they seem to be a ubiquitous important vehicle on the other hand when you compare it to say the production of the genie I don't know there are 50 000 Kuba wagons there are 660 000 Jeeps built so there's at least seven Jeeps on the road for every pupil it was an imbalance that would be repeated in all spheres of German production and it would come back to haunt the Nazis as they extended their War into Russia 23rd of June 1941 one day after German panzers roll into Russia at the start of operation Barbarossa the Germans think they have great Vehicles they move into the Soviet Union with a lot of confidence that they can stand up to whatever the Russians are going to throw at them they're really not expecting a lot of opposition Soviet t-26 is and the BT tanks really no match for these German panzers so you've gone to imagine where surprise went over the horizon rolls this entirely different looking Beast [Music] what they're seeing is something that's really Sleek it's fast it's got this really sloped frontal armor against which the 37 millimeter shells are the German panzers and the pack anti-tank guns simply bounce off this Beast it's the t-34 this development sends shock waves through the Vermont they very quickly realize we're outclassed by Soviet armor Soviet tanks the most famously of the t-34 proved themselves to be more powerful than Germans expect and in many cases more powerful than the German types themselves the only thing that saves the Germans was the fact that the Blitzkrieg Veterans of Poland and France were able to adapt on the floor and take out the Russians tank tracks and what that does is to immobilize them so the Infantry can finish them off but that was only a temporary solution what the German Army and Hitler and Porsche all quickly realize is Germany will need heavier and better tanks so a rushed program has put into place to develop an entirely new generation of what would have been super heavy tanks at the time [Music] the German tank manufacturer henschel was commissioned to design a Panzer capable of mounting a gun that could Pierce 100 millimeters of armor at a range of 1500 meters it was assigned the code number vk-4501 is his favorite engineer on this vitally crucial job and that of course is Porsche but a Hitler isn't content to leave this job of cooking up the mother of all tanks to just one man Hitler did with portion henschel what he often did where he sent two people to do the same job to see him how one would emerge and so we were left with portion henschel now in direct competition to build the First new super heavy tank the race was now on to build the tank that Porsche would name the Tiger [Music] [Music] by 1942 Porsche was a commissioned officer in the SS and had been appointed to the main Committee of tanks and tractors in charge of managing tank production so it's only natural that Hitler's gonna turn to Porsche in a time of need and to design the tank that the Hitler is hopefully going to turn the tide of war in the Nazis favor [Music] the tiger project was not the first time that Paul should toyed with the idea of a heavy tank Porsche had actually had an idea for a heavy tank before the war he had actually started working on plans for what he called a heavy breakthrough tank which had given the code named leper the problem is when many Porsche's designs as the tank was too heavy and he couldn't actually power it with the engines available at the time now Porsche went back to his old plans for the vk-4501p Tiger time is really short carlotto sour who is Albert speer's Deputy has decided that the tiger prototypes have to be ready for a demonstration on the 20th of April 1942. that's Hitler's birthday so what Porsche does is he dusts off his old leopard designs UPS the power of its engines to 640 horsepower but there was a downside the weight of these new engines meant that the tank exceeded its required limit by at least 12 tons Hitler doesn't even seem to care he's already given the green light for production so by his birthday they have like five prototypes ready to roll so as far as Porsche is concerned all he needs is like a rubber stamp on the test for one of these five tanks and everything's gonna be great much to his surprise it didn't work out that way so right from the beginning it's a disaster they take it off of its transport put it on soft ground and it sinks it didn't go well for Porsche his love of the heavy was too heavy the people from Henshaw are nearby and they offer to Dr Porsche would you like us to use our tank to tow yours out because his is hopelessly stuck he politely declines that it also became apparent that Porsche is ahead of its time design suffered major problems What Porsche is trying to do with his design of VK 4501 is used to introduce a vehicle with a hybridized transmission system the transmission system that's making use of electricity as a means of controlling it and no matter what he does he cannot get the transmission to work it was over engineered and too complex Carl Raba of course his right-hand man identified another problem with the Prototype that it's cool and behaved in such a way that it made the engines lose power to fix this problem the entire engine compartment had to be remodeled and enlarged which is why only five chassis had been completed by the date of the first tests and Porsche's radical new engines required a vast amount of copper copper is in really short supply in the Third Reich Germany itself has no natural reserves of it Germany could not afford the vast copper usage for Porsche's tanks they needed the copper for radios for U-boats for many other forms of war production so the whole idea of installing these vast copper coils into two engines for every new tank feels like a really impractical waste of resources but Hitler didn't give up on his favorite tank so henschel wins the contract for the first Tiger but Hitler still retains his affection for Porsche and he allows Porsche to continue developing his own version of the super happy tank Porsche's tiger and henschel's prototype stay in parallel development until a final set of tests and it's not until that point that it becomes clear that while the Hensel tiger wasn't much better than the Porsche equivalent it was slightly more reliable and easier to build Porsche's tiger was quietly Laid to Rest by then the remaining chassis initially ordered from Porsche had been completed he decides to tape the chassis and find a way to mount Germany's most effective artillery piece the 88 millimeter gun on those chassis and what Hitler wants is the long barrel 88 to be installed into the Tiger's turret but no matter how much they modify the engineers simply can't make the turret big enough now the knee belonging Works was re-tasked with taking 90 poor chassis adding 200 millimeters of frontal armor and surrounding the rear of the tank with an armored box structure that would encase the long-barreled 88. Porsche's tiger is no longer a tank attack held gun is designated the Panzer Jaeger and is nicknamed Ferdinand by Hitler himself in honor of its creator Ferdinand Porsche one of the reasons for the intense pressure to build these vehicles so quickly was that they could take part in Germany's summer of 1943 offensive in Russia the Germans wanted to be able to deploy new heavy armor to give them a hopeful decisive advantage over smaller Soviet tanks the ferdinands were rushed into production ready for operation Citadel in July 1943 where they had a baptism of Fire thank you what Hitler decrees is that the Army group South under General von manstein are going to lead the German fight back on the Eastern front with Germany's new super tanks at the Battle of Kursk from Manchester in a master massive Panzer force of more than 2 000 armored vehicles contrary to popular belief this probably only included 117 tigers all 90 ferdinands and more than 200 brand new pampered tanks the plan is that the German for whelmed the enemy in and fighting vehicles combination of tigers panthers and ferdinands will so thoroughly destroy the enemy that there will be a path of Destruction through which the German armor will penetrate the Soviet lines so that they can exploit this breakthrough Hitler believes these new super heavy tanks will roll over the Soviets breaking huge holes being Unstoppable and restarting the march to Moscow that was Hitler's fantasy the reality was very different the German plan goes badly wrong for three reasons first of all the super tanks are not deployed in sufficient numbers to make a difference on the battlefield Porsche's Ferdinand now they're said to have knocked out 320 Soviet tanks at Kursk for the loss of just 13 ferdinands that's an amazing kill ratio of more than 20 to one but there were 2 700 Soviet armored vehicles at Kurst and the Soviets are churning out 1300 t-34s a month that's the equivalent of three entire German Panda divisions every month so the kill rate for these sukrip tanks was like trying to plug a hole in a dam you could stop up one where but the water would come somewhere else secondly the super tanks are deployed in a way that is inappropriate for the terrain where they're supposed to fight and that's because the area around Kursk is damp it's marshy it's muddy it's crisscrossed by creeks and rivers if there's any open ground it's absolutely peppered with tank traps and more than 400 000 miles so you've got Hitler's new tanks but they're so heavy they're just gonna sink into the mud and none of the bridges over the rivers are strong enough to carry them the tanks were in many ways designed for fighting in Western Europe on better Road systems in actually shorter distances what kirsk shows is the heavy tank is a brilliant piece of Machinery when it fights where it wants to fight but moving it around and dealing with very difficult conditions instantly led to problems [Music] thirdly they simply weren't ready for combat all these super tanks they've been rushed to the front without any adequate testing and not enough training for their Crews they were sent into combat so quickly the Germans only had 20 of the right fuel for them to actually have operations and the supply of ammunition they had at hand was approximately 40 of what they actually would have needed to fight the battle of the 90 ferdinands that are deployed during operation Citadel only 13 of them are lost in combat as a result of enemy action however 29 of them are lost as a result of mechanical failures that's a 30 percent loss rate from mechanical failure by contrast the Soviet tanks were much easier to maintain the Soviets made for them for better choice their tanks weren't as high performance as the German tanks but they were robust broke down far less often had fewer parts that could fail so they gave up a little bit of performance but they made up for it in reliability and ability to fight out of the 117 tigers that have begun the Battle of Kursk only four made it to the final Mythic showdown of prokarovka those four admittedly had a good day they reportedly shot up to 60 tanks in the Soviet Vanguard and they were also helped by three long-barreled Panzer Falls but there's a sting in that tail and it's the Panzer form nobody thinks about the mark IV least of all Adolf Hitler it is the uncelebrated Workhorse of German armored fighting Vehicles during the second World War the truth of the matter is though the pounds are four is the tank that fights for the longest in terms of years it's produced in the highest numbers and it's a more robust reliable tank the Germans could have built many more pounds before so they wanted to but Hitler's obsession with the heavy time means there are diverting resources Hitler and spirit shot down two entire workshops that are intended to produce Panzer Falls effectively what they've done by shutting down two workshops for this nonsense is stifle the production of the Panzer 4 down to eight a month and so as a result the knee belonging Works only constructing 186 pounds of fours in 1942 when it was meant to have produced 1800. so instead of 1800 reliable medium-sized tanks that they're supposed to have for the Battle of curse they've got 90 self-propelled guns 30 of which break down in action this is just no wonder they lost the war is it was not allowed to get back to full production so in the aftermath of course the Ferdinand doesn't just go away they take it back they redesign it a little bit they put some machine guns on it they re-title it the elephant and they send it to Italy but polish hadn't stopped working on Mega tanks yet far from it the fact that henschel had picked Porsche to the tiger contract didn't stop him working on Super tanks he was actively involved in developing the tiger one into this the tiger 2 the King Tiger and originally the turret was of his design but it proved to be impractical however what he did next was to in fact use the same trick it use of the Ferdinand he did away with the turret and replaced it with a single large caliber fixed gun this became known as the jagged tiger this is the the yag tiger absolutely massive 128 millimeter gun over seven meters long an incredibly deadly tank but there are some problems if you take this tank off road the gun is knocked out of alignments and you have to recalibrate before you can open fire more importantly to stop the gun from bouncing up and down and damaging itself there was a big clip that held it in place to come into action somebody has to climb out of that lovely armor and Undo It risking being killed before they even open fire and very very importantly this tank has no turret that means the engine has to be running and the tank able to move to left to right to engage the enemy and the transmission is very very delicate well handled no problems at all get it wrong you stack the transmission what you've got is tens of tons of useless Steel once again Porsche designed a mechanical Marvel that suffered major problems the biggest in May 1943 Adolf Hitler attended the demonstration of a new tank concept devised by Ferdinand Porsche at this stage the tank is just a wooden mock-up but it is absolutely enormous 10 meters long three and a half meters high capable of penetrating the front armor of the Soviet tank at three kilometers away the armor on this vehicle is thicker than the Armor on some warships Porsche calls it the mammoth and it is supposed to be unstoppable Hitler was massively impressed his tank expert Heinz scadarian was not show a Nazi a giant tank and he's going to be impressed unless he's the Nazi's official tank expert charged with overseeing production of panzers and re-establishing Supremacy on the Eastern front he looks at it and goes nope he points out in his Memoirs that this thing would have weighed 200 tons and didn't even have any guns on it to suppress infantry fire this is a flaw that poor should have been aware of because it was that lack of machine guns that endangered the Ferdinand at Kursk so guderian actually says except for me everybody present found the new tank magnificent suffice to say gadarian didn't Arian the tank specialist was overruled space was carved out of the production schedule for Porsche to work on his latest secret project code name it was given which has to be ironic because it was a massive white elephant and the biggest tank ever was Mouse Porsche never let practicality get in the way of his imagination and in response to gudurian criticism he adds a 75 millimeter high explosive gun to the right of the main turret he thought about putting in a machine gun in the Commander's Coppola he even considered putting in a quadruple anti-aircraft gun on the back of the turret but the main thing about this particular tank is its size I'm stood next to a tiger one and it's at least half as tall as I am and it's over six meters long if I bring my other model in you'll realize that this thing is one and a half times larger than the tiger and if we compare it to the sort of tanks that gudurian would have been familiar with in 1939 and his first blitzkrieg then one of these actually fits inside the turret of the mouse like all of Porsche's tanks the plan is to have two twin hybrid electric motors powering the vehicle but even with an aircraft engine powering it it can barely make 19 kilometers per hour that's crawling along less than 12 miles an hour the mouse was Porsche's most impractical design which in history of World War II tanks is quite extraordinary it was so heavy that in the end no bridge in Germany could actually Bear the weight of a mouse opponent so undeterred by this porced then invents a snorkel system for his tanks now the idea for that is that one Mouse will sit on the River Bank trailing this cable under the water which would then power a second mouse driving across the riverbed and one of the mouse's electric motors can be slaved to another and effectively use one stupid tank to drag the other stupid tank underwater from one side of the river to another so that you don't need a bridge never mind the fact that it can only manage a river that's about 20 meters deep do you know what I love about this is this whole stupid snorkel plan they never got the chance to try it because by December 1943 they'd still only ever built one tank prototype basically there's never gonna be a second mouse by a river when you need one by this point Albert Speer had quietly pulled the plug on the whole project despite this the development program somehow staggers on until September 44. by May 1945 as Germany was collapsing two mouse prototypes were thrown into battle in uncompleted form only one had a functioning turret and there are no accounts of it ever having fired a single shot the Soviets capture both prototypes at the end of the war and in an attempt to get one that will actually work they bolt two halves from the two vehicles together and that vehicle is on display in the kubinka tank Museum in Russia Today there's no doubt that the mouse is clearly this joke of a project and it's a joke that's ultimately on the Nazis in the time it took them to make two stupid Mouse tanks the Soviets made around 35 000 t-34s so let that sink in for a moment these are War winning tanks all right they're just winning the war for the other side in retrospect porch was one of the great disastrous for the German war economy he took up massive amounts of resources building vehicles that should not have been built and those that were completed didn't work thankfully for us he squandered Nazi resources at the end of the war Porsche was arrested by the French allegedly for war crimes I mean there was plenty pretext to arrest poor Sean the French could justify easy his arrest Bice also pretty clear that the Rob behind that arrest was not about holding him to any sort of war crimes account it's pretty clear they wanted Porsche to design the French equivalent of the Volkswagen in their Peugeot or Renault factories ultimately Porsche gets saved by his son Ferry raised the 62 000 needed to bail his father out of jail by going to work for the Italian racing company of sustalia making high-powered racing cars with his father Free Ferry began work on the first official Porsche model unveiled in 1948. so lo and behold we have the first car named Porsche the three five six to make the 356 what berry does is to cannibalize pots from the Volkswagen Beetle the engine the steering system and the brakes they all come from the Volkswagen and from this Ferry made something remarkable in June 51 ferries Porsche 356 powered by this modified VW engine won its class in the Le Mans 24-hour race it's an absolutely incredible achievement but his father was not there to see it Ferdinand Porsche died of a stroke on the 30th of January in 1951. Ferry would take all he had learned working alongside his father since 1931 and turn it into the automotive muscle for his cars one of the legacies of porsy's involvement with Daimler Benz both before and during the war is his adoption of this horizontally opposed cylinder design for his engines it's known as a boxer because the opposing cylinders Hammer the hell out of the crankshaft like a prize fighter this is the engine that's going to give the muscle to the Porsche 911 and the Porsche Boxster those iconic cars that are going to make Porsche's name and the history of Porsche tanks has one final host script yes brand Porsche does have one more final fling with the tank of course we never gave up his love of the tank in 1958 he was part of a conglomerate that built the first post-war German tank for the West German Army and it's one of the last projects that Porsche works on before the retirement of its chief engineer Carl rubber in 1965. name of that tank it was the leopard [Music]

Channel: Free Documentary - History

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Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full Documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), History, History Documentaries, Free Documentary History, War Factories, Secret History of World War 2, World War II, WWII, WW 2, Second World War, War Production, War Industry, History of World War 2, Military Production, War Factories Complete Series, War Factories Season 3, War Factories Full Episodes, History Documentary, Porsche, Ferdinand Porsche, Porsche Documentary, Volkswagen

Id: ySTU7fwPDjw

Length: 44min 5sec (2645 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 19 2023