My search turned up a few posts about the restoration of 131, and several other posts about The Tiger (including a cool video of hand starting a tiger) in general. But nothing about the Effect/Outcome of the report that was done after its delivery to England. That is what I am wondering about.....after 131 was given a thorough "going over" what was the response of The Allies.? Did it spur them on to build bigger tanks and bigger/more anti tank guns.? Maybe they thought the Tiger (at that point) was a bit of an anomaly.? What was the general consensus of The Allies after seeing a Tiger of their own.? I would think somebody in some branch of the military must have had an... "Oh Shit" ... moment in their day when the facts of The Tiger sunk in.? Thank You hand start .....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROnb5ouBjNc
To be honest, I don't think the technical or strategic chaps who assessed the captured Tigers, at Aberdeen, Chobham etc. both during and post-war were really all that impressed. Not to say that they couldn't see it was a fine machine in many ways, but they had access to a variety of other operational reports that weren't exactly complimentary about reliability, and the overall 'concepts' of a BFG & heavy armour were hardly revolutionary by the time Tigers were being evaluated. Britain was already working towards Centurion, The US Pershing, and the Soviets ploughing their own furrow with the frying pan turreted low-profile approach starting to be considered. The detailed report prepared by the British is very much a straight description of the vehicle with the odd eyebrow raised at some technical details - they never really seem to be overtly considering the whole package as a terribly important development, more of a curiosity, and presenting it in a solid form for others to scratch their heads over. Fletcher's Tiger book that Pacifist refers to is very good for facsimiles of the reports, both actual & intelligence based. Perhaps most interestingly in this context for the 'Time & Motion' study of Tiger carried out in '47, where many of it's fighting systems & ergonomics are assessed as rather poor. The decisions about where Allied tank design was heading were being made, or had already been made, elsewhere in the technical & political arena. Mostly. As to immediate first impressions of the beastie. Yes, some slightly 'there's a biggun' reportage, but as regards the overall strategic impression & relevance; perhaps something of a 'meh' from the powers that be. Serious men looking at a big tank, but knowing that, after all, it was just another tank, not quite a wunderwaffen.
Jesus.! I am always amazed by some of the responses. I probably have a very blue-collar perspective of the war and it's weapons. I tend to see myself as an enlisted person. If I were in a Sherman, in the desert in 1943, and I saw that The Germans were starting to filed those Tiger Tanks, I would be pissed to hear that the technicians who inspected The Tiger were not "really all that impressed". But then again, I really have no idea (by wars end) how, ultimately, much of advantage the Tiger and Panther were on The Italian and Western Front.
I wouldn't read overly much into my 'not really all that impressed'. Italics applied for a reason. Yes, an interesting device, and yes, some interesting specifics, but the chaps doing the assessments were living in their real and rather specialist technical world of production, supply & grand strategy. They couldn't exactly see a new device and go 'yeah, we'll make that'. The best that can ever be achieved is a 'hmmm, we might need a response to that', and in the period the mechanised responses were already coming through, and the guns & ammunition already being issued increasingly up to the job. 'Let's not panic' is surely a desirable stance for a techie chap in this field. They also didn't look at devices in isolation. We look at Tiger, & potential developments relating to it, in hindsight; a hindsight coloured by decades of mixed propaganda and opinion on this particular weapon. They looked at it with some knowledge that Germany was falling to the back foot, knowledge of the importance of production & supply, and perhaps an increasing confidence that Germany could produce as many of these things as they could hope to, but it still wouldn't hold back the turning tide of allied strategic preparation. Again. It was only another tank. A big powerful one, but not by any definition an automatic war-winner. Now, if they could lay their hands on what Germany might be considering a year or two in the future, I don't doubt that would be considerably more interesting 'stratego-technically' (sorry, dreadful phrase) than something already deployed. Procurement production and design is pretty slow by it's very nature, even when rushed along by time of war. A glimpse at what the enemy might do next (qualified, of course, by other intelligence as to what they could actually achieve) could be far more useful in that timeline than even a solid inspection of something that was designed several years previously. A captured weapon has a context. That context adds all sorts of qualifiers to it's usefulness as a piece of information.
The Tigers encountered in Tunisia did not impress and they achieved very little. In Italy it did not attract the vastly overblown reputation that post-war fanbois tried to graft on to it. In fact the Tiger tank had no real effect in NW Europe 1944-45. The numbers employed meant it could never be a significant weapon. The N African experience showed that a 6pdr was well able to deal with a Tiger and the 17 pdr just being introduced. The British at least had anough firepower to see of fthe Tiger. You can not compare a Tiger to a Sherman and then declare the Tiger to be the better tank. One was a medioum and one was a heavy. They were designed to do different things and expecting the Sherman to match the Tiger in armour and firepower is absurd. Why not compare them another way. If the Tiger was the standard German tank how far do you think their Panzer Divisions would advance during The Bulge? Why not use the latter comparison so we can declare the Sherman the winner? The Sherman v Tiger comparison is as silly as comparing a Destroyer to a Battleship and coming to the conclusion every navy should only field fleets of Battleships.
Again, I do not have the knowledge that many of you guys do.....but I always, kind of, thought The Germans should have stuck with the MkIV Tank.....with as much armor and as much gun as it would take. Those seemed to be a very reliable and produce-able tank. You wonder what they could have made with the time, efforts, and steel that was used to make both iterations of the Tigers.?
If I recall correctly the US doctrine in battle was that the tanks are not used in 1:1 combat. Was it Patton?
No competent military officer since before days of Sun Tzu has sent out his men seeking one on one fights. Save those damn WW1 pilots. The smallest doctrinal US tank force was a 5 tank platoon that was designed to work together. If required they would split into a 3 and 2 tank group but that was due to tactical situations.
Sorry for the double post but I realized I should clarify my point. Patton like most high ranking officers in the tank doctrine business was originally horse cavalry. This is the during and post WW1 cavalry. The concept of a charge against the enemy front was eradicated by WW1. There would still be charges but on the enemies flank and rear. The cavalry had fallen back on their other strengths that of maneuverability and speed or as Patton's famous speeches stated. "We're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass." So the American priority was not a tank that could assault a enemy hard point but one that could flank it and assault a weak point in the line. Reliability and the ability to fire on the move was more important to them than frontal armor. As has been noted Patton was not terribly good in a stand up fight. His personal training had been entirely about maneuvering and exploiting the enemies weakness.
One other point was the US Army doctrine that tanks should be engaged primarily by tank destroyers rather than our own tanks. George Marshall and Leslie McNair were both advocates of this.
I would disagree with you on this point The Sherman's ability to fire "on the move" was not better than many other tanks, and was not more important than frontal armor. Of much greater early doctrinal importance was the ability to fire a decent sized HE round.
Checking dates. There's another evaluation issue here, in that 131 was turned over to the DTD after display at Horseguards, on 20th October 1943, and the basic report ('General Description') appears to have been first published in January '44, with Peter Gudgin's chaps still working on the main technical assessment until '46. The '43 Intelligence summary really is apparently just that, a summary. Takes a long time to dismantle a vehicle from scratch, take notes, double check, decide what's important, etc. Centurion Mk1 was specified in '43, with first prototype available in April '45. A 'heavy'. 17pdr. Merrit-Brown Gearbox. Horstmann suspension. What could Tiger have added to that immensely successful design? Not a lot really, other than maybe a few engineering details. The Cent went on quite nicely for 40-50 years. Not so many slab-sided interleaved wheel awkward maintenance and quite mechanically delicate Tiger clones in the postwar years. One of the first usable heavies to the field, maybe, but not quite the genetic precursor to where armour design actually went. 'Conceptually' correct for the future (A BFG & a stab at MBT), but mechanically, less so.
The gyro-stabilizer was certainly a step in that direction. Though apparently according to this not a terribly successful one. http://www.ww2f.com/topic/32722-main-gun-stabilizer-revealed/ . Edit: Damn old school popular science. I just learned that America bred honey bees to produce a strain with longer tongues. To aid the war effort.
It was a baby step, and IIRC, was intended to quickly return the gun to it's aiming point after movement to a new position. The Sherman manual specifies firing on the move only in an emergency, if the target is less than 600 yards, and only while crossing flat terrain(basically, if you are not on a road, don't do it.) Don't forget that the M-3 Lee/Grant also was equipped with gyros
Time for a slew of captured Tiger images I feel. GERMAN TANKS AND MILITARY VEHICLES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. © IWM (STT 9743)IWM Non Commercial Licence THE BRITISH ARMY IN TUNISIA 1943. © IWM (NA 2981)IWM Non Commercial Licence THE BRITISH ARMY IN TUNISIA 1943. © IWM (NA 2640)IWM Non Commercial Licence WINSTON CHURCHILL DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN NORTH AFRICA. © IWM (NA 3277)IWM Non Commercial Licence THE BRITISH ARMY IN TUNISIA 1943. © IWM (NA 3693)IWM Non Commercial Licence THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE UNITED KINGDOM 1939-45. © IWM (H 34426)IWM Non Commercial Licence GERMAN TANKS AND MILITARY VEHICLES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR. © IWM (STT 6113)IWM Non Commercial Licence THE CAMPAIGN IN ITALY 1944. © IWM (NA 17525)IWM Non Commercial Licence THE CAMPAIGN IN ITALY 1944. © IWM (NA 17526)IWM Non Commercial Licence
That picture of Churchill, standing atop a Tiger, is very intriguing. I assume that is an 88 round he is cradling in his arms.? Poppy.....yeah, I kind of thought the same thing....."Jesus...look at these things".!
I thought #2 was watching for Allied aircraft? Can someone tell me what the three canisters on each side of the turret are for? Thanks.
