Germany’s BIG cat
The Tiger was conceived as a heavy tank of the type known as ‘breakthrough tanks’. However, development was slow and, having gone through a series of prototypes, two competitors for the contract were identified – one produced by Porsche, the other by Henschel. The Henschel Tiger went into production in August 1942 and production ended two years later, after 1,350 had been built.
One major derivative, the Tiger II, was developed from original, and the others were largely irrelevant. The Tiger certainly fulfilled the ‘heavy’ part of the brief, weighing in at some 56 tons fully loaded. This meant that to cross water obstacles it would require a 60-ton-capacity bridge, which were few and far between. Despite the first 495 Tigers having a built-in snorkel, climbing out of the water onto a progressively more saturated bank negated this accessory.
The simple question of how to move a damaged machine of this weight seems to have been overlooked. It required at least two heavyduty prime movers to haul one Tiger out of a ditch or simply into a position where the repair crews could get to work. Furthermore, German eagerness to get the Tiger into action had prevented the accumulation, not to mention the distribution, of spare parts.
Consequently, when the dense Soviet minefields began to take their toll, basic items such as track pins were unavailable to the maintenance companies. This resulted in the cannibalisation of other damaged Tigers to keep at least some in action. This problem was brought into sharp relief when on the first day of Operation Citadel, 5 July, 13 out of 14 tanks of the Tiger company attached to 19th Panzer Division were put out of action due to mines. Indeed, such were the repair problems faced by AGN’S Tiger Battalion that by 6 July, just the second day of fighting, half of its Tigers were out of commission and a request was sent to the factory in central Germany for 10 transmissions and engines, as well as more basic parts. These were eventually flown in and, on 9 July, the battalion withdrew for repairs.
However, the Tiger was well provided with radio and intercom equipment both for external and internal communications, as well as excellent optics and a good number of vision ports, so an alert commander would have a better awareness of events around him than his Red Army counterpart. Responsibilities for the five-man crew was broken down as commander, gunner, loader, driver and radio operator/hull machine gunner. This is clearly a more sensible arrangement than in the T-34. Internally the
Tiger was considerably more spacious. It was also painted, which spared the crew the danger of injury from flying metal shards when a shell hit the machine, unlike the T-34, the inside of which was bare metal. In the event of a driver being disabled or killed the machine gunner was expected to haul the casualty out of the way and take over – a difficult task given the lack of space. In a Tiger there was more room for the grim but vital task.
As a result of the experience gained at Kursk – where tank-hunting infantry teams worked to attach magnetic mines to the hull of a tank if it was travelling slowly or bogged down – Zimmerit paste was applied to the Tiger (and other tanks) from August 1943 onwards, in order to prevent magnetic mines from attaching.