The interior looks beautiful and the net result should be exceptional once the hull and turret are married up at some point in the future. The work that has gone into this project is immense. The attention to detail is exceptional; especially when you consider so much of it will be permanently hidden from view. This is the essence of the very best conservation work. This tank was the first Tiger to be captured intact by British or U.
Damage is still visible on the mantlet, superstructure front plate and turret lifting boss. The crew abandoned the tank and it was recovered the next day and refurbished using parts from other vehicles. The trend to design bigger and more powerful tanks is universal but the results are not always impressive.
Trials of prototypes in reveald that the Henschel design was the more practical and production began in July By this time specifications had changed and the tank would weigh in the region of 57 tonnes, and mount an 88mm KwK 36 gun behind a maximum mm of armour on the turret front. It was a formidable combination. The gun was very effective and extremely accurate while the armour was proof against most contemporary anti-tank guns at anything but the closest range.
Yet it was not all progress. The engine had a nasty habit of catching fire while the gearbox, if subjected to great stress, was liable to break down. If this happened the repair crew had to lift the turret off to get at it. For all that the Tiger was regarded as formidable. It saw action in Russia, Tunisia, Sicily, Italy and north west Europe although production was limited to just 1, tanks and it was feared by all Allied tank crews, which gave the Panzer forces a considerable pyschological advantage.
Even so it would probably be fair to say that more Tigers were lost through mechanical failure than combat action. The Panther was not as thickly armoured, nor as heavily armed, as tanks such as the Tiger but was probably a much more balanced design. It was one of the fastest German tanks, highly manoeuvrable and equipped with an accurate gun. Its worst defect was a propensity to catch fire if the engine backfired. The Model G was the last main production variant of Panther and our exhibit was one of a group built, under British control, at the end of the war.
These were tested in Britain and Germany and may have contributed to the design of the British Centurion. The camouflage scheme is similar to that used on Panthers leaving the factory in the last months of the war. A basic undercoat of red with other colours rapidly applied. This example is at the Tank Museum Bovington. The Luchs or Lynx was essentially a variant of the Panzer II although by the time it first appeared, in August , the role of the light tank in German service had changed.
Faced with the atrocious mud of the Russian front the Germans elected to use tracked, instead of wheeled reconnaissance vehicles and the Luchs was the main type. Vladimir suggested that the tank had been blocking the spring and the water had found a new route. He was absolutely right — the BT-7 was discovered 10 metres 33ft away from the current spring. The Yakushevs have a modest flat at the site of their workshops, allowing them to live on site Credit: Anton Skyba.
This was almost 20 years ago. Since then, Vladimir and his sons have taken dozens of armoured vehicles and almost every one has been restored to working condition. The Yakushevs use a rotation scheme. The family has a small flat with a kitchen and a big common room with beds while they are based in the workshops. Some of the tanks are remarkably well preserved after more than 70 years in swamps Credit: Denis Aldokhin.
One son joined him in , and the other in The Yakushevs are not the only tank hunters in Belarus. Other amateurs also search for the lost vehicles. Only two teams have such a licence. The Yakushev family and a specialist in renovation, Alexander Mikalutski, are the first. The second team, an amateurs club called Poisk, which is where Vladimir and Mikalutski started to learn their trade almost 20 years ago. We thought, we would lift up tanks, renovate them and get money for this.
But we had worked in Poisk for nine years and only received a salary for one year. Now the team works for an official fixed salary. The hobby has turned into their job, but the work itself feels like a holiday. The main object of these tank hunts is the armoured vehicles that became mired in marshes, many of which fell off bridges into the soft ground. Those that slipped underneath the water were preserved.
If it was possible to lift up and fix it, it was removed by a maintenance battalion. The Germans were especially good at it. If they could not pull out the tank, it was filled with explosives and destroyed to stop it falling into enemy hands.
Throughout this period, the hunters lifted up only five tanks that were intact. Often they have to assemble a working model made up of pieces from several tanks. One Czech vehicle, now at the history of engineering in Tolyatti in Russia, was built from three separate vehicles. The crew collect data for months before they raise a tank. They find help in archives and from older residents, some of whom were children during the war.
Then they wander through forests and marshes searching for machines. The ground around the tanks has to be drained before they can be lifted out Credit: Denis Aldokhin. Vladimir has the most experience of walking through the mire. When it is very deep they put on chemical protection suits.
They use metal detectors and feel into the mire with special 8m-long 26ft probes. You reach the place and then you have to crawl back They often spend nights near the marshes in a van.
Many tanks lie in the vast expanses of swamp and forest in Belarus Credit: Denis Aldokhin. There is a different problem in the summer. It seems mosquitoes will overturn the van. Insect repellents do not help in marshes. The conditions are extremely difficult in hot weather: they have to work in thick jackets and hats even when it is 30C because of clouds of insects. The Ministry of Emergency Response officers drain the area the tank is stuck in.
But the Germans believed that it could have all gone differently, if only they had won the war early. The German army therefore spent the interwar era looking for ways to increase its mobility, to hit its enemies faster and harder early on in the fighting, and to make sure it would win some future, hypothetical battle of the Marne.
The tank seemed to be one possible way to keep armies moving and to avoid a future stalemate. The German search for mobility differed fundamentally from what was taking place elsewhere. The interwar period was the age of the breathless military enthusiast, singing the praises of this or that new weapon or doctrine—tanks, strategic bombing, airborne troops—and swearing that technology had changed war forever. By and large, the Germans were immune to such happy talk. The nature of war had not changed, they believed.
Like their patron saint and philosopher of war, Karl von Clausewitz, they believed that war "was an act of violence to force our enemy to do our will.
Indeed, German officers prided themselves on avoiding such Einseitigkeit one-sidedness , and to call someone "one-sided" was the harshest criticism in the German military vocabulary.
This disdain for one-sidedness tempered German enthusiasm for the tank. The Germans could see that for all the potential of the tank, it also had serious weaknesses. Tanks were better at attacking than defending; they couldn't hold ground on their own; and if they came across unsuppressed enemy artillery or antitank guns, they became easy targets for enemy fire. Tanks could succeed, but only if they worked in harmony with the other weapon systems in a close, cooperative, combined arms arrangement: the tank to take ground, the infantry to hold it, and the artillery to suppress enemy weapons that might harm the tank.
With these views as their bedrock, the Germans spent the interwar era carrying out a comprehensive series of maneuvers, exercises, and wargames, all designed to test the possibilities of combined arms mechanized warfare. With Germany still officially disarmed, these test runs involved faux tanks—trucks with papier mache or cardboard tank chassis placed over them. Even with these constraints, the Germans found that establishing close cooperation between the tank and the other arms was tougher than it sounded.
Lutz and Guderian soon uncovered what we might call tank warfare's "first principle": in order to support the tank, the other arms had to be mobile enough to keep up. Infantry and artillery had to move as rapidly, reliably, and relentlessly as the tank, and chaining the tank to the pace of the infantry was a fundamental mistake.
All well and good, but one element was still missing. One of the major problems that Lutz, Guderian, and the entire officer corps had experienced in World War I—a problem that contributed mightily to the eventual stalemate—was the realm of command and control.
The telegraph had been a great technological breakthrough back in its day, but it was far too rigid to control mass armies spread out over hundreds of miles of terrain.
Identifying and locating every enemy unit in the field was often impossible, and in fact it was hard enough figuring out where your own units were, especially if they had invaded enemy territory or were in contact with the enemy. Providing friendly units with up to date orders based on the current situation was impossible. With mechanized units careening around the battlefield at speed, and aircraft now inserted into the mix, command and control was lurching towards chaos.
Thankfully, a new technological solution was at hand: the radio. While the tank was the obsession of most contemporary military discourse, radio was the real military breakthrough of the period. The days of the primitive Morse code were over, replaced by direct voice messages from the commander to subordinate and vice versa, in something approaching real time. The Germans had no monopoly on radio technology, but they recognized its military importance more clearly than anyone else.
The hypothetical situation, a surprise Czechoslovakian invasion of Germany from the southeast, with German units hastily assembling in the theater from all over the Reich, challenged the participants to get a corps-level radio net up and running within a single day.
The game showed how important it was that the radioman be more than a mere technician. He had to immerse himself in the mission and in the overall operational situation, so that he could separate the wheat from the chaff, prioritize key messages, and delay those less pressing until later. The Germans learned one other lesson from their radio exercises. The radio was more than a novelty, a desirable asset, a shiny toy. For command and control of the new mobile formations, it was absolutely indispensable.
Tank warfare on the scale envisioned by the Germans was unthinkable without radio. By the early s, the Germans were well on their way to designing a new military formation that met all their criteria.
The last piece of the puzzle was political. Adolf Hitler came to power in January , destroyed the Weimar Republic within months, and created a one-party Nazi dictatorship.
In May , he announced German rearmament; technically, he declared that Germany would no longer feel bound by the disarmament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. He created a new armed force, the Wehrmacht: an army of 36 divisions, a sizable Luftwaffe, or air force, and a small but modern navy.
Criticizing Hitler as a military commander and strategist is like shooting fish in a barrel, but he did have a certain amateur's intuition in this early period of his rule. As an old ground-pounder and trench warrior, he was naturally interested in the tank. In early , Guderian staged a demonstration of modern weapons for the new chancellor. For 30 minutes, Hitler sat and watched the various units go through their paces: a motorcycle platoon, an anti-tank platoon of 37mm guns, the German standard at the time; one platoon of light armored cars, followed by a platoon of heavy ones; and finally, a platoon of light tanks.
The tank that Hitler saw was the German Mark I. Originally intended as a trainer, it actually saw service in the field through the early years of the war. It was no King Tiger! Its armament consisted of two machine guns in a small turret on the right hand side of the vehicle, and its armor 8 to 15mm could barely protect the two-man crew against small arms fire. But according to Guderian, Hitler was beside himself, repeatedly exclaiming, "Now that I can use!
That's what I want! True to the German belief in combined arms, each division paired a Panzer brigade with a motorized infantry brigade. The Panzer brigade contained four battalions, each with a strength of tanks.
Counting command tanks, the division had some in all, enough to satisfy even the most diehard tank fanatic. The infantry component was just as strong, however, consisting of a two-battalion motorized infantry regiment and a motorcycle battalion.
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