• It is 1941 and the opportunity is given to you to design/develope a Tank that is fitting the need for German Wehrmacht.
    Choose a Tank Body and explain what you would have done with it.
    What parts would you have exchanged.
    Or how your concept of Tank would have been.
    To limit it a little.

    -For upgrading a Tank series you can only use the bodys from Panzer I till Tiger early and early Stadium of the developed Panther. (meaning no other Panther series or later build Tanks such as Tiger II etc.)

    • For new desgined Tanks say:
      The body is similar to a Tiger II tank i.e. so we might get an idea on the look of your Tank.

    It is for fun.
    Thank you for your posts.


  • Afternoon Aquitas.
    I would have been happy to mount the L43/75ml AT gun to the MkIV chassis earlier than they did. That would have proved more than adequate in combating the early T34s and the M3s and later, the M4s. The Mk IV was versatile enough, without the complications of the bigger engined and over engineered MkV and VI. Not as thirsty either, which meant a lot to Germany, without its own sufficient fuel production.

    I know that is not what you asked, but I feel that was all Germany needed in 41.


  • @wittmann:

    Afternoon Aquitas.
    I would have been happy to mount the L43/75ml AT gun to the MkIV chassis earlier than they did. That would have proved more than adequate in combating the early T34s and the M3s and later, the M4s. The Mk IV was versatile enough, without the complications of the bigger engined and over engineered MkV and VI. Not as thirsty either, which meant a lot to Germany, without its own sufficient fuel production.

    I know that is not what you asked, but I feel that was all Germany needed in 41.

    You answered pretty good. You explained why you would stick to a Panzer IV and what kind of an upgrade you would have had in mind.
    Thank you for your answer!

    I feel too the Need of an upgraded Version of a Panzer IV.
    It had a very good engine and was easier to maintain then a Tiger for example.


  • Thank you. Hoped I had not misunderstood.


  • Throw in an improved glacis, improved driver vision, and the removal of the round traps on the turret and I could get behind this idea. I don’t know what type of latches the Nazis used on their tank hatches. Since so much of the IV’s armor was hatches I would want to know if they needed improvement. Loose hatch latches was one of the things I was trained to look for when getting up close and personal with an armored vehicle. No use getting my guys killed because someone defeated the armor with an e-tool.


  • I’m not sure I’m understanding fully the design question that’s being asked, so I won’t try to come up with an answer of my own at this point, but I just want to draw attention to the fact that any particular Tank Turret A can’t necessarily be combined with any particular Tank Hull B because you have to take into account the diameter of the turret ring.  Tank guns of a particular caliber require a turret of a particular size (in order to accomodate the recoil), which in turn requires a sufficiently large turret ring.  The problem is that some tank chassis are too small for certain turret rings.  That’s precisely why the Americans had to create the M3 Grant/Lee tank as an intermediary stopgap design between the M2 Medium tank and the M4 Sherman.  When the Americans designed the M2, its 37mm gun (equivalent to what the Panzer III carried) was considered adequate.  The Panzer IV, with its 75mm gun, immediately rendered the M2 obsolete.  The obvious solution would have been to keep the M2’s hull and simply slap a new 75mm gun turret on top of it to replace the original 37mm-gun turret…but that proved impossible because the M2 hull was too small to take the enlarged turret ring the 75mm gun required.  The Americans realized that they would have to design a completely new hull to accommodate the 75mm turret, which would take time.  So as a short-term solution, the Americans opted to keep the basic M2 hull, keep the 37mm gun, but add a 75mm gun to the tank by fitting it in a WWI-style sponson added to the side of the hull.


  • You may relax CWOMarc and come up with your own thoughts to it.

    You have to see your self in Charge of the German Waffenamt a weapon development department.

    Go out and let us know what you would have thought would be a better solution.

    Example:

    You see the benfits of a P IV but suggest that it should come with a greater turret?, fine.
    And wider tracks like the Panther had?, fine.
    And so on. Explain what you see should have came into Production and should have seen Action.
    Thank you.


  • Given a free hand, I’d say that the best addition to Germany’s tank arsenal in 1941 would have been a clone of the T-34…and by “a clone of the T-34”, I don’t mean the Panther, I mean a real clone.  The Panther was directly inspired by the T-34 and copied many of its key features (such as the Christie suspension system), but Germany made the mistake of “improving” on the T-34 because they felt they could do better technically and because their high standards in military hardware (the “blued metal and polished walnut” tradition) was offended by the T-34’s crude construction.  This was a major error because they ended up with a complex tank that was slow to manufacture and difficult to maintain in the field.  A German T-34 clone designed for simple production and upkeep would have been a much better investment because Germany could have cranked it out in much larger quantities than the Panther and kept it operating in the field much more easily.


  • In case you ask me, I would stick to the Panzer IV. The big issue the Germans had was too many different spare parts and to maintain too many different Tank types in the field. The supply system got over stretched and finally broke down.

    I don’t think any proud German would endorse the idea suggested by Marc, to clone a T-34. Its just against human nature. Its like I should buy a car made in Sweden, it just wont happen.


  • @Narvik:

    I don’t think any proud German would endorse the idea suggested by Marc, to clone a T-34. Its just against human nature. Its like I should buy a car made in Sweden, it just wont happen.

    I can understand that, and under peacetime conditions this would be a decisive consideration.  In wartime, however, pragmatism sometimes has to take precedence over fine craftsmanship.  The Wehrmacht’s technical fussiness over its weapons was in some ways admirable, but it also made efficient mass production more difficult than necessary.  For example I’ve heard stories – whose authenticity I can’t verify – of seats being ripped out of fighter planes at the factory because the upholstering didn’t meet the quality specifications laid down by the Luftwaffe.

    British gunsmiths (and army officers) shared with their German counterparts the “blued metal and polished walnut” tradition which I mentioned previously, but after the Dunkirk disaster they quickly discarded this tradition as a romantic peacetime extravagance.  The results were the Sten Mark II, a much simplified version of the rather traditional-looking Mark I, and then the even cruder Mark III, which is widely regarded as the ugliest gun ever used by the British armed forces.  The British didn’t care that the Mark III looked like a piece of scrap iron; what mattered was that it worked, and that its simple all-metal stamped-and-welded construction meant that it could be cranked out in vast quantities.  From the point of view of the enemy soldier who receives a career-ending bullet, it doesn’t make a lot of difference whether it was shot from a finely crafted rifle or a crudely assembled submachine gun.


  • I take acception to one of your points Marc. I care what I’m shot with. Were it a fatal shot I would prefer a head shot frm any of tye finely crafty 50 cal sniper rifles out there. For wounding I want a cheap pellet gun. One with a leaky seal.


  • If I’m designing a new tank in 1941, my assumption is that it won’t be used in large quantities until 1942. Designing the tank itself would take time, as would getting factories ready to produce the tank. Therefore I need to ask: what kind of tank would Germany need in 1942 and onward?

    The perfect tank should have the following traits:

    • Mechanically simple, reliable, and easy to produce
    • Sloping armor
    • Able to destroy a T-34 at a range at which the T-34 cannot respond
    • Reasonably fast
    • Reasonably fuel efficient
    • Wide treads to spread out the weight on muddy roads

    There probably wasn’t any WWII era tank which deserved a perfect score on all the above listed criteria. But one tank which would have come the closest to doing so would have been the E-50. The E-50 was part of Germany’s planned Entwicklung series of tanks. These tanks were intended to replace all previous German tank designs. Unlike those previous designs, E-Series tanks would be mechanically simple and easy to manufacture.

    The E-50 could travel a very respectable 60 km/hour. It was to be equipped with an 88 mm gun. This was the same gun used by the Tiger II (King Tiger)–a gun which proved devastating against nearly every type of enemy tank (including T-34s). The E-50 weighed about as much as a Panther or Tiger I. The Panther was only slightly more expensive to produce than a Panzer IV. The E-50 would have been considerably less expensive to produce than a Panther. The E-50 came equipped with an advanced rangefinder, making it more accurate than its predecessors. It employed a narrow turret. The narrowness of the turret allowed for an increase in turret armor and a decrease in turret weight.

    Had large numbers of this type of tank been added to Germany’s anti-Soviet armies in 1942, the result would have been potentially war-changing.


  • @The11HP20:

    I take acception to one of your points Marc. I care what I’m shot with. Were it a fatal shot I would prefer a head shot frm any of tye finely crafty 50 cal sniper rifles out there. For wounding I want a cheap pellet gun. One with a leaky seal.

    Fair enough.  I can see your point because I once had the interesting experience of accidentally shooting myself in the chest with a .22 caliber bullet, with no ill effects other than a mild bruise.  A friend of mine had set up an improvised pistol range in his basement and had invited me to do some target shooting with him.  His setup was rather rudimentary: rather than using sandbags (or whatever is normally used for this purpose) as a back-stop for the bullets, he had installed an ordinary wooden plank.  Most of the time it worked adequately, but on one occasion it didn’t: the bullet I fired hit the plank, bounced off, flew back across the room, hit me in the sternum and dropped to the floor.  I kept it as a souvenir.  I later learned that Admiral Kimmel had a similar experience during the attack against Pearl Harbor, when a spent Japanese .50 caliber bullet crashed through his office window and smacked him in the chest, leaving an ugly blotch on his white dress uniform.  I don’t think he kept it as a souvenir because his reaction was to say, “It would have been merciful had it killed me.”


  • That’s too funny. I had the same thing happen with a pellet gun. I shot the bottom of a plasitc 55 gallon drum. The pellet came back and hit my shin. Just in case I was peer reviewed I decided to aim at the same spot and try it again. That pellet hit me a few inches from where the first did. After that I felt too stupid to collect souvenirs.

    Although somewhat painful to hear if you put yourself into Kimmel’s shoes, that is one of my favorite quotes.

    Back onto topic though. Tanks are cool.

    P.S. Wow. Just caught my typo. Make that I take exception.

  • 2024 2023 '22

    @aequitas-et-veritas

    I would definitely choose the E-series. I assume that the tank design will be submitted early enough to allow for the beginning of mass production and for several Panzer Divisions to be equipped with these tanks by 1941 before Operation Barbarossa.

    As much as I would like to choose the E-100, it seems to take too much fuel and is too slow, even if it is nearly invincible.

    So I would choose either the E-50, the intended replacement of the Tiger 1 or the Panther, or the E-75, the replacement of the Tiger 2. However, these units would have been much cheaper and easier to produce, getting rid of much of the noncombat problems the earlier tanks had.

    Honestly, I think Germany, combined with good decisions (such as not declaring war on the US and having a better strategy), could have won the war with the full group of E-series tanks. I am unsure though why the E-10 and E-25 would need to exist, as both serve the same roles. I think only one of them would have been good enough. Similarly, I think only either the E-50 or E-75 is necessary. The E-100, though, as good as it is, would not have been practical.

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