‘Paper Tigers’ is at heart supposed to take a hard look at the fighting vehicles of the war and determine if they were either underrated (like the M4 Sherman) or if they were overrated, proverbial paper tigers like perhaps the T-34/76. It stands to reason that a tank that is ranked highly by culture and by general consensus is more apt to fall into this category, because the hype builds it up to be something that it isn’t. And if one had to make a list of the most powerful tanks of the war, a solid bet would be that a lot of them would be German, and near the top would be the replacement for the Panzer IV, the Panzer V Panther.

And on paper it is easy to see why. The Panther was an outstanding gun platform with arguably better frontal armor than the famed Tiger, but it was only a bit more expensive to make than its predecessor. Like the T-34 and the Tiger before it, its presence caused a massive tank scare for its opponents. While not as readily known by the average individual as the Tiger or T-34’s, anyone with a basic knowledge of WWII fighting vehicles knows that the Panther was a tank to be reckoned with. But it is as good as some histories make it out to be?

We’ll get to that in a minute, because before we can successfully talk about the merits of the Panther tank some attention must be given to how it came to be, because the original idea for the Panther was far different than the end result.

The Panther has its orgins in the VK. 20 project, a design requirement issued for a 20 ton tank that would be a replacement for the Pz III and Pz IV. Daimler Benz, Krupp, and Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nurnberg AG (or MAN for short) all started working on designs right up until the Wehrmacht had a traumatic emotional event called the T-34/76.

Yes, the T-34/76 is not as good as history makes it out to be, but these paper tanks usually have a similar thread. They’re always highly rated by the enemy, because the enemy never has to deal with their ergonomics or their reliability or their ease of maintenance. They only are worried about how easy they are to knock out, how hard their guns hit, and how many of them there are. And the T-34/76 was a winner in all of these fields. The Germans learned that the armor superiority that they had enjoyed in France and somewhat in Africa was now in great peril, and that a 20 ton replacement tank would not be able to compete. A commission was made and the Germans took a good hard look at the T-34 for inspiration on a tank to beat it.

They took a lot of lessons from the T-34. Their new tank needed sloped armor, it needed wide tracks to have good cross country mobility, it needed to have about a 3 inch gun with anti-tank and a good high explosive round, and it needed to be around 30 tons. In other words, they wanted a T-34.

Krupp dropped out, but DB and MAN continued. DB made a tank that looked a lot like the T-34. Quite a lot. It had all the features specified, plus a front mounted turret (like the T-34) and a diesel engine (like the T-34) and a rear mounted transmission (like the T-34). Honestly, the suspension was different, and that was it. MAN made a tank that included the wanted design changes, but was more in line with german philosophy. The turret was centrally located, the transmission front mounted, the traditional overlapping suspension style emulated, and a conventional gas engine derived from the Tiger mounted to the rear.

Where it gets important is in the fact that the design had to be approved by none other than Adolph Hitler himself. Initially he leaned toward the DB design, but eventually was persuaded that the MAN design would be easier to finish and produce. After all, the engine was basically ready, and it used a turret that Rheinmetall-Borsig had already done the legwork on. So the 30 ish ton VK 30.01 MAN was ready for the limelight, but then (and this is very important) Hitler decided that the frontal armor needed to be changed from 60mm at a 55 degree slope to 80 mm, and that any flat armor at the front had to be 100mm. so it was.

 And as more demands were placed on the tank, the weight climbed up, capping out at 49 short tons (or 98,000 pounds). For comparisons sake, the Tiger was 60 short tons. But after this, the Germans determined that the Panther was more or less ready for a combat debut at the battle of Kursk. It was less.

With that, it is time to disassemble the Panther.

Armor:

The Panther was from the front impressively well armored. The upper plate being 80mm at 55 degrees was 140mm of effective thickness, and the lower plate (60mm at 55 degrees) was still as effectively thick as the frontal plate of a Tiger. The Turret front was 100mm, and the mantlet was 100 mm square on, tapering down to 60 as the slope increased.

Side and rear armor was as one would expect less impressive. The turret side and rear armor was 45mm, side sponsons were 50mm, and armor behind the tracks were 40mm. rear armor was 40mm.

But let’s talk about that frontal armor. At the time, it was freaking world-beating. the 75mm guns of the Sherman, Cromwell, and T-34/76 (its 76mm but you get the idea) had precisely one 6 inch tall section of the Panther at the bottom of the mantlet where they had a chance of scoring a penetration by ricocheting the round down into the 40mm thick hull top, but apart from that they were incapable of penetrating the Panther from the front at any range. Getting a hit like this is the tank equivalent of firing a proton torpedo into the Death Stars exhaust. And this one weak-spot was eliminated on the Panther Ausf. G, leaving essentially no hope for these tanks to penetrate. The American 76mm and Soviet 85mm could only manage to penetrate the mantlet with a square on shot with their standard rounds at 200 yards or less. American HVAP rounds had a chance of penetrating the lower plate, but still were not able to defeat the upper. The vaunted 17 pounders main round even could not defeat the Panthers front plate, and the special sabot that could was so inaccurate that hitting a Panther at 1000 yard was about a 1 in 20 chance. The American 90mm, and the Russian 100, 122, and 152 were realistically the only guns that were readily capable of meeting the task at hand, and the 90mm and 100mm were realistically only able to do that in 1945.

And yes, against the side the panther tank becomes abruptly venerable to just about every antitank weapon in the war, but realistically that happens with all tanks. And the Panther was also not intended to fill the role of a heavy tank. it was a replacement for the Panzer IV, and the Germans designated it as a medium, so if we were to take that designation at face value then the Panther is by far the best armored medium tank of the war

So, it seems like the Panther is going to get a big old check in the armor category, with precious few guns being able to penetrate it frontally for the course of the war. But there is an issue, one that haunts the Panther as it haunted nearly all of the german tanks in the war. If you have some familiarity with the subject, you probably already know what I’m talking about. And If you don’t, brace yourself, because this may come as a shock.

German armor was pretty much shit.

Let me explain. There is more to armor than the base thickness. Armor plate must be able to prevent rounds from penetrating, but it should also be able to withstand impacts without experiencing spalling, fatigue, cracking, breaking off, etc. and german armor basically couldn’t.

Going back to the first tests done by the western allies on the Panther, there were signs of problems in this field. On july 30^th American forces tested their weaponry against a few captured Panthers, and as a part of their testing fired a 90mm HE round from 1500 yards at the Panthers front plate. They recorded that it cracked the welds between the glacis and nose plate, and glacis and side plates for about 12 inches per. One HE round.

Another test in mid-august was performed against 3 different Panthers, and apart from learning about the penetrative qualities of the 76mm and 17 pounder, there were also some results concerning the Panthers armor. Of the three, only one was what the deemed to be good quality, taking 30 hits without fracturing. The other two cracked within a few shots, and after this quickly failed catastrophically.

In fact in nearly every test of armaments against the Panther, the issues were bound to pop up, sooner or later. In October 1944 the United States War Department decided that they wanted to get to the bottom of this situation, and sent armor samples to the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts. The results came back in January of 1945 and they revealed two major flaws. One was a lack of Molybdenum, which is usually used in alloying to increase the hardness of metals. To make up for this more carbon was used to reduce the amount of alloy needed to achieve good hardness, but this made the welds brittle and very prone to cracking. The second was that the German heat treatment of the armor plates was inferior to the American, and as such the plates were of very low toughness and therefore chipped, shattered, and spalled at an alarming rate. And as a twist of the knife, the Americans re-treated this armored plate and were able to raise the toughness dramatically, alleviating the problem.

While this would be an issue throughout the war, it steadily got worse as German access to alloying materials deteriorated, until instances such as the following happened. A piece of armor that would be inspected by the metallurgy lab was recovered on March 10^th 1945 after having been blown off of the side of a Panther by a Sherman’s 75mm HE round. Holy shit.

Am I saying that all Panthers had armor that was this bad? By no means, and allied tankers could not count on shooting a Panther with HE and having it fall apart. But by the same token, German tankers were rolling the dice on if their tank would be able to take multiple hits before falling apart. More often than not, the Panthers armor wasn’t as good as advertised.

Armament:

If there is anything on this tank that is as good as advertised, it would be the 7.5 cm KwK 42 L/70 cannon. As the armor was (on paper) practically a world-beater at the time, the gun was too. The standard round could penetrate 100 mm of armor angled at 30 degrees up to 1500 yards away. With better armor penetration values than the Tiger, the Panther could defeat every tank in the allied arsenal from the front with this standard round with the sole exceptions of the IS-2 mod. 1944 and the M4A3E2 Assault tank. Everything else, it could take. And for those, it had an APCR round with the same penetration on the same armor at 2000 yards. It is an end all be all anti-tank gun.

And it even has a high explosive round. And that high explosive round is basically as far as I can tell equivalent to the Sherman’s, due to it being undercharged so it has the relatively low velocity of 700m/second, compared to the 935 and 1,130 meters per second of the AP rounds.

And that’s it. No HEAT, no shrapnel, no canister, no smoke, no white phosphorous. HE and AP only.

If there is a complaint to be leveled at the armament, it is that it is very… single minded. This is the gun to destroy tanks, and maybe also shoot HE if needed. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe this is not. But it is noticeable.

Mobility:

Would it be surprising to hear that the Panther was more tactically mobile than the Sherman?

Going by the numbers, the Sherman topped out at around 41 kph, the T-34/76 at 49 kph, T-34/85 at 55kph, and the Panther right there too. The historically very mobile T-34 was matched in speed by the Panther, and that speaks volumes initially.

And the Panther could neutral steer. In essence, this means that the transmission allowed the panther to engage both tracks in order to turn, rotating the tank about the centerline. Most American and Soviet tanks could only engage one track to turn, so they rotated around the center of the immobile track. What this means is that in tight spaces the Panther, despite being larger than the Sherman and T-34, is able to maneuver better.

 And off road performance was fantastic. At some point, and I don’t know when, but a myth arose about German armor that basically said that the way that Sherman’s would beat them would be if that the German tank was bogged down in mud the lighter Sherman would be able to outmaneuver it. And in most cases, that’s a wrong assumption to make. Recall that the Panther was specifically required to have wide tracks for good flotation. As mentioned in my Sherman piece, the standard Sherman before the addition of the duckbill extenders had 13.7 PSI of ground pressure, while the Panther had 12.5. But more than this, the Panther’s weight was also more evenly distributed along the tracks. The Sherman had its weight on the tracks at 6 spots (where the bogies hit the track) the T-34 had 5 spots. The Panther had 8 points of contact. This helped it have mobility that allied commanders sometimes had a hard time of believing. On muddy and boggy ground, it was superior to the western allies tanks.

In general, its performance in adverse conditions was admirable. The British 4^th Armored Battalion Coldstream Guards captured a Panther which they named Cuckoo. In winter, the Churchill’s that they operated slid around the icy roads with alarming regularity and would end up in in the ditch. But 8 tons of additional weight kept Cuckoo firmly planted, much to the annoyance of the Churchill tankers.

It even had a decent power to weight ratio. Its 690 HP engine was very powerful for sure, but the tank weighed so much that it could only achieve 13.77 HP/ton. However, this was still superior to all the Sherman’s exempting the GAA powered ones. In all, mobility was shockingly excellent.

Reliability:

With most paper tigers, they do really well on the first three, because that is where their reputation for being a terrifying enemy comes from. It is in these next few categories where we see if their reputation for being excellent is earned. And starting with reliability, the Panther will start to fail. And it will start to fail hard.

To cover the catastrophic failure of reliability that is the Panther, we will look at the Germans thoughts, British testing during and after the war, and also the opinion of the country that operated the Panther the second longest, France. The picture that these reports will paint will be at best unflattering.

Even before the Panther was introduced to combat, there were big hints that things were wrong with the design. In February 1943 the first production Panthers were demonstrated before Albert Speer, and it looked like it went well. But the first unit to receive Panthers reported a lot of technical issues. Fumes built up rapidly in the turret when firing, the third gear of the transmission was apt to break, the fuel pump would fail, the final drive was weak and would break, and the engine would blow gaskets and catch on fire randomly. All of this is obviously bad. But the Panther was being rushed into production so that 200 of them would be available for Operation Citadel, which would be better known as the battle of Kursk. So how’d it do?

2 of the 200 caught fire as they were driving off the trains that had brought them to the front. When the battle started on July 5, there were 184. By July 7 there were 40. By July 10 there were 10. Of the 190 that were rendered inoperable, 81 were done so by enemy fire. The rest, over half of the original number, had broken down within 5 days.

As you could expect, this was basically catastrophic. If the Panther was to have any success as a tank all of these issues needed to be figured out. Testing was done, and to what must have been their dismay the Germans discovered that there were more issues with the tank than the ones mentioned above. The steering gears would fail if the tank was required to turn while reversing, and if they tank attempted to utilize its neutral steer capabilities. Its fuel lines were porous, and would allow fumes to build up around the engine. And the engine itself had numerous problems too.

These issues were incredibly bad. As I have said earlier, if you want a less biased view of the equipment, give it to a friend. In this case Germany has no friends, but they do have a lot of enemy's that desperately want to know what the deal is with this tank. So from a British report, we have an early Panther Ausf D being tested. The report gives a picture that is almost irredeemable.

In this test the Panther was driven for a total of 20 miles. In this time the hydraulic system failed, was fixed, but drained itself every time it had to perform a hill climb. While climbing a hill the engine stalled, the tank rolled backwards, and at the bottom of the hill the engine caught on fire. It was put out by the fire suppression system, and trials continued. On a rough terrain course the washers of the no 7 road wheels broke and fell off of the tank. During speed trials the engine misfired constantly and 3^rd gear broke on the gearbox. Then the engine caught fire again, and the tank died. Keep in mind that all of this happened within 20 miles of driving. The Panther in question had 500 miles on the clock.

The Germans worked to correct these issues as quickly as they possibly could, and were able to alleviate many of them. The gasket problem was solved, as was the fuel pump and fuel lines issues, which in turn was able to reduce how often the engine caught fire randomly. The transmissions were improved so that issues usually wouldn’t develop untill 1500 km were clocked up. Bore excavators and shell boxes alleviated the fumes from the cannon firing. The steering gears were unable to be fixed, so the drivers were instructed to never use their neutral steer capability or turn while reversing. Notice how this degrades the mobility from its paper rating that I had above.

With all of these issues fixed, there were two main ones left. The engine breaking down, and the final drives shearing. To fix the engines there were many changes, most of which were deratings of the power output. Peak horsepower fell from 690 to 580, and horsepower per ton fell to 13.1. As you can see, the mobility of the tank is degrading fast at this point. Satisfied with this, they went to fix the final drives, and were able to add some improvements in November of 1944.

So did all these fixes work?

During July of 1943, the Panthers availability rating was 16%, by December, it had gone up to 37%. And in May of 1944 it had risen to 78% on the eastern front. So it was fixed, right?

Well, let’s ask for a non-German opinion on this, first from the British. Immediately after the war the British had control over a plant that manufactured panthers, which still had all the requisite components to make a few tanks. So they did. They made 2 Panthers, and 2 Jagdpanthers, and repaired a Bergepanther recovery vehicle to like new status. The Panther and the Jagdpanther that they made are still visible at the Bovington tank museum, and I have seen them with my own eyes. Anyway, there are 4 brand new tanks, not a mile on any of them, and with every design improvement that they received. So let’s see the results!

“Despite the fact that no less than five vehicles were available for test, very little information of any value was obtained from the trials owing to the extreme unreliability of the Panther tank.”

Oh.

“The original intention of testing the three types in the Panther series, i.e. Panther Tank, Jagd Panther and Panther A.R.V., had therefore, to be abandoned and efforts directed to obtaining such data as could be obtained from those vehicles which could be induced to run, using the remainder as a source of spare parts”

Oh.

“Engine compartment fires occurred in each of the four vehicles involved in this trial, in the majority of cases more than once.”

Ohhhh… The engine fixes didn’t change anything. And the steering still doesn’t work. But maybe the final drive? This British report doesn’t say anything about the final drive, maybe that was fixed. Let’s ask the French, who used the Panther from the end of the war to 1947. They have experience, they’ll know!

“The truly weak spot of the Panther is its final drive, which is of too weak a design and has an average fatigue life of only 150 km.”

150 km.

Oh my God.

The Panther has an on road range of 200 km. by French standards it is more likely for a Panther to break down than to run out of gas.

We can stop right there. Nothing can top that. No, nothing can bottom that. Forget the fact that the French calculated that the engine needs to be replaced after 1000 km, forget that the turret will not turn if the tank is on a 20 degree incline. Forget about the fact that a smoke grenade thrown onto the engine deck will light it on fire. This is the single worst thing I have yet to see about any tanks reliability. And this is after the fixes. Honestly we can stop the whole article here. Nothing can top that. It’s so bad it boggles the mind. What the hell were they thinking? Anyone who made this, anyone who drove this? How the F*** did this happen?

The answer is not surprising. The failure of the final drive can be traced directly to Hitler. It is literally his fault. Remember when he wanted the front plate increased from 60 to 80mm, and the turret front bumped up to 100? That raised the weight of the tank from 30-35 ish tons to 45-47 tons. And the final drive was only designed to handle the original specs. When the tank grew, it outgrew the final drive, and it came back to bite them.

So there we go. As far as I can see, unless anyone gives me good data to suggest otherwise, the Panther is an unmitigated failure on the reliability front.

So seeing how it’s going to need to happen a lot, how easy is it to repair a panther.

Reparability:

Welcome to Hell.

That is probably the best description for fixing a broken Panther. Literally, anything going wrong on this tank that is very prone to having things going wrong with it is practically a nightmare to fix. And that’s assuming that you can fix it.

You see, in 1944 it was determined that AFV production was of the greatest importance to Germany, so the production of spare parts was severely curtailed. In many cases if a tank broke down that was it. Game over. Panthers were usually moved by rail as much as feasibly possible due to this, because if they had to drive they might break, and if they break then they were finished. But there were some spare parts to be had, so perhaps you may have been lucky (or unlucky) enough to be able to get (or have) to fix your Panther. And at that point, welcome to hell.

Let’s say that you had to replace a road-wheel. If it was an innermost one, because of the overlapping nature of them, you really had to remove 5 before you got to remove the one that actually needed replacement, and then you got to put them all back on. This is nothing compared to what needs to happen to repair the transmission.

If one of those break, the first thing that needs to happen is that you need to turn the turret 90 degrees to the left of the right. Then you need to take the roof armored plate off. Then you have to remove everything in the drivers and the bow gunner’s compartments. The radios, the MG34, the driving controls, the instruments. All of it. Now you can get at the final drives and the transmission. And you need a crane, preferably from a Strabokran road gantry. You remove all the protective covers on the transmission pieces that keep the driver and bow gunner from being ground up into meat, and then can disconnect the transmission from the final drives and the engine shaft, and now you get to crane it out and do the whole thing over again in reverse.

The only component of the tank that is easily replaceable is actually the motor, but apart from that most components are hard to do maintenance on, hard to replace, and weigh so much that a road gantry is needed to move them.

I know that this little series is young, and that I’ve really only looked at three tanks with this fine tooth comb, but the Panther is by far the most painful to repair that I have seen.

The ergos need to be good.

Ergonomics.

Let’s start with the bow gunner and radio operator, who are one and the same. They have a MG 34 with a unique setup where they have a component that is supposed to rest on the gunners head while he is aiming though the sights, and this is how he moves the gun. The sight apparently has a very narrow field of view (if anyone can get the FOV and magnification settings of a KZF2 MG34 tank sight, please let me know) so situational awareness while using the bow machinegun is very poor. He also has one periscope fixed at 45 degrees facing right. The only other thing that he has is abysmal legroom. The transmission is biased to his side of the tank, so he has about a foot wide area where he can put his feet under the linkage to the final driver.

The driver has marginally more legroom. He has 2 fixed periscopes facing forward and to the left, but not to the right, which seems like an oversight. He also has a hatch in front of him that can be opened in low threat areas for more view (Note: this is for Panther D and Panther A, Panther G has only one fixed periscope facing forward and no hatch). To combat the poor visibility they mounted a second seat behind the main one and made extended controls so the driver could drive unbuttoned. Apart from this the gearbox won’t really fight him.

The loader has a little seat that he can fold down when in combat, and apart from that has a single periscope pointed slightly to the right and a big hatch on the rear of the turret. The only real problems with this position are that the 75mm round is pretty darn big and unwieldy, but more important than this is that all of the rounds are located outside of the turret basket, in the side sponsons or other such places. So every time you need to load you have to duck out of the turret basket, grab the round, duck back in and load it. is this a deal breaker? No, several tanks had to do this, but when you compare it to the Sherman, realistically the Cromwell and the Churchill’s, and even in a way the T-34-85, they all had a large complement of ready rounds located either right under the turret basket or in special racks that allowed for quick access. In the Panther you have to move a lot more to get the same result, and early models had only 3 quick access rounds under the turret (this eventually gets to 7 on the Ausf G, which is alright). It’s a minor ding, but it is a consideration.

A thing of note, by the end of the war the Sherman’s had all ammo low in the tank in lightly armored boxes with water jackets to keep them from having catastrophic ammo explosions. The Panthers had about half of their ammo in the sponsons above the tracks with no separation from the crew compartment. So when these got hit in the side, which they did because the only place to take them out was the side, the odds of a brew up were high.

The gunner has lots of room. The controls are good and workable. The optical quality is fantastic, accounts from the Coldstream guards talk about a time that they were assaulting quite literally a castle, and none of their 75mm and 6 pounders were doing real damage. Cuckoo however had clear enough sights for the tank to be able to fire HE rounds through individual windows at range to flush the Germans out. All present were impressed with how clear and good the sights were. Also, the high velocity of the rounds made shell drop and leading targets easier because time to target was much shorter than on other tanks.

 But there are a few issues that must be mentioned. First is the method of traversing the turret. The power traverse on the Ausf D was a fixed type, which traversed the turret 360 degrees in 60 seconds. This was replaced by one that was variable with the engine power, and it could turn the turret 360 degrees in 15, but only if the engine was in high revs. Second is the sights had a very low field of view, and did not give good situational awareness. And third is that the gunsight is the only means that the gunner has of seeing out of the tank.

The commander has an intercom. That’s it. His one and only job is to command the tank, which on the one hand sounds good, but as I will explain in a bit has shortcomings. The only thing that he has that isn’t an intercom is a fantastic cupola and a mediocre hatch. The cupola is mounted somewhat high in the tank and has a full 360 degrees of vision with multiple view ports, a design that wouldn’t catch on in the allied army’s until around a year later. The hatch opens by being raised up by operating a screw until it is of a sufficient height, then slides over. The advantage of this system is that it is very low profile, the disadvantage is that it takes a long time to open. As a result of this, it is thought that the hatch was usually kept in a raised position with the cover over the hatch, providing protection from attacks from above and being able to be opened quickly.

As a note, in the Sherman paper I talked about how Sherman’s would fire white phosphorous rounds at Panthers, and then inexperienced crews would bail out because the thought the tank was on fire as the fumes were sucked into the ventilation and the Sherman’s would fire their machine guns to take care of them. Between the fact that the French determined that a smoke grenade would catch the tank on fire and the notion that the commanders hatch is kept open at nearly all times, I think that this WP technique might have worked better than people think, with a ready route of ingress of WP into the crew compartment and the fact that any WP that gets on the engine deck may start a fire. Just a thought.

So, that’s the crew’s ergonomics, and outwardly they don’t seem all that bad. But there are problems, and they compound to make a big problem for the Panther.

To show this, let’s put a late war Panther Ausf G and a M4A3(75)W into a hypothetical situation. In this situation the tank will drive across a field, turn 90 degrees left and ford a small creek and stop on the other edge. It will radio to command its whereabouts, and then the commander will see a target about 60 degrees to his right at 800 yards, and the tank will engage, first with HE in the tube then with AP.

Starting with the Sherman. The commander orders a left turn to ford a creek. The driver turns his hath periscope to the left to see where he is going, finds a spot to ford, and does so. The commander selects the right frequency on his radio and calls into command and gives his little update. Then he spots the target. He hits the turret override and starts traversing the turret as he gives the notification to his gunner. The gunner picks up the target on his periscopic sight and gets the gun laid on, then moves to the monocular gunsight to get the final shot and fires. The loader reaches directly beneath him and gets a AP round from the wet stowage and rams it in, and the tank fires again.

Now the Panther. The commander orders the left turn to ford the creek. But because the driver has no visibility left, the commander must tell him precisely when he needs to execute the turn in order to cross at the best spot. The panther crosses the creek, and the commander orders the radio operator to call into command and give the update. Then he sees the target. He gives the bearing and elevation as best as he can tell, and the driver has to rev up the engine in neutral in order for the gunner to power traverse the turret. The commander has to give very precise orders about where the target is because the gunner has very little situational awareness. Once they are on target and fire, the loader leans out of the turret basket and retrieves the round, then comes back in to load and fire.

If you couldn’t tell, the Panther required a lot more input by the commander to get the same results as the Sherman. And that is really the Panthers main ergonomic failing. With an experienced crew, it was a very deadly tank, but without one it suffered more than a T-34 or Sherman or Cromwell with a crew of the same lack of experience. It was a hard tank to command effectively, and as the war drew on and good crews became rarer and rarer the Panther became far less effective. And inexperienced crew in a Sherman, Cromwell or T-34/85 would be able to get more out of their tank than a inexperienced crew in the Panther.

Production:

Production of the panther was 6,000 units. This made it the 3^rd most produced armored vehicle Germany made in the war. When compared to Russia and America, this is basically pathetic. But compared to say Great Britain, this is actually fairly favorable, with only 4000 Cromwell’s and 7,500 Churchill’s built during the whole war. Was it nearly enough? No. But it wasn’t that bad either.

The cost of a Pz IV was about 100,000 Reichmarks, and for a Panther was 117,000 RM. On the surface this seems odd. The Panther weights nearly twice as much, how can it only be a few thousand Marks more expensive?

Because the Panther was built by slaves.

Dude, F*** Nazis.

If it is any consolation, the slaves sure as shit sabotaged the tanks at every instance that they could, jamming fuel lines, leaving important components not fully screwed into place, knocking teeth off of gears and gluing them back on. Add this atop the numerous design flaws, and the already terrible reliability of the Panther crashes to new lows.

Conclusions:

At the start of this, I knew a bit what to expect. Great armor, great gun, great mobility, some reliability issues, but all in all the best tank of the war. And then I started reading things that chipped away at that. And then the British and French post war reports just broke me. I had no idea the problems were that prevalent and pronounced. So that leads me to my conclusion.

If the Germans really wanted to win the war, they wouldn’t have built the Panther.

Offensively, it is incapable. It can kill tanks, and it can take hits, but it can’t drive from one town to the next without risking breaking down and being left on the side of a road because it is impossible to fix. It is purely a defensive weapon. And even then, if it breaks down and the enemy drive past it, it’s a write off, you can’t recover it and get it back. And to use it properly everyone needs to be well trained and experienced, or else you will get your asses kicked by an inferior amount of inferior Sherman’s like at the battle of Arracourt.

When I did all of my research on the Sherman, I was constantly pleasantly surprised. The negative aspects were not as bad as I had been lead to believe, and the positives were more positive than expected. The Panther is the opposite. The positives of armor and mobility had huge flaws, and the negatives of reparability and reliability were worse than I could imagine. Only the gun really holds up.

The T-34 had flaws, some quite major, but they were offset by the sheer number of them. The Panther doesn’t have that luxury. Each defective Panther, and there were a ton of them, was more damaging to Germany than each defective T-34 was to the Soviet Union.

So, and I can’t believe that I’m typing this, and I want something that can convince me otherwise, but I believe that the Panther was an outright bad tank.

It is the king of paper tigers.

So seeing as this is now the king it will be paper panthers from now on. LOL

6112205
This is a great read. Thanks for the research. Wow, Panthers were an absolute nightmare.

But as long as you ignore every single reliability, ergonomic, and manufacturing fails, its fine. Aka a great video game weapon. Man, Germany should've spent more time drawing napkin blueprints of 400mm armored tanks with an autoloading 100mm gun and a 5000 HP turbine strapped on somehow for my digital needs.

6112205
You still writing this?

6179044
kinda. I'm running into research issues. I have a article on the Firefly but it has a lot of gaps in it that I'm not happy with. also balancing a story and maybe a book and work. so yeah. if you want the firefly article I'll throw it up, but it isn't super great.

6179065

Good luck, we're all counting on you