The Paper Tiger.

German tank design doctrine starting in the early 40’s was dependent on the belief that any armored vehicle made would be rendered obsolete by the enemies developments within a matter of two years at best, and at the time they were being proven completely correct. For example, a Panzer III F made in 1940 would be completely overmatched in all ways by a M4A1 from 1942. Therefore, in order to be able to keep ahead of the enemy in the technological arms a replacement for each of their armored vehicles was needed to be in the process of design while the current generation was being put out into the field. In the case of the legendary Tiger I, that meant that a replacement breakthrough tank was already being designed even as production spooled up.

What this meant was that the already formidable Tiger was to be replaced by a tank of even more power, a tank with incomparable armor and armament that seeked to be like the Tiger before it the most powerful tank on the field of battle. Building off of the Tiger’s formidable reputation, this entirely new design would become known simply as the Sonderkraftfahrzeug Panzer VI Tiger Ausf. B, or more commonly referred to as the Konigstiger.

The Tiger is arguably the most well-known tank by popular culture, with all of its appearances in film and high kill ratios bolstering it immensely. But the casual tank enthusiast knows that the tiger had a big brother, and that big brother could wipe the floor with its little sibling. While the King Tiger does not get the popular exposure of the Tiger, those that know about it usually think of it as the biggest, baddest, best tank that Nazi Germany ever made. I remember way back in the day, about 5 years ago, I convinced a friend to play World of Tanks simply by telling him that he could drive a King Tiger.

So the King Tigers reputation among most people who know of it is that it is the biggest, baddest, best tank of WWII. So the question then is simple. Is it? Or is it a paper tiger.

Well, as far as being the Biggest, baddest, best tank of WWII it only checks two of those three boxes. Let’s find out which ones.

Armor.

On paper, the King Tiger easily takes the cake for having the best armor of any vehicle of the war. From the front, it has a impressive upper plate of 150mm sloped at 50 degrees from vertical. Already, 150mm is the thickest plate of armor mounted on any tank chassis of the war, but with the slope it amounts to 235mm of effective armor, more than double the thickness of Tiger one and 100 extra mm over the Panthers front plate. The lower glacis is still immense, with 100mm at 50 degrees it is 1.5 times the effective thickness of the Tigers front. Add in the chance of ricochet from the sloping of the armor and the front of the King Tiger is virtually impenetrable.

But from the sides, it is a completely different story. The lower hull is 80mm at zero degrees, the same thickness as the tiger’s side plate. The upper hull is 80mm with a 30 degree slope, but that only amounts to 90 mm of effective armor. We’ll see what this means for the tank a little later.

The rear is the same, 80mm of armor sloped at 30 degrees.

Early tanks used what is called the Porsche turret, named so because it was created by Krupp for Porsches submission for the design. This turret, as far as armor is concerned, is flat out bad. The front is 100 mm thick, with a curved plate. Rounds impacting the top of the plate will ricochet off, but rounds striking the bottom will be deflected down into the 40mm top hull armor or into the turret ring, crippling or destroying the tank. Rounds that hit square on from a sufficient cannon (17 pounder, 85mm, or 76mm) will have little issue penetrating, especially considering that there is no mantlet over the front of the turret, and no spalling shield behind. Because of these factors the Porsche turrets front is less well protected than the tiger tank that came before it. The sides and rear are 80mm sloped at 30 degrees, but there is another glaring issue. The commander’s cupola bulges out from the left side of the turret, and here the turret does not even retain the 30 degree slope, being a flat 80mm thick.

The later ‘Henschel’ turret is far better. The front of the turret is more narrow, with a flat piece of armor 185mm thick, and more of it being protected by the 200mm thick mantlet. The turret itself is wider, so the commanders bulge is removed, allowing for consistent 80mm of armor on the sides and rear inclined at 30 degrees for 90mm effective thickness.

Now, before we go too much further and discuss the armor quality, let’s just discuss the Tiger II’s armor in a purely theoretical on paper context.

Now, the front hull is impenetrable by any British or American weapons at the time exempting the 17 pounder APDS, which could penetrate the lower glacis provided that it could hit it (but recall that it can’t hit a 2x2 meter square from 1000 yards). The Russians have a bit of a better time, with the 122mm and 100mm being able to pen the lower plate from roughly a kilometer, but even then I have to wonder. See, because of the bullet drop at range it will be hitting that lower plate at a more pronounced angle than the 50 degree constructional slope, and that will make the armor all the harder to penetrate. From the front it seems that the Tiger II maintains the Tiger 1’s invulnerability to all weapons at the time of its introduction.

But from the side we run into a problem, which is that the King Tigers side armor is not really any better than the Tiger 1’s , and that gunnery has caught up to it. The 76mm gun of the Sherman’s and Hellcats and M10’s (which is 3-inch, but functionally identical) can pen a King Tigers side flat on from 2 kilometers away. It can pen it at a 30 degree slope from a kilometer. The 85mm of the T-34/85 can pen from a kilometer and a half flat on, and about a kilometer if angled at 30 degrees. And the 17 pounder can do the job from nearly 3 kilometers flat on, and 2 if angled at 30 degrees. And the main problem here is that when the King Tiger starts running into these army’s the guns I just mentioned are getting fairly common. When the King Tiger runs into the British in Normandy, one in four Sherman’s has a 17 pounder. When the King Tiger debuts on the eastern front in august of 1944, there are literally thousands of T-34/85’s. When it attacks the US army in the Ardennes at the Battle of the Bulge, 1 in three Sherman’s have the 76, to say nothing of all the tank destroyer battalions.

So strangely we have the situation where even though the King Tiger has better armor than its predecessor, it is a more vulnerable tank at the time of its introduction. The old tales of a single Tiger being hit by over 250 shells and surviving are far harder for a King Tiger to achieve. Especially when we start considering the armor quality.

So we know that the Panthers armor quality was, simply put, aweful. But we also know that the Tiger was made with good quality armor. Perhaps being a heavy tank the tiger II would receive preferential armor treatment.

It might have?

The sources that I am looking at as far as the King Tiger’s armor is concerned are British and soviet. The British sources look at the armor from a theoretical perspective, the soviet ones from the perspective of shooting the holy hell out of a King Tiger. First, the British report notes that the King Tiger marks the fullest shift away from face hardened armor that has been seen out of German tanks yet, with no face hardening on any surfaces and unusually soft steel for all armored plate except the mantlet. In fact, the report says that they expect the back damage (I.E spalling) to be far less than on all other German tanks. This seems like a big old check in the armor quality category.

But it lives in near direct contradiction to the soviet firing trial. They took one of the three king tigers that they captured intact from the king tigers inglorious debut on the eastern front and decided to test it until destruction. The first round that they shot was a 122mm high explosive round at the front plate. The results were as follows. 300x300mm of spalling on the interior, the welds between the front plate and bow machine gun casting burst on ¾ of the circumference, all the bolts on the bow machine gun port were ripped off, the weld between the right hull plate and upper front plate failed, and the tank caught on fire. That was the first round.

Now throughout the trial the soviet guns never were able to defeat the frontal armor, but they never had to on account of the consistent spalling and plate deformation that they were able to cause. The soviet conclusion was the armor was of markedly worse quality than either the Tiger before it or the Panther.

Given that it is the only firing trials, I have to go with the soviet results. I wish someone would dig out any British results, or dig the US archives and see if any exist conducted by the US, but unless I see anything hard that I can point to and say ‘the King Tigers armor quality is good’ I have to say that it wasn’t.

My thoughts on the King Tigers armor are fragmented. Do I go based off of the raw values in grading its armor, or its ability to withstand the enemy’s weapons? Because by paper, even with potentially crappy quality armor, it is the best armored tank of the war. But compared to how hard a time it gives other tanks killing it it isn’t at the same level as the Tiger 1 or KV1 or B1 or even Matilda. I guess that I think that the armor is kind of a disappointment, but your mileage may vary.

So, if the best armored tank of the war has disappointing armor, could the most powerful tank gun of the war be disappointing as well?

Armament.

Yes. But for a different reason.

Let me not mince words. Let there be no misunderstanding. This is the most powerful anti tank weapon mounted in a turreted vehicle of the war. Remember that the Panthers primary round could penetrate 100mm of armor at 30 degrees at 1500 yards. The kwk 43 could do so at 2500. The only thing that could bounce it was the front plate of the IS-2 model 1944.

So what is my issue with this cannon?

Well, it’s as follows. What can the 8.8cm L/71 do that the 7.5cm L/70 can’t?

Neither can beat the upper front plate of the IS-2 Model 1944, but both can beat the turret front from a kilometer and a half. Both can destroy a Sherman or Cromwell or T-34 from about 2 kilometers. Not that the Germans knew this, but there is as far as I know nothing that can’t be penetrated from a reasonable range (kilometer plus) by the 7.5cm that can be by the long 8.8cm apart from the Sherman Jumbo and heavy Churchill. So as far as I’m concerned, if the King Tiger had the 7.5, it really wouldn’t change its ability to destroy tanks.

But what about its HE performance?

Well, honestly, if the king tiger had the L/70, its HE performance might go up.

The bursting charge of the long 88 HE shell is 698 grams of explosive in a 9 kg shell. The bursting charge of the long 75 is 725 kg in a 5.7 kg shell. So the 8.8 will have more material for shrapnel, but the 7.5 will have a bit of a larger boom on target. They seem comparable.

Ok, so similar ability to defeat enemy vehicles, similar HE performance. The only real difference between the two guns as far as I can tell is that one of them can carry more ammo than the other one. And that does count for something.

So again, I have a dilemma. If we are just going by paper gun performance the 8.8cm L/71 wins best gun of the war by a country mile. But looking at it from the perspective of if this was the best gun to mount on the tank, I think the 7.5cm L/70 would have been the better choice. it weighs less, it allows for more ammo, it still kills the hell out of tanks, and it’s HE is comparable to the 8.8cm. And in that way the 8.8 is a bit of a disappointment.

Ok. What’s going to disappoint me about the mobility?

Mobility.

Well right off the bat we have some pretty abysmal HP to ton ratios due to the fact that the King Tiger and the Tiger share the same engine and transmission. While the tiger was able to eek out 12 HP per to, the King Tiger fumbles around with 10. This is if the engine is at full revs of 3000 RPM. However the tigerfibel (the tiger manual) stated that the engine should never be run over 2600 RPM if it could possibly be helped, because if you did you risked breaking the transmission. So realistically, the King Tiger has about 8.5 HP per ton. Off to a poor start.

Luckily things do begin looking up from here, because the King Tigers very wide tracks give it excellent flotation for its weight, at 11.8 psi ground pressure. This beats out all but the E8 as far as Sherman’s go, and is even better than T-34/85. Looking better.

It’s also able to lift its skirt if needed, topping out at 41 KPH, which still means that it can outpace the Sherman’s save for the strangely fast M4A2. Not too shabby.

And again, because the transmission is the same as it was on the Tiger 1, that means that the King Tiger has the same neutral steer capabilities as the Tiger, and the same steering capabilities in general. This is another good point for the King Tiger. Things are looking up.

But then they come crashing right back down when we look back at the weight of the tank. 68 tons. Remember the issues that this caused with the tiger and its strategic mobility. Just make those issues more pronounced. Apart from railroad bridges, the King Tiger basically cannot cross any bridges because they will not support its weight. Further, the germans never developed a suitable analog to the British Bailey Bridge so what bridges that they did make they had to make… on a budget. Reference the picture from the tiger writeup with the makeshift bridge (and the makeshift bridge that failed because, well, it’s not built to any code). And even if they did have an analog to the Bailey bridge, it would have been about 25 tons shy of being able to support it because the Bailey could only carry 40 tons. So the King Tiger is very limited by waterways and bridges in where it can go.

Further, there is not a German tank transporter that can support its weight in existence, the largest can only carry 35 tons, so anywhere it goes, it will have to drive there or go by rail. And if it goes by rail, there is the whole song and dance about switching to narrow transportation tracks to get on and switching right back to combat tracks once you get off. Now that we are at the point where we can drive, we find that the King Tiger burns fuel at the prodigious rate of 2 gallons per mile on road. At 1.7 gallons per mile the M4A3 is a good deal more effective, but gets blown out by the M4A1’s 1.5 gallons per mile, which is trounced by the Cromwell’s 1.3 MILES PER GALLON, which itself is destroyed by the T-34/85’s 1.7 miles per gallon. A bit of a tangent, but the point is that the King Tiger devours fuel, and by mid-1944 the fuel situation is getting pretty desperate. Which leads me to some math.

If you filled up a single King Tiger and drive it on road, it would get about 110 miles over 870 liters of fuel. For the same amount of fuel you could get 3 Stug III’s or Hetzers the same distance, or two Panzers IV’s that same amount.However, getting a Panther tank that same distance only saves you 150 liters of fuel. So perhaps from the point of view of fuel economy the King Tiger weirdly makes sense. It all depends on if you think a King Tiger is worth 3 Stug III’s or Hetzers or 2 Pz IV’s.

So in all, I am left with the same annoying conclusion as before. In the short term apart from the low horsepower to ton ratio the King Tiger is a suitably mobile tank and I cannot complain much about it. but in the big picture, it is a bit of a dog as far as mobility goes.

What will tip the scale for me as far as its mobility goes will be the reliability of this tank.

Reliability.

Good news. It is more reliable than the Panther. Maybe

Bad news. Not by much.

The best and the most comprehensive account that I can provide detailing the Tiger II’s poor reliability is the experience of King Tiger 502 of the 501rst Heavy Panzer Battalion. The battalion received its 45 King Tigers August 7^th of 1944. These 45 King Tigers amounted to roughly 1/10^th of all King Tiger production (spoilers for the production section, but this is important to a point I will make on reliability later). Two companies of 15 King Tigers per were sent to join army group North Ukraine in blunting the continuing advance of the Soviets following Operation Bagration. Eventually, the tanks were detrained and transferred to their combat tracks they were driven 50 km toward the town of Ogledow. Ok, 50 km, about 31 miles. Question of the hour, how many out of the 30 tanks make it to their end of March?

Put your answers in the comments below.

You ready? OK.

8.

22 had broken down within the 30 miles from leaving the train. But not King Tiger 502.

So, with 8 King Tigers left over the Germans moved out in the direction of Ogledow as the remainder were repaired from their brief but devastating road march. I will tell more of the story later, but after some combat the Germans are defeated, and King Tiger 502 is captured intact by the soviets. They decide that they will simply drive the King tiger to the nearest soviet controlled railroad station to be moved east for further testing. This railroad station was 113 km (70 miles) away. 502 had already survived one march, could it survive this one, now that it was twice as long?

No.

At the start of the march the soviets discovered that the final drives for the right tracks were destroyed, and they replaced it with another final drive from one of the other captured King Tigers. Then they set out. Initially the going was tolerable, the tank drove well enough, but quickly the soviets discovered that the treads were flat out bad. They would lose their tension every 15 kilometers, and have to be tensioned or run the risk of walking the tracks off. Worse, the tank turning would put too much torque on the pins, which would shatter. A few of the links started failing too.

Atop this, the tank was running very hot. The gearbox (and right engine group? Don’t know what is meant by this) were in danger of overheating, and cooled when the tracks were tensioned. But so far, nothing too catastrophic had happened (well, apart from the final drive failing)

But at Km 86, the left drive wheel fell off the tank. Three teeth were sheared off. The Russians looked, and saw that the balancer for the first idler wheel was out of plane with the other wheels. When the tank hit a bump, the front idler would hit the bolts of the drive wheel and break them until the final failure. So the soviets fetched an extra drive wheel from one of the other King Tigers and installed it, and repaired the front idler as well to fix this problem. Alright, all good. Back on the road.

But with 10 km to go, it happened again.

This time, it was because the torsion bar for the front idler broke, causing the front idler to knock the bolts off of the drive wheel again. So they changed the torsion bar, replaced the idler and drive wheel a second time, and drove to the station. Where the right final drive broke a second time.

Basically, it was a total failure.

Fortunately, 502 had suffered enough as far as the Soviets were concerned. The tank was not selected for firing trials, and is now in the tank museum at Kubinka.

So now the question is whether the tanks issues that we have identified were ever corrected. So, I am looking for; improved treads, improvements to the final drives, improvements to the cooling, and potentially improvements to the suspension design. Lucky for me there is a pretty comprehensive list that details when improvements were made. Looking at that, we see that the tracks are improved in September of 1944. Unfortunately there isn’t much more in terms of solid dates for changes. The best I have found is a vague statement concerning improved gaskets, bearings, and drive train components at some point in production. I do not have any further trials after the change in tracks that would collaborate an increase in performance (though I am quite sure that the new tracks were better because it would be hard to be worse.)

Now, even if performance was improved, by September of 1944 210 King Tigers have been produced to this level of appallingly bad reliability. And that is near half the production run. Let that sink in for a bit.

All evidence past this soviet trials report of improved reliability come from German Readiness Rates. I am inclined to look at these skeptically at best. Essentially, these reports show what percentage of each type of tank is ready to drive at the time the report is written. The example that the tank encyclopedia posits to show that the King Tiger is reliable is that on December 15 of 1944 80 percent of all King Tigers are available for operation compared to 61 percent of Panthers and 72 percent of Panzer IV’s. WOW! It’s the most reliable tank in the army!

What they do not tell you is that the next day is the first day of the Battle of the Bulge, and that the King Tigers high availability rate is due to all of the extra love and care it received before the battle that the Germans were counting on it winning for them. Moreover, the availability rates do not detail how many miles after the start of operations the King Tiger can go before breakdown.

To get a good answer, I’d need to go to the National Archives and see if there are any reports on any of the many captured King Tigers from the end of that battle. And I might. I really might.

In all, unless I see something to change my mind, the King Tiger is unreliable to the point where unlike the Tiger 1, it affects its ability to perform in combat for even short actions.

Reparability.

It’s just like the Panther. The only real change that makes the King Tiger a bit more acceptable is the fact that the overlapping road wheels are no longer interleaving as well, so messing with the suspension is marginally easier. But the transmission is still super garbage to repair like on the panther, the engine is tolerable to work on and god help you if you ever had to remove the turret. an just in case you forgot, spare parts to repair the tank with are as rare as rockinghorse shit.

However, there is another issue. That of recoverability. The Tiger was already a hard tank to recover. What happens when you add 8 tons to it?

As far as I can tell, it becomes unrecoverable. I have not seen a single photograph of a king tiger being towed by anything German. Ever. Now perhaps this is because the situation had devolved to the point where there wasn’t much time to take pictures of the process. Perhaps it is because the King Tigers broke down or bogged down in positions where recovery was impossible (on the front or behind enemy lines). But, knowing how tough it was to recover a Tiger 1, and also knowing that that was at a time when the tactical and strategic situation was more likely to allow recovering of vehicles, I think (and have seen a bit of evidence to that collaborate this) that the remediation drill for recovering a stuck King Tiger was to set demolition charges and run.

So its reparability is garbage.

Ergonomics.

Alright, we know that the Tiger 1 was a fairly ergonomic vehicle, so I will only be covering what changes there are in each position.

Good news for the bow gunner, he might have the best bow gunner’s seat in the entire war because he has a periscope for finding targets and the scope on his MG 34 for shooting at them. The only potential issue is that the periscope has a slight angle to the right of the tanks centerline, so targets to the left may be out of the field of vision. However, not knowing precisely what angles the MG can engage, it is possible that the periscope covers the entire field of fire, in which case this is the best bow mg position of the war.

Again, the driver’s position is like that on the Tiger. The steering wheel, the ease of turning. The only difference of note is that the driver has a single periscope to view the world from, but does have the ability to rotate it giving a very good range of vision. Another unqualified thumbs up for the King Tigers Ergonomics. The hull is doing pretty good.

However, we start getting into issues with the turret.

The gunner’s seat is the same story that we already know. A tight field of view, no periscope to better it, turret traverse linked to engine power, but apart from that it is a pretty good spot.

The commander’s position is the same. Pretty good vision all around, with a nice shield to protect from any flashback.

We run into our first issues in the loaders seat. The loader actually has a decent amount of room to do his work in. he needs it, because the rounds that he is working with are simply massive. The 8.8cm rounds that are used with the Kwk 43 are nearly 4 ft long, and weigh over 50 pounds (for comparison, the 120mm round of the Abrams weighs 37 pounds and is barely over 3 ft long). The round being as large and heavy as it is the position of the gun matters far more to loading than on most other tanks of the era. If the gun is elevated and the breech block is low loading is far easier than if the gun is depressed and the round must be lifted up. Further the size of the round does limit the ability to do things such as move and rotate it, meaning that from the ready racks at the rear of the turret the round must be dragged by its nose as opposed to grabbed by its rim. Finally, the round is simply going to wear a loader out faster than a smaller alternative (the l/70’s round for example, which weighs nearly 20 pounds less and is over a foot shorter). All of these factors combine to mean that the British estimated the King Tiger’s time to load to be about 8 seconds (6-7.5 RPM), compared to the Panthers average of 6 seconds (10 RPM).

On the subject of the ready rack, it is pretty substantial, with 22 rounds available. However, I have read that following the debut of the King Tiger on the eastern front and the debacle that it was that orders were issued to not have any rounds stowed in the turret to improve survivability. This had the unintended effect of halving the rate of fire to between 3-4 rounds per minute. This may have only applied to the 501 heavy panzer battalion, but if it was applied on a wider basis then that is arguably less than the IS-2’s rate of fire. Now with its heavy frontal armor only being able to fire the most powerful tank mounted anti-tank cannon of the war 3 or 4 times a minute is not a big deal when fighting armor (but rest assured that it could be if there are enough enemy tanks around) but for every other target that does not need a AP shell that rate of fire is woefully inadequate for a shell that is only marginally superior to the Sherman’s 75mm.

In all though, the King Tiger seems to be an quite ergonomic vehicle apart from the loaders station, if not a difficult one to command due to the well-known at this point quirks of German vehicle design.

Production.

Originally it was going to be 1500, which is a respectable number. However, the Henschel assembly plant was leveled by the RAF in September of 1944, destroying a great many King Tigers and ruining the ability to maintain full production. At the end of the day, the total number was 492. But that isn’t the worst part about the production of the King Tiger.

It took in total about 300,000 total man-hour’s to build a single King Tiger, which is about twice as much as for a single panther, but that is not the worst part about the production of the King Tiger.

No, the worst part about the production of the king tiger is the cost. One of these costs 800,000 reichsmarks. For comparison, a Panther costs about 180,000 reichsmarks fully loaded. You can have 4 complete panthers for the cost of 1 King Tiger.

Now, I think that the Panther is a bad vehicle that fails as a medium tank. but when you have a choice between two vehicles where one has somewhat better armor but apart from that they are pretty comparable, but you can have 4 of the one with somewhat crappier armor to me it’s a friggen no brainer. The King Tiger may be powerful, but I have a hard time believing that a King Tiger has the same combat value of nearly a full platoon of Panther tanks. This is a economically unsustainable vehicle.

In conclusion, its production was garbage.

Conclusions:

I am torn. On the one hand the King Tiger has the best armor of the war, the best tank mounted anti-tank weapon of the war, on a mobile but underpowered chassis with generally very good levels of crew comfort that may have had its reliability kinks sorted out by November of 1944. Man, that sounds like the best tank of the war.

On the other hand the King Tiger has worse protection against its enemies weapons of the time than its predecessors, a gun that fails to do anything better than a smaller lighter weapon mounted on a medium tank, reliability issues for at least half of its career that render it combat ineffective, a complete inability to repair it, and almost pathetic production numbers and a cost that boggles the mind.

Looking at it in isolation, it looks like the best tank of the war. Looking at it in context, this is the best summary for the tank that I can think of.

I think this tank is a bad tank. Moreover, I think that this tank is a wholly worthless to the Wehrmacht to the point that I think that it should have never been built. The design is approved in November 1943, after the failure of the Tiger tank to break through at Kursk and the opening of the Italian front.Germany is at war on two fronts, and they know that the western allies are going to take a crack at Europe in the near future. The point being that they are in no shape to attempt a major offensive action in the near future that would require a breakthrough tank. The tactical role that the King Tiger was made for no longer existed.

Indeed, in the only major offensive that the King Tiger took part in (the Battle of the Bulge) the main thrust of the King Tigers was defeated simply by blowing up the bridges before it, and unlike with the lighter tanks of years past there was no good way to repair the bridge enough to support them. Also, the route taken by the Germans was dictated by the weight of the King Tigers, and as a result was not as direct and added further to the fuel woes that they were experiencing.Add to that the fact that the King Tigers were eating fuel at a prodigious rate (remember, three Stug III’s can go the same distance as a King Tiger on the same amount of fuel, or a single Stug III can go 3 times the distance) and the offensive petered out relatively quickly. As a final twist of the knife, for most of the offensive the King Tigers were behind the main advance for fear that they would break down and stop the entire offensive behind their near immovable bulks.

At the tank museum in Bovington I remember seeing one of everyone’s favorite little tanks, the Jagdpanzer 38t ‘hetzer’. At the bottom of the plaque that was in front of the hetzer there was a line that read something to the effect of ‘in all, a better vehicle than King Tiger’

Back then, I didn’t believe it, I was a little taken aback. Now I absolutely do.

The Tiger 1 may have been a paper tiger. But the King Tiger is the paper tiger.

6416452

>simply

well, there goes my Pulitzer Prize.

well, that is why I have sort of a two tiered conclusion to the tank which I usually dont do. most of the tanks design (not all of it, but most of it) is solid and when viewed in a vacuum makes it a contender for the best tank of the war. of course when viewed in context I think that its a big dumb piece of shit that hurt germany more than helped it.

however, even outside of germanys failing situation I think that the King Tiger was most likely a bad tank because of its probable shit tier reliability and near inability to recover due to its ridiculous weight, again, I can't say with complete certanty that the reliability of the King Tiger was always terrible (unlike with Panther where I can), but i'm fairly sure that it was.

Biggest reason I can see for WHY the Germans built the Tiger II (and their large expensive armored vehicles in general) instead of mass producing even more PZ4s/Stug3s/whathaveyou (as tends to be the claim of what they should have done), comes down to manpower. They simply didn't have the crewmen for huge numbers of weaker but cheaper and more sustainable tanks. So like the Israelis with the Merkeva, they wanted the strongest, most survivable tank to make the crews they DID have count.
I have no idea if this was actually part of their thought process, or if they simply thought "more gun+more armor=guder tank." Either way, still ended up a logistics nightmare. A common thing for the Germans it seems.

6416517
from what I have read the thought process was never about protecting the crews. It was, as you said, only about "more gun+more armor=ubermensch tank" and this was basically because Hitler had a hard on for bigger armor and a bigger gun. originally, Panther was going to have 60mm front plates, 80mm at the turret front and mantlet, and the L/48 gun. all the extra armor and gun was Hitlers personal request. add to that that one of Hitlers closest advisers on tanks was Dr Porsche, you know, the guy who thought the maus was a good idea, and you can see the issue.