Why the "Hetzer"? Why not Stugs?

hello everyone we are today at the german panther museum and this is director ralph hart hello and we'll talk about why the heads are in the first place small question big answer so shall i give a broad overview how it came into this existence yeah basically what what is the very beginning basically i mean i have my own theory of thesis so basically it's about the mobility of anti-tank guns yeah yeah the the tactical okay so we should start with um anti-tank guns on tank bases first of all so probably yeah um so as you can see here maybe on the screen i don't know exactly we're here in the area of the tank destroyers in the panzer museum so over the course of the war the the turreted tanks in the wehrmacht lost their big part of the of the armored force and the tanks without a turret the so-called panzer yiga or jagdpanzer or stormgeschitzer made the the bigger part of the of the force um first of all the names jacques panzer and panzeriga that would be the hunting tank or the the tank hunter are synonymous in german they use it all the time both words uh without without a real difference there's no there's no official use for both words so if in this video we use tank destroyer that's that's pretty much it um we should add that panzer jaeger was also the name for all anti-tank troops correct at one point that that's always before it was panzer up there and i think in 1940 they changed it to panzerka yeah so it's it's a bit muddled up it's it's a perfect example for how the wehrmacht is not really structured in these things um so there's no need to to maybe we one day find the the last source document where everything is cleared up but at this point and if you ask the the people from then they used it in both ways without difference so it's okay um the main idea is that um a tank without a turret is easier to produce it's cheaper and the the main advantage is you can put a bigger gun in it because you don't have the turret that restricts the the caliber because the gun needs to have space to roll back when it fires so if there's no turret you have more space throwback so you can mount a bigger caliber that's the basic idea the big disadvantage of course is you have no turret seems simple but that's that's really really important because um the turret gives the normal tank if you call a main battle tank or battle tank or just tank it doesn't matter the turret is the the thing that gives the tank the flexibility on the battlefield to react fast to to in german it's a wonderful word wilkin to have effectiveness in the battlefield to destroy things it's it's that's this easy so the turret is the the main advantage of the tank if the turret is taken away all the advantages i just said come into play but you lose the flexibility so tank destroyers are basically weapon systems that need to fire from an ambush ambush situation they have to wait for their for their for their opponent they have to wait for their appraiser to say then fire and then they basically are just talking basically here then they need to get the hell out of there yeah because they if they encounter a tank with a turret and they don't destroy it in the first place or the the tank uh has um has uh uh comrades with him um they will be surrounded they will be certain they will be um destroyed in a matter of minutes so a tank destroyer always has to fire from an ambush position and then get away so that's important for me because the german world panzer jiga tank hunter suggests power suggests fighting fighting power on the battlefield um and that was meant to be it should it was intended to make the the soldiers in the tank and the the tank destroyers feel better basically they had the weaker weapons they had the bigger caliber if they hit they hit hard but they were in the weaker position tactically speaking so that's the the all-around effect for the tank destroyers in the german case tank destroyers were very attractive because when the tidal war shifted and they were more on the defensive tank destroyers were fitting for that profile uh if you're fighting more on the defensive attack destroyer is a good weapon as i said it's cheaper easier to produce and it does the the job it does what it is supposed to do so the germans um place more importance on these on these um vehicles and um in the first place they mainly transfer the sturm geschwitzer the assault guns into forms that are now tank destroyer in the first place they were intended to give indirect fire to support the infantry explosive damage then they get bigger longer guns intended to destroy tanks um so we have now the the strung shoots are very good designs that work in that are working very good um but ls air force is a factor too so when the allied bombing attacks started to grind down the factories it was ever more difficult to produce from gujarati and around november 1943 the um the main facility to produce strong bishops was hit so hard that the production practically ceased so the germans were in need to construct something new so they looked around what do we have to disposal um regarding factories and of course they looked to bohemia because there were all the factories slightly out of reach from great britain so the idea was okay let's produce there main problem was the stumblishes at this time fitted in the 24 ton category so you needed cranes that could lift 24 ton chassis to move it around in the factory the bohemia in german it's the burmese mirror machine fabric so the bmm bohemian i don't know i can't afford i i don't know so it's um basically in what later czechoslovakia and before um they only have 16 ton cranes they just can lift house in the in the category of 16 tons um oh that's incorrect um that's what that's number it will come out to um they haven't cranes that can lift beneath the 24 ton category that's more precise i don't know what their limit was but it was beneath 24 tons so they couldn't build the stonegashes even if they had the plants the blueprints they couldn't build it so what to do they thought and they took their own old design from the 30s um the well-proven um actual ict the the main czechoslovakian tank that worked very well which was used by the vermont for a long time which was very proven that's important it runs smoothly it was a very good design the hull at least because all the upper parts were outdated at this point but the hull was perfect still so they made what the germans made best uh they thought okay which parts do we have and what can we improvise so they took the 38t hull put on a 7.5 centimeter anti-tank the basic main anti-tank in the germans used on practically everything where they could um and then just put a small armor chassis on it a small armor casemate so we have basically an old tank with let's say at this point run-of-the-mill middle class good working anti-tank gun and there's a very strange armor on top because what they did was to make the the front armor very thick um very thick six centimeters that's very okay for this for the time but the side and the back are very thin paper thin basically it's just against hand guns and uh splinters so what you've got here is again the basic tank destroyer design very hard at the front to be um ready to take one or two hits when you fire from the airbrush and then had to leave but from the sides it's just paper it's just um decoration could have been open as well i mean the the american tank resource were top open sometimes the germans all the time experimented with open designs by necessity so actually it's kind of a luxury in 1943 that they at least got paper thin armor but they got it so we got this combination of old old hull modern gun and strange armor um the thing is what they had to do to make the the tons the weight of the vehicle load to get them on the cranes is um they needed to build um to to build it small that the the armored space was small so the overall weight was not so high and so the vehicle is very very cramped inside we have three people sitting in a row um the gunner the driver and the loader and the the commanders actually separated in a small niche behind all of them it's a very strange setting it's very hard to operate and that's the next problem i didn't touch that field at all as of yet when you have no turret the team in the vehicle has to work together even better than an intang tank is a very complicated thing um based on computer games people often think it's easy to operate very complicated i know you you put your finger on that oftentimes but we cannot stress it enough um viet numbered around which name i just forgot sorry described it as the belay in the tank everybody has a very complex job to do to make a show that works and the communication is incredibly complicated um and we're talking now about in our days about functioning headsets where you actually hear something and this time it's another matter um so in this case the tank the driver has a more an even more important job because he has to to direct the the hull of the vehicle at at least the right direction so he has to think more and tactical terms not just driving terms tank drivers have to do that too but the tank destroyer driver has to do it more and even more and the the um the the team corporation is even more important yes um so that's basically what they built um what we now have is it's not a glass gun um it is armored but it's basically a thing that hits hard from an ambush situation and then runs away and it worked pretty well as far as i know um the crews and the infantry at the size was very um very content with it it worked very well it's it's not a master design um the the what the headset is now based on the computer games where it got this pop cultural status headsets gone ahead saying yeah they had so it's kind of unexplicable um but at the time it was a working um vehicle and the most important thing is or the most interesting thing is the germans actually thought about building far more of them in 45 46 in the ongoing years then the bigger the bigger cats that are always on our mind when we're talking about the late wehrmacht confronted with the with it with the ever-changing title of war at the end with the masses of medium tanks from all sides um there are evidences in the sources the germans thought about building nearly exclusively these things in 4 45 if the war would have been longer most interesting at least partly on diesel bases then at last so that's the rough walkthrough through the heads-up i should add here a bit the 75 millimeter gun which is mounted here if you have it in the regular and the tank situation is about 1 500 kilogram or 1 425 kilogram and you can't tactically move this around anymore oh it's well you need not easily at least yeah you need all the eight guys and they are not really well protected yeah yeah that's correct the the guns get bigger and there's just the need to get the guns on motorized vehicles yeah and if you're on a motorized vehicle and you are supposed to coordinate yourself with tanks and and half tracks you need tracks and if this situation's there you can at least slap on some armor yes right yeah that's that's a wonderful evolution you can see in the german army from the from the early anti-tank guns then the improvisations and then the the the the real tank destroyers and then the the later tank destroyers that are basically the the essence the distilled essence of the of the former angus throats it's it's very evolutionary yes there's actually uh i think one one regulation but it's it's like the tiger fever similar in the comic and they have like the early anti-tank and two guys and they run and smiled and the medium and they're like painting and with the heavy one it's like and then finally with the with the 88 it's like we can't move anything yeah and we are we tend to think about flat ground and stuff like that but normally you are working between hedges on muddy ground it's always the worst condition for soldiers so you have to think from the worst situation and they exactly knew that there's a point where you can't move this stuff around anymore correct that's basically that's that's how assault guns were born because the the experience that led to the idea of the assault gun in the first place what the first world war exactly the western front not the eastern front with the beams creek but the western front so yeah it all comes back in circles okay thank you very much my pleasure and thank you for watching and see you next time bye

Channel: Military History not Visualized

Views: 359,347

Keywords: Hetzer, Jagdpanzer 38 (t), Jagdpanzer 38, Why the Hetzer?

Id: 8PbzVU2vqdI

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 02 2021