- CHAPTER 1 -
From late 1942 onwards the German engineers employed in the hard pressed armaments industry produced a remarkable range of armoured fighting vehicles. They were driven by the desperate demands of an insatiable front line which was showing the first warning signs that it might ultimately roll back and consume their homeland in a red tide. The race against time was remorseless, and this ominous situation was compounded by Adolf Hitler who harboured unrealistic expectations that new and improved tank designs were somehow capable of turning back the surge of the Red Army. The weight of Hitler’s expectancy and his unreasonable deadlines placed the engineers and manufacturers under extreme pressure to design, develop and supply new and unproven battlefield technology as quickly as possible. The war in the East was a demanding and remorseless taskmaster which consumed every new offering as soon as it was ready for action, the price of failure was unthinkable and, not surprisingly, this unsettling combination of concerns actually drove the German armaments industry on to some remarkable achievements. Chief among these was the development and deployment of the Panzer Mark V - The Panther.
The Panzer Mark V - The Panther.
Among the many excesses which the Nazi regime condoned was its willingness to embrace the concept of slave labour. The German armaments industry workforce, both willing and enslaved, worked ceaselessly in gloomy war ravaged factories to design, develop and produce an astonishing variety of highly effective armoured fighting vehicles which appeared on the battlefield in an incredibly short period of time. It has often been said that the German armaments industry placed the best possible weapons in the worst possible hands; that is certainly true of the Panther.
Under peacetime conditions a new fighting vehicle would generally be designed, built and tested over a period of three to five years. Between 1941 and 1945 however some very successful designs for armoured fighting vehicles were produced in just 12 months. As war progressed the Red Army received huge volumes of increasingly sophisticated vehicles and weapons and as a result it became imperative that new German vehicles should be brought into action as quickly as possible. Many of the most successful German machines were adaptions of existing vehicles which were modified to produce specialist tank destroyers such as the Jagdpanzer IV and the Nashorn. Other armoured fighting vehicles such as the Tiger and the Panther, were completely designed and built from scratch, these designs were more innovative and, in most respects, more effective, but the hasty development process meant that significant teething problems often remained unsolved. In the case of the Panther the evidence of this hurriedness was evident for all to see. On his way up to the front lines prior to the battle of Kursk SS Panzer Grenadier Hofstetter recalled seeing the new Panther for the first time.
“As we passed the unfamiliar column of Panzers, it was soon obvious that there had been a serious problem with one machine in particular that was reduced to a burnt out wreck with no sign of any enemy activity. We later learnt that this was the Panther – Guderian’s problem child!”
Heinz Wilhelm Guderian was a German general during World War II. He was a pioneer in the development of armored warfare, and was the leading proponent of tanks and mechanization in the Wehrmacht. Germany’s panzer forces were raised and organized under his direction as Chief of Mobile Forces. During the war, he was a highly successful commander of panzer forces in several campaigns, became Inspector-General of Armored Troops, rose to the rank of Generaloberst, and was Chief of the General Staff of the Heer in the last year of the war.
The omens pointed towards dismal failure, but against heavy odds, the Panther gradually gained a fearsome reputation and eventually produced a legacy which shaped the face of tank design in the post war era. The Panther’s excellent combination of firepower and mobility produced a fighting machine which has frequently been hailed as one of the best tank designs of World War II. It has been estimated that every Panther deployed accounted for, on average, five allied tanks and as many as nine Russian tanks.
The statistics are unproven and in reality it may well be the case that the Panther was actually a very expensive failure which drew much needed resources away from the real requirements of the Panzertruppen. At the time it was strongly argued, by Guderian and others, that what the hard pressed front line troops really needed was to a high volume of reliable main battle tanks in the shape of the Mark IV F2, a machine which could at least attain parity with the T-34. There remains the strong argument that the decision to develop the Panther was a wrong option, especially as the problems caused by the poor quality components used in the final drive were never overcome. This serious flaw made the Panther highly susceptible to breakdowns which were so frequent as to be almost a certainty. These catastrophic mechanical failures were particularly common during the long road marches which became increasingly numerous as the war progressed and the Panthers had to be rushed from place to place. Many of the repairs required, particularly those on the final drive, were very difficult and frequently could not be managed at divisional workshops and required the vehicle being returned to army depots far behind the lines. On the retreat it was not always possible to recover the broken down vehicles and this led to many, otherwise salvageable, Panthers having to be destroyed.
Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich, Albert Speer, inspects a Panther tank. The vehicle has already received a factory coating of Zimmerit anti-magnetic paste.
The other principal disadvantage of the Panther lay in its comparatively weak side armour which made it highly vulnerable to attack from any direction other than head on. As a result of the poor ammunition stowage design, the tank was also highly susceptible to “brewing up” when hit. Taken together these negative aspects of the Panther are the main reasons why the Panther has not attained the legendary status of the Tiger I which was much loved by its crews.
Like the Tiger, the development of the Panther resulted from the Wehrmacht’s unpleasant surprise encounter with the Soviet T-34 during Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, in June 1941. During the first weeks of Barbarossa, the men of the Panzertruppen repeatedly encountered the T-34/76 medium tank. Although in short supply, the T-34 made a quick and lasting impression on the German armoured forces who were shocked to be confronted with this formidable vehicle with its near perfect combination of speed and mobility, rugged reliability, sloped armour protection and firepower. As a result of numerous adverse encounters with the T-34, especially the battering sustained by the 4th Panzer division at Mtsensk on 4th October 1941, Colonel General Heinz Guderian, leading Panzergruppe 2 in Army Group Centre, requested the establishment of a Commission of Enquiry into the relative strengths of the tank armies on the Eastern Front.
The original T-34 Model 1940 - recognizable by the low-slung barrel of the L-11 gun below a bulge in the mantlet housing its recoil mechanism. This pre-production A-34 prototype vehicle has a complex single-piece hull front.
Although Guderian suggested simply copying the T-34, this proposal was rejected and the report of the enquiry instead recommended that the main attributes of the T-34 be incorporated into a new German built machine. The main points which were desirable in the new design the T-34 were its excellent main armament which was capable of firing both high velocity anti-tank rounds and a reasonably effective high explosive shell , well sloped armour and a highly effective suspension design with wide tracks which gave good cross country mobility.
A page from the Pantherfibel the crew manual published in 1944 demonstrating graphically how to combat the T-34 visually illustrating the weak spots (in black) as aiming points.
The outcome of Hitler’s itervention in the debate was the decision to produce a brand new medium tank – the Panther. Hitler however demanded a crash building programme and as soon as the new machine was off the drawing board and into production, the Panther underwent a complex and difficult development cycle which included overcoming problems with the vehicle’s transmission, steering, main gun, turret and fuel pump. Despite having to contend with these and a host of other issues the first 200 Panthers were nonetheless readied for participation in the Wehrmacht’s 1943 summer offensive in the East. The Panther then saw action from mid-1943 to the end of the European war in 1945. It was intended as a counter to the T-34, and to replace the Panzer III and Panzer IV. However a remorseless allied bombing campaign meant that production did not reach the necessary levels and Panther formations served alongside those equipped with the Mark IV and the heavier Tiger tanks until the end of the war.