Jagdtiger Tiger Tank Panzerjager Jagdpanzer VI

Panzerkampfwagen V:

PzKpfw V:
was a tank fielded by Germany in World War II that served from mid-1943 to the end of the European war in 1945. It was intended as a counter to the Red Army T-34, and to replace the Panzer III and IV, though it served along with them as well as the heavier PzKpfw VI until the end of the war. The Panther’s Very good combination of firepower, mobility, and protection served as a benchmark for other nations’ late war and immediate post-war panzer designs and it is frequently regarded as one of the best tank designs of World War 2.Until 1944, it was designated as the Panzer V Panther and had the ordnance inventory designation of Sd.Kfz. 171. On 27, February 1944, Hitler ordered that the Roman numeral V be deleted from the designation. The Panzer V was a direct response to the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks. First encountered on 23 June, 1941, the T-34 outclassed the existing Panzer III and IV. At the insistence of General Heinz Guderian, a special Panzerkommision was dispatched to the Eastern Front to assess the Soviet tanks. Among the features of the Soviet tank considered most significant were the sloping armor, which gave much improved shot deflection and also increased the effective armor thickness against penetration, the wide track, which improved mobility over soft ground, and the 76.2 mm gun, which had good armor penetration and fired an effective high-explosive round. Daimler-Benz (DB) and Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG (MAN) were given the task of designing a new thirty to thirty-five-ton tank, designated VK30.02, by April 1942 . The  design was a direct homage to the Russian T-34. It resembled the T-34 hull and turret form. DB’s design used a leaf spring suspension whereas the T-34 originally used coil springs. The DB turret was smaller than that of the MAN design and had a smaller turret ring which was the result of the narrower hull required by the leaf spring suspension. The main advantages of the leaf springs over a torsion bar suspension were a lower hull silhouette and a simpler shock dampening design. Like the T34, the DB design had a rear drive sprocket. Unlike the Soviet T-34, the DB design had a three-man turret crew: panzer commander, gunner, and loader. But as the planned L/70 75mm gun was much longer and heavier than the T-34’s, mounting it in the Daimler-Benz turret was difficult. Plans to reduce the turret crew to two men to stem this problem were eventually dropped. The MAN design had more conventional German ideals with the transmission and drive sprocket in the front and a turret placed centrally in reference to the hull. It had a petrol based engine and eight torsion-bar suspension axles per side. Due to the torsion bar suspension, the MAN Panzer V was higher and had a wider hull than the DB plan. The slightly earlier, Henschel designed PzKpfw VI heavy tank’s use of a “slack track” Christie style pattern of large road wheels without return rollers for the upper run of track, and with the main road wheels being overlapping and interleaved in layout, were design concepts broadly imitated with the MAN model for the Panzer V. The two designs were reviewed over a period from January 1942 to March 1942. Reichminister Todt, and later, his replacement Albert Speer, both recommended the DB design to Hitler because of its several advantages over the initial MAN Panzer V plan. However, at the final submission, MAN improved their Panzer V design, having learned from the DB proposal, and a review by a special commission appointed by Hitler in May 1942 ended up selecting the MAN plan. He then approved this decision after reviewing it overnight. One of the principal reasons given for this decision was that the MAN model used an existing turret designed by Rheinmetall-Borsig while the DB design would have required a brand new turret to be designed and produced, substantially delaying the commencement of production. The MAN Panzer plan also had better ability to handle water hazards, easier gun maintenance and higher mobility due to better suspension, wider tracks, and a larger fuel tank.  A mild steel prototype Panzer was producedby September 1942 and, after testing at , was accepted. It was put into immediate production. The start of manufacturing was delayed, however, mainly because there were too few specialized machine tools needed for the machining of the hull. Finished Panzer tanks were produced in December and suffered from reliability breakdowns as a result of this production haste. The demand for this tank was so high that the production was soon expanded beyond MAN to include Daimler-Benz, Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen-Hannover (MNH) and Henschel and Sohn in Kassel. The first panzer tank production target was 250 per month at MAN. This was increased to 600 per month in January 1943. Despite determined efforts, this figure was never reached due to disruption by Allied bombing, manufacturing bottlenecks, and other difficulties. Panzerkanpfwagen V tank production in 1943 averaged 148 per month. In 1944, it averaged 315 a month (3,777 having been built that year), peaking with 380 in July and ending around the end of March 1945, with at least 6,000 built in total.