Was the King Tiger Tank a Load of Rubbish?

We recently visited King Tiger Tank 213 in the Belgium village of La Gleize where it was abandoned during the Battle of the Bulge. Standing next to it and reading all of it's stats, I couldn't help but be incredibly impressed. It looks like an absolute monster! BUT, we then sat down to discuss it with Battle of the Bulge Historian Peter Caddick-Adams who gave us some very good reasons to why it was actually a poor tank.

What do you think? Was the King Tiger a poor tank? Opinion seems to be very much divided for many reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoo5VIO0KeI

Merry Christmas!

Ross

 

It definitely had bugs that needed to be worked out. Allied tankers would probably soil themselves if they met one head to head. Strategically it was no threat except from a moral standpoint. It's main problem was unreliability. Many US tankers resented very much the range advantage they had with their guns and armor... Who could blame them.

 

Well I would not call it rubbish but rather "flawed" given the man hours it took to build asw well as the tons of material. It was well conceived in shape, good slope tn armor but hugely wide, meaning bridges, trains were sorely pressed to handle it's size and weight. It's powertrain was over stressed to move it, a slightly updated MB V-12 gasoline engine similar tp the Tiger One. It had a longer 88mm main gun, probably the best tank gun of WW2.

So it was , IMHO, too big, too expensive and and, especially in the Ardenne, to maneuver and travel distances easily. At the stage of the war it appeared it's low production too small. . North Africa and the Russian steppe was a distant memory but it would have probably been more effective there.

I have only seen one, just sitting there and it is by far the most psychologically impressive tank of WW2 to me. Just not effective, especially with the allies airpower growing..

Rubbish, never, ill conceived I would say yes. But "What a tank !!!

 

Gaines is on the right track here and this flawed (or incomplete) technology was endemic throughout the German military.

Germany introduced a wide array of weapons and technology that promised much, but delivered little except in very limited cases, yet much of these are staples today. Surface to Air missiles, Air to Air missiles, cruise and ballistic missiles, guided bombs, heavy tanks, combat Jets etc. The Allies by contrast brought realizable technology to the battle field.

 

I wouldn't go so far as to call it "Rubbish" but I believe the Tiger 1 had a more impact on future machines.

With that said I believe it was the Soviet IS3 that is considered the mother of all MBTs....

 

I thought it was the T-44/T-54/T-55 and the Panther. Can't say I have ever heard or read about anyone claiming that the IS-3 was the mother of all MBTs.

 

There are some very knowledgeable armor guys here that will chime in with deeper insight, but it seems to me that the Tiger II suffered many of the same issues as the Tiger I. The worst two problems were that they were under-powered and had very poor transmissions. To move anywhere, especially at speed was to strain the engine and risk a major breakdown. The transmission system was awful as well, prone to frequent breakdowns that were beyond the crew to repair. Note that that Panther suffered frequent transmission failure as well.

The under-powered engine issue may have been insurmountable under wartime conditions. There's only so much motor you can fit inside a tank of any size, and with German industry strained to the breaking point there wasn't much that could be done. There's only so much horsepower you can get out of an engine that would fit in that frame.

The transmission issue is what really puzzles me. I'm not an engineer, but you'd think they could fix that issue and even retrofit the tanks in the field with a more robust transmission. By the end of the war, their three most feared tanks (to include the Panther) all had bad transmissions.

 

I used to be very much on the side of a far more strongly critical/realistic view of German armour.
The fanboy coverage of much of it had become, frankly, ridiculous, and still is in many quarters. The balance of positive appraisal had swung too far.
I still attempt to be critical/realistic, obviously, but think the pendulum may have moved too much in the other direction of late, dare I say it among people who perhaps haven't looked at the subject with enough consideration of the complexities. (eg. There've been a few shots of Tigers put up on Twatter recently that have led to a string of 'rubbish' 'crap' etc. commentary, almost as limp as the fanboy 'Tigerz R kule' brigade... but that's the way of Twatter, where 140 characters doesn't allow for much nuance.)

One thing I think is important to state, is that It was just another tank. Another machine for carrying squishy lumps of flesh (the important bit) into battle, with pluses and minuses. Not some magical device, or conversely; a total waste of time and effort.

'Underpowered' can often be used as a criticism. Fair enough; it pushed the technology of what could be done with contemporary power packs & the power to weight isn't exactly stellar, but if you watch enough film footage of them moving about I think 'lumbering' is hardly the right word. Surprisingly nimble given the weight, gun etc. Nothing intrinsically wrong with thick armour and a BFG if used properly - the concept is essentially sound.
Where all this begins to fall down is in more intangible factors though.
Mechanical fragility is more the issue than any particularly bad design. A certain need to go for more advanced technological solutions in order to make up for increasing shortfalls in production, supply, manpower, fuel etc. lead to pushing the envelope of what was possible. Those Maybachs are incredible pieces of work for a 1940s engine, but if you have to build such advanced kit you also have to take the hits in reliability. Most studies of any Tiger unit (whatever type) in action shows a high level of loss to mechanical failure.
Much of that failure might have been fine (not the right word... maybe tolerable) if The German armed forces had taken the infrastructure needed to support these advanced machines more seriously, but there's that old bugbear of the Wehrmacht - where are the bulldozers, the ARVs, the transporters. the appropriate amount of more humble materiel needed to maintain the shiny stuff? On the whole, despite there technically being examples of each type of support machine in German service, they simply weren't provided for in the way the Western Allies did.
If your Sherman or Churchill broke down or was damaged in action, there was a good chance of relatively rapid recovery and repair. If your Tiger broke down, there was a good chance that the only recovery vehicle to hand was another Tiger, thus taking that second machine from action and putting even more stress on its mechanicals.

So I no longer think the idea or even implementation of Tigger 2 was particularly bad, but do think, as is so often the case with German stuff, that the support was ill thought out and patchily available.
There are a variety of other issues regarding these big felines, maybe they'll come up here, but this seems to me their greatest failing. Maybe examine the fact your army's essentially horse-drawn more closely before pushing on with heavy vehicles that require very mechanised backup. But hey; that's what you often get in a bureaucratic competitive dictatorship.

Ramble, blah, etc.

Whoops...
Maybe there weren't enough horses handy to get it back on it's paws...

 

A most excellent, well-balanced post from Adam. I can't add anything to it and, of course, I'm a 'fan' ( not 'boy', though ! ). 'Rubbish' is too strong a word but in the Ardennes the Tiger II was more of a mobile pill-box ( even Peiper put them at the back of his Force ).

( As an aside, I never cease to be fascinated by the morale/propaganda value of both types of Tiger. If they really were 'rubbish', why was seemingly every single enemy AFV encountered by US troops in the Bulge reportedly a 'Tiger !' )

 

It depends what you mean by "Load of Rubbish"

Tanks are a combination of armour armament and mobility. The Tiger was designed to take the biggest gun under the heaviest armour operationally practical in WW2. The Germans conceived of heavy tanks originally to spearhead breakthroughs, but invested in them to combat the heavily armed and armoured Soviet tanks, such as the KV85 and JS2 . The Tiger weren't really needed to defeat allied tanks.

The Tiger II's lack of mobility and unrealiablity made them a liability in the Bulge. Peiper had them at the back of his battlegroup, which is why they appear on so many wartime newsreels. The fact that they caught up with him at La Gl;eize is a testament to the failure of his mission.

The concept of the heavy tank died out in the West within a decade of WW2. British scientists analysing tanks casualties in WW2 came to the conclusion that it was more effective investing in bigger guns/better ammunition and fire control than to add armour.

As Martin has pointed out there is a psychological moral dimension to these tanks. It was a comfort to the Germans to know they had a tank that could keep out most enemy shot and projected fear into the minds of allied tank crews.

 

Nice little summary of Sovs testing Tiger 2:
Archive Awareness - Tiger II Trials: Mobility.

It, and other performance assessments from original German trials to other allied nation's investigations, imply that you have to be a tad careful with citing the thing as having poor mobility.
The poorest of mobility of all, naturally; when it's prone to breaking down & knocking back fuel like a drunken sailor, but when running as intended not particularly lumbering or incapable by comparison to other machines of the day.
Mobility and reliability definitely connected, but not automatically the same thing. It was a big bugger with a BFG & that's a plus as well as a minus in 'tank triangle' terms - not really as silly weight-wise as Maus etc. would have been, but often cited in the same sort of way.
The Engineers of the Waffenamt were overly ambitious, politically pressed, short of materials and sometimes given too much leeway to experiment, but they were not really stupid. (Not unlike most other serious engineers behind a variety of other often criticised WW2 vehicles from an assortment of nations.)

Posting this, just 'cos somebody eventually has to on a King Tiger thread. It's some sort of byelaw I think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Acz7UxF5EgA

 

Haha yes......very familiar Wochenschau footage : a rather self-conscious looking Leutnant von Rosen 'reviewing' Tiger battalion 503 at Sennelager in September '44......

 

Nice little treatise there from Von Poop, with good follow up from Martin Bull and Sheldrake.

As for Peiper and the King Tigers at the rear, I think that was just proper planning. When you're going to make a dash through narrow twisting roads in hilly country with questionable bridges and unknown defenses (mines, AT guns, etc), it's only smart to put your least agile (heaviest) machines at the rear so as not to plug the rollbahn with one unfortunate loss in a narrow spot at the head of the column. ...Easier to pull a Mark IV out of the way than a King Tiger. Once you get into more open country, you would deploy differently so as to make better use of your heavy hitters.

Would any of you more knowledgeable and mechanically minded rogues care to comment on the transmission issues in the Panther and Tiger I and II that I mentioned earlier? It may be subjective on my part (maybe the weak link in all tanks is the transmission?), but in my reading it just seems like too many of those classes of Panzers got left on the side of the road because the transmission burned up. Is there some common fault in these systems? Is it a different type of failure in each model; in effect different types of transmissions that fail in different ways? WTF?

I'd welcome any insight into this. In my non-gearhead brain, it just seems that such an issue could/would be solved much earlier in the war, an early fix in the Tiger I, yet they seem to go on with similar problems in the Panther and then the Tiger II.

 

Oh, the tangled web of German tank transmissions...
Warning: This is a very dull subject. I love all this stuff (while still getting mightily confused myself) but am reminded of once being found by the missus slumped/upright, asleep and drooling over a particularly soporific chapter of Spielberger. Awoken to high-pitched laughter... and shame.
Taking Panther as the first example, and cribbing from said Spielberger: The Heer/Panzertruppen High command wanted simple manual transmissions, while the Waffenamt wanted automatics (suspecting that the new wave of heavier tanks would create too much physical effort in gear changes).
Manual won, and the new transmission was prototyped and put into production extraordinarily quickly. Dedicated factories for a decent enough, fairly simple and cheap-ish design.
Where the problem really lay, was in the final drive reduction, which was flimsy and not fully up to the job of steering heavy vehicles through tight turns. Production issues (a shortage of gear cutting machines) & replacing the planned steel with an inferior type was also to cause much grief further down the line.

If a driver was a tad heavy on the steering, or hammered the (really rather clever) brakes too hard, gear teeth had a tendency to snap off and that flimsy final reduction often sheared it's mountings.
An epicyclic system was tested, and found to be excellent by comparison to Spur gears, but the aforementioned lack of machinery meant it could not be produced in sufficient quantity.
To quote Spielberger directly "All attempts to improve the final drive met with failure, despite the offers of a special bonus as incentive". The only compromise improvement made was to strengthen the casing as much as space allowed, which improved things regarding alignment and mountings warping, but didn't really ever fix the issue.


As said above though, all that refers specifically to Panther's issues (I have much better books on that subject).
Tiger 2 had a somewhat different gearbox/final drive & steering, which proved more robust, and was theoretically superior in being twin radius and more inherently solid. But... big but... it still required more careful handling than the stresses of combat often allowed, and was prone to melting clutches along with snapping brake & accelerator linkages. It's issues were more to do with the sheer weight of the machine, while actually making it nimbler than Panther in terms of turn radius and lighter to handle, leading to more subtlety of control.

You pays yer money... Not every nation had a Walter Wilson and his superb epicyclic box (an easy UK boast - British transmissions were streets ahead of any other nation, and were the evolutionary basis for pretty much all future tracked vehicles), and despite so many clever buggers working in German industry, when your machining ability has been bombed to shit, ball bearings are a form of unicorn horn and steel quality was fading, they had to make compromises in trying to get such large lumps rolling and turning. Compromises that might well have paid off on more traditionally defined medium vehicles, but the stresses between track and cylinder when a vehicle weighs c.70 tons are immense, so each seemingly small compromise on Tiger 2 built up to a not-quite-fit-for-purpose battlefield result.


Spur Gear, as used in Panther's final reduction. Risky business with compromised materials on a heavy vehicle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il6bXqXVyIM

Epicyclic. Stronger, but harder to make:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7TfOdVzpk

MVTF's Panther transmission. Think of 'weak steel' and 'lack of gear cutting machines' while looking at it...:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9NCPthmTsU

Gizmology's ever-useful explanation of tracked steering systems.

 

Adam, I'm out of salutes, but thank you for that plain-speak (non-gearhead) explanation of some of these issues.

I'm still slightly addled on the subject, but not quite as much as before your post. For example, the Tiger I (which you don't really go into) came out in 42, so it would seem that the oft-mentioned transmission (and "final drive") problems could have been fixed well before allied bombing took a toll on industry. I know that the Swedes were getting rich manufacturing advanced industrial tooling and machinery (as well as high grade steel) to export to the Reich in their own ships, which were off limits to allied sea and air units. That trade went on right up until the end of the war, though after (late?) 43 getting cargo to Bremen or Hamburg was no guarantee it would get to its final inland destination by rail.

So, in short, while you have clarified the issues with rushed production and degraded industrial capacity late in the war (Panther and Tiger II), I still don't get the ongoing issues with Tiger I that showed up earlier in the war. The engine power (or lack) is clear enough. Short of some technological breakthrough, you weren't going to stuff more horsepower into the frame of the tank. Yet, the other issues evade me. Obviously, you need a really beefed up drive train to move a machine of that weight reliably, but that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, much less something beyond the abilities of a good engineer in 42/43 when they had real industrial capacity and tooling at their disposal. The tank had problems from the beginning, and they were never seriously addressed.

Sorry to run on, but when you compare the Tiger to the Sherman (for example), you see a rather fast response to the problems that turned up in combat in North Africa. The wet storage of ammo, the upgraded gun in the Firefly which was really quite brilliant considering they were adapting a gun that had no business in a tank - yet it was done so rapidly that they were able to convert 25% of the commonwealth Shermans slotted to go into Normandy, even though they had only begun converting them in January of 44. The American 76 was a bit slower, but they were designing the gun from the ground up, yet still managed to get large numbers into action during the course of the ETO.

A bad transmission/drive train seems like a much easier problem to address...

Maybe there are no clear answers to these issues since we can't really know the priorities inside the German war machine. It may be as simple as government bureaucrats micro-managing production over the inclinations of the people actually designing and building the weaponry.

 

Tiger 1...
"As late as September or October 1942, the Tiger Ausf E was called a lame duck in influential circles ... all those involved were taken by surprise by the exaggerated glorifications of the press, which produced in us as great a feeling of distaste as the earlier disparagements"
That's not some hyperbolic internet slagging off. That's Dr Erwin Aders, the head of German armour development in 1945.

You will not hear me saying anything other than you state, mate. The Allied response to fixing technological issues was better. End of.

What is worth bearing in mind re. Tiger 1 is that 'development' had pretty much stopped by the time it entered combat.
The thing had it's roots in 1936, and by the time it joined the fray, despite it's much-vaunted expression of the MBT concept made flesh, German technological activity had moved on (I think correctly) to other designs like Panther.

There's a cracking 1944 after-action report by the British called 'Who Killed Mr Tiger' (yes... we can be that twee... sorry), which details Tiger losses in Italy. (It'll be online somewhere. Possibly uploaded by me as I was obsessed with it).
It details a surprising amount of Tigers lost to basic mechanical faults and a complete German inability to recover otherwise fairly easily repaired machines - it even concludes "Mr Tiger killed himself" (apologies again for my countrymen's turn of phrase).
But... whatever snapped, broke or wore out on Tiger 1, and however much the recovery effort was flawed, the truth is that the higher echelons in Germany no longer really gave a toss about fixing those issues.
There's maybe something there about what might please the Fuhrer, and the Fuhrer likes 'new'.
Tiger 1 was an impressive beast, looked lovely in Signal and ticked certain boxes, but nobody really worked on sorting it's weaknesses.
"Our Tigers have some worrying issues Herr Kommandant." might be the query raised in the Waffenamt.
The response being: "What do you think this is Prof. Dr X? Nineteen-forty-f-ing-two? How are the trials of Panther/TigerB/E100 going?".