I heard this story yesterday "After the war the british army got 10 panthers for trials and evaluation.

Nine of them burst into flames on starting the ignition, they had to get a german POW out to see what the problem was. He said basically when you stop them you have to stall them in gear or the fuel rushs back up the lines and a spark ignites it.

The steering was also awful, most crews skid turned then as using the proper steering threw the tracks off.

The veteran in question said 'we were always fighting the tank and trying to make it work' .

Similarly late war german tanks lacked automatic turret traverse as they ran out of copper for the wiring!" I always thought the Panther was an excelent tank untill I heard this. But what I am wondering is; which of the Panthers was the best? Ausf A, Ausf D,or Ausf G. Did one of them have a better engine? Which had the best speed?

Well, the Panther D, A, G (that's the cronological order, don't ask me!) underwent several modifications, naturally the Ausf.G, being the final one, was supposed to be the best model.

In very short terms, the D. model had only a very simple slit for it's hull machine gun, A used a ball mount, and G ditto plus improved armour arrangement including on the gun mantlet in order to avoid a shot trap.

IIRC the engine was the same.

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If I remember right the bulk of Panthers officially tested by the British postwar were actually assembled by REME in the immediate aftermath of Germany's occupation. The 'G' example on display there is certainly a survivor of this programme. (Hence there are high hopes it'll get a running restoration as it's all pretty complete, just somewhat neglected... This could mean 3 fully restored Panthers & the Gibb Jagdpanther residing in the UK!)

Interestingly the French gave their postwar Panthers a transmission life of 150 KMs, there were certainly reliability/maintenance issues to all models, not least the difficulty of changing major drivetrain assemblies when they failed. (There's a very good point by point asessment made by the French in Spielberger which contains the comment that Panther is; "in no way a strategic tank" based on these drivetrain weaknesses.) There's no mention of the fire thing in later/post war Panther testing reports that I have, though of course it was something of a 'feature' on the first models.
Might be worth checking the Pantherfibel to see if any warning was given to crews on routines relating to this:

Panther fibel.pdf (6.6meg pdf.)

Cheers,
Adam.

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