Dwight and Borepatch have both weighed in on this one already, but as (I think) the only one of us who has actually visited the Tank Museum in Bovington, I though I would weigh in as well.
This is not a bad list, and since it’s production tanks only, it doesn’t include the the execrable Valiant. However, I think you have to bump one of those five out to include this:
That is the Italian Carro Veloce L3 flamethrower tank. A two man tank just over four feet high, today it’s been retroactively reclassified as a “tankette.” At the back right, you can barely see the edge of the 133 gallon tank it towed behind it on a two-wheel trailer. It deserves a place on this list due to the nasty tendency to roast the crew alive due to leaks in the gasoline lines.
So which of the five in that video come out? I’m going to say the Jagdtiger. Not because anything in the video is wrong: it was a tremendously resource-hungry tank that required another parallel supply chain for its massive 128mm gun. However, that wasn’t clear in 1942, when it was first conceived, or 1943, when the bulk of development occurred. The main concern was dealing with massive numbers of Soviet tanks on the Eastern front, and where heavier Soviet tanks like the KV-85 were just starting to come online. In that environment, making the tradeoffs necessary to build that massive tank-killer probably seemed more justified in 1943, and the first Jagdtiger’s were delivered in January 1944. And even for the first few months after Normandy, there probably would have been no way to reclaim the material already allocated in the supply chain to build them. But any of them built after, say, September, were indeed a bad use of resources.
In Tigers in the Mud, Panzer commander Otto Carius noted other flaws with Jagtiger (which are called “Hunting Tigers” in the English translation of the book), one of the biggest of which was the tendency of 128mm cannon to be jolted out of alignment during movement, which meant it had to be put into travel lock before maneuvers. Worse still, the travel lock “had to be removed from the outside during contact with the enemy!”
Tags: Bovington Tank Museum, Carro Veloce L3 flamethrower tank, Germany, Italy, Jagdtiger, Military, Otto Carius, tanks, video, World War I, World War II
“It drives like a crappy 1940’s Russian tractor” !!!!
Priceless !!
Good one. I agree with the Jagdtiger being on the list, they’d have been better off making more Tiger 2s. But your main objection to the Panther seems to be not about the tank, but about the lack of training crew members received. That’s not a flaw in the tank, but a flaw elsewhere. While early units had final drive failures with few miles, they resolved that quickly by using helical cut gears for the final gear before the drive sprocket. These early failures greatly reduced the “average miles between failure” metric, and later units were much more reliable.
Sorry the Panther was worse than what the Japanese, Italians and French developed, not to mention the famed US Tommy Cooker, the Sherman?