In this, I hope not too long, video which has been sponsored by Audible (but more of that later)
I shall be talking about a late World War Two German tank destroyer called the "Hetzer".
And straight away, even now, I know that there are people watching who will be thinking to themselves,
"Oh dear, oh dear, he's called it a Hetzer, flaunting his ignorance there. That's not its official title you know."
Well, yes, I am going to be calling it a Hetzer because -
it's a good name. It's a good name. Hetzer, it's short, it's familiar, it's characterful.
I know it works because people who know about World War Two vehicles all know what is meant when Hetzer,
that word, is said. And it's the name that I was first introduced to this vehicle with.
And also it's quite characterful in its meaning. I've heard it translated loads of ways though,
malicious agitator, chaser, baiter, hassler, harrier, rabble-rouser and so forth.
And so ... there's no exact it seems English equivalent.
Although Hetzer and hassler I suppose are reasonably similar in sound.
Anyway, it's a good name.
And I also know that it's an authentic name in that there were people in World War Two,
including those in the German Army, calling it the Hetzer at the time. So that's all right then.
But yes, okay, officially it was the Jagdpanzer 38, or to be a little bit more German about it,
Jagdpanzer acht und dreißig.
Or to be even more pedantic, it was the Jagdpanzer 38(t).
The "t" ... standing for the German word for Czechoslovakian,
because this was based on an earlier Czech tank called the Type 38, the Light Tank or LT 38. Whew.
Anyway, let's get into Bovington Tank Museum.
It's a German tank destroyer that came out late in the war and it was issued to infantry divisions.
Guderian asked for something like this, he wanted his men to have something with a bit of punch to take on the enemy.
And this was a tough nut to crack. From the front it's got 60mm armour,
which as you can see is very well sloped. So from the front this has really good armour.
From the sides and rear not anything like so good.
It's got a 75mm gun, which was not devastating but decent, and it could do the job.
And it was much more powerful than the gun that was on the 38(t),
which was the Czechoslovakian tank that this is based on.
If you look at the wheels down the side,
then if you know what a 38(t) looks like you'll recognise, "Oh, that's just the running gear of a 38(t)."
But there was a little bit more work they had to do to convert because they had to make the entire thing a little bit wider.
And even so, can you see with these sloping sides and a lack of hatches or periscopes and so forth,
there's very little room or visibility in this. How can you see what you're doing?
The driver and the gunner and the loader all had to fit into the same bit of space at the front of the vehicle,
so there really wasn't very much [room] for them.
And the gunner and the loader ended up on the same side of ... the gun, which is not very convenient.
Ergonomically this was a nightmare. It steered like a cow.
... Although they were quite reliable, because they were based on the 38(t) running gear.
So it had at least that going for it, but it really was ...
you're blind in this thing. You see there are no vision ports or anything along the side,
there's only that tiny thing at the front.
And this machine gun here, which is the heavy barrelled version of the MG34 designed specifically for tank use.
It was a bit heavy for an infantryman to carry,
but having a heavy barrel was good because it could absorb more heat.
That's actually quite unusual in that it's remote-controlled.
That could be fired from the inside of the vehicle for self-defence.
And that's all it had though. You see there's no bow machine gun, no coaxial machine gun.
So if an enemy got here then you've got nothing, you can't see him,
you can't depress that gun to shoot him. You've got no pistol ports, no way of seeing him. You're pretty doomed.
So this was a bit of a mobile coffin, but it was reliable and it did do the job. It had a fairly decent gun.
So ... it's an example of many, many tanks like this,
... they cobbled [them together] during the war, making the best of a bad situation.
So this is a recycled Czechoslovakian tank into a very small and cramped tank destroyer.
One snag with that rooftop machine gun was that it couldn't be reloaded from inside the vehicle.
So, once you've fired [off blindly] your 50 or 75 rounds in the drum magazines,
then what can you do? You're going to have to get out onto the top and reload it in an exposed position.
And whilst you're firing blindly, of course you're very unlikely to hit anything.
Now I've read that this rooftop machine gun was popular with the troops, which I can believe.
I can imagine for instance if you've been ... recruited quite late in the war and stuck into this
hotchpotch of a vehicle, you might think, "I don't want to have to expose myself on the roof of this thing,
I want to stay hidden. That's why we're deployed, we're in a hedge, right? We want to stay hidden.
I don't want to be seen, I'll just ... work these controls from the inside, brrrppp brrrpp.
Oh, it makes a really loud noise, doesn't it? Let's just hope it just scares the enemy away."
I can understand why people didn't want to get up out there and fire it actually looking down the sights.
But just because something's popular doesn't mean it's effective.
There's no gunner's sight either side of the mantlet, no piercings anyway.
Essentially, that's it, that's what you've got to see the world through. Good luck.
The proper name for the gun was the Pak 39 L/48 75.
Right, I suppose I should explain what all that means. Well Pak is an abbreviation for Panzerabwehrkanone.
"Panzer", it means armour, but it's often used to mean tank.
And "abwehr" is sort of defence as in Ministry of Defence, army sort of thing.
And "kanone" is well, cannon.
So it's an armour or a tank defence cannon. It's an anti-tank gun.
And 39 was the year in which it was approved, designed, whatever.
L/48, right. L/48 refers to the 75. 75 is the millimetre calibre of the barrel.
So ... the bore going down the barrel is 75mm in diameter.
So that's also the diameter of the shell that comes out of the barrel.
And L/48 is the number of times that 75 divides into the length the barrel.
So if you multiply 75mm by L/48 you get 3,600mm, which was the length of the barrel.
Generally speaking, they try to make barrels as light and as short as they can get away with.
But if you want a high-velocity gun, you want an awful lot of the energy in the propellant
pushing the shell up the barrel to transfer its energy to ... that shell.
So if you have a very short barrel, a lot of the energy just goes flying out the front of that barrel
before it's actually done its work accelerating the shell. So you need a longer barrel.
But you don't want it too long because then the energy is expended and then you've just got an
unnecessarily long barrel and a little bit of friction and so forth even slowing the thing down.
So they did their calculations, and they worked out that the shortest barrel
that they could get full value of the propellant out of was an L/48.
How would you like to be in this thing? There's nothing on the right-hand side.
That's an engine cover there. There's nothing on the left-hand side.
There's no hatch or anything like that at the front. What you've got
is this hatch here.
That's it, seriously. One hatch in the roof for both gunners and the driver,
and the rooftop MG gets in the way of that a bit.
The commander has a tiny two part hatch with a periscope in the way of the front part. This thing's a death trap.
No commander's cupola. Inside the thing the commander can see the backsides of the men in front of him,
and if he's lucky possibly something through his periscope.
That is the [site of the] sight which moves left and right in that arc,
along with the gun. Obviously it's missing the optics there.
Now it seems that this design was actually inspired by a Romanian design.
Only prototypes of this were made, and it was called the Mareșal.
Now granted, that man is wearing a terribly large hat, but don't be too fooled by the scale of that.
You can see the size of the overall man and the one next to him, and so you can see that that vehicle is tiny.
The Germans looked at that and thought, "Do you know, they've got something though.
It's low, it's going to be fairly easy to armour quite well at the front, and you can put a reasonably big gun in it.
And maybe there's a way we can make this cheaply.
Ah, I know! Why don't we get old 38(t)s and convert. Or use the same factory setups
to make new things but with a lot of the same tools. Yeah, that could work."
And so they did. Now they started developing it in 1943 in Prague,
which is of course the capital of Czechoslovakia, at the (here we go),
Böhmisch-Mährische Maschinenfabrik
(or BMM plant as most tank enthusiasts refer to it).
And it wasn't until about April '44 that they really started putting these into mass production.
And they made something like 2,500. A few more perhaps, but not many more than 2,500 of them.
And actually, while I say that, after the war that the Czechs carried on producing them and they called it the ST-I.
And then they sold it to the Swiss who renamed it the G-13. So there you go, this vehicle has no shortage of names.
The vehicle the Hetzer replaced was the open topped Marder series, like this.
These also put a 75mm gun on the chassis of a Czech Type 38,
but the Marders had thinner armour, a higher profile, and of course an open top.
So some considered the Hetzer to be safer.
But I think that one thing that keeps crews safe is an ability to see.
Also being on the side that's winning is quite handy, and by the time anyone got into a
Hetzer on the battlefield, the Germans weren't winning.
Though it was decently armoured at the front, the sides were typically only 20mm thick.
And the top was only 8mm thick. So, yeah, getting on for bulletproof, but if anything
substantial hit it there that vehicle was in big trouble.
And the front suspension, of course, had to bear the weight of all this extra armour at the front,
and the big gun which stuck out the front as well.
And early versions apparently drooped quite markedly at the front.
They did redesign the suspension and they kept upgrading it.
But even the later versions were struggling under this new weight.
The Hetzer weighed 15.8 metric tons, ... (in combat that is),
which was nearly double the weight of the 38(t) upon which it was based.
So it was always going to be struggling in that department.
Note the scissors periscope sticking out of the commander's hatch near the back.
There was a plan to add a 360 degree rotating periscope to give him at least some all-round vision,
but they never acted on this.
Now the Hetzer was not fast. If you look at a lot of sources,
they all say that it clipped along at a fairly sprightly 26 miles per hour. That doesn't seem all that slow.
For you metric fans that's about 41 kilometres per Imperial hour. Sorry to mix Imperial and metric.
And that seems to be a reasonable lick, though there were of course plenty of tanks that were faster.
But that's under ideal conditions on a good road, cross-country it was not that great shakes.
And it was not considered to be fast enough to keep up with motorised infantry.
So really it was reduced to a lurk-in-bushes, a shoot-and-scoot role.
But in that particular role it was perfectly adequate.
It had a gun that could knock out most of the things that the Allies had at the time.
And it was reasonably small, so easy to hide.
But I wouldn't have liked to be in this thing when you had to do the scoot bit.
Turning around really slowly and awkwardly and blindly,
and then exposing your thin rear armour to the enemy as you trundled slowly away.
But anyway, it was credited with a fair few 'kills', if you like. Although you could say that in terms of war effort
that was a little bit pointless, because this was sort of spiteful sniping at the enemy
that was by this stage in the late war rolling forwards and inevitably going to win.
So yes, ... they achieved a few spiteful bits of attrition against the rolling-forward front of the
massively overwhelming enemy, both on the East and on the Western Front.
About 50 Hetzers were made into flamethrower vehicles, or Flammpanzers, which saw use on the Western Front.
This is a model, clearly. I couldn't find a copyright-free image of the real thing.
Now I would not want to have to fight in one of these. We've got very little in the way of escape hatches.
One or maybe two crew members can see forwards, but you're otherwise blind.
And you are inside with the flamethrower fuel with thin side armour and you have to get very close to the enemy.
Not flipping likely!
Somebody sent me this. ... I have to say it's a lovely colour, so thank you very much.
And it's quite a good fit as well. So it'll come in really handy for when I do those
desert warfare things.
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And one of the things that you might care to look at, because you're watching this video,
so you're obviously interested in tanks and possibly interested in the Russian Front,
because I noticed that one of the books there was a war memoir called "Tank Rider", by Bessonov.
Evgeni Bessonov I think his name was.
This is a work of which I was aware many years ago when I first encountered it.
And I tell you it's a hair-raising tale. How much of it is true? I don't know, I've only got him as a source.
But there were, I'm sure, plenty of people around who survived the same events that he lived through,
and so would have been in a position to contradict him had he just made loads of stuff up.
... He's fighting as a tank rider, as the title suggests.
And so the Russians didn't have enough lorries to move all their soldiers in World War Two,
so infantry often rode on the back of tanks. Not into battle generally, just towards the battle.
Once you're going into battle you really don't want to be on the back of a tank.
The tank is a large noisy thing, so everyone can see it and everyone can hear it, and it attracts fire from all quarters.
So you really don't want to be on the back of that. You want to get off it as quickly as possible once the enemy
makes its presence known. And you want to be within jumping range of a ditch to keep yourself safe.
Anyway, so he was an infantryman tank rider and, yes, he lived through some pretty hair raising battles.
He wasn't just in danger from the Germans you understand,
people on his own side kept putting him in harm's way.
I don't know that any of them tried to kill him directly, but they seemed to be very keen to give him
near suicidally dangerous missions to carry out against the enemy,
in the hope that the Germans would do the job for him, yikes. Yes anyway, so.
There you go.
You can click the link in the description and it's an easier way to get to the site.
Now, right, back to the action.
The Polish rebels of the Warsaw Uprising captured one of these,
and they called it twat, or "Chwat", (saying it in the proper Polish way),
which means a bold and resourceful person. Apparently it's quite an archaic term.
Anyway, it defended a barricade near the Post Office.
And outside the Army Museum in Warsaw you can see a Hetzer today, although not one in the mintiest of condition.
This particular Hetzer was scuttled by its crew,
who were probably the Wehrmacht 73rd Infantry Division, on January the 17th 1945 near a place called Błonie.
Possibly it broke down or ran out of fuel first,
and they chose not to hand it to the enemy in a useable one-careful-owner format.
This view here shows you how incredibly cramped it was in there.
Four men squeezed into that forward fighting compartment filled almost entirely with gun,
and somehow 41 rounds of armour-piercing ammunition.
Whatever they used to blow it up did a thorough job.
The engine decks are missing entirely and the thin armour of the back half is just blown apart.
Shattered in places and bent in others.
No, that disc at the back is not an escape hatch, that's the main air intake for the engine.
So you're not getting out that way.
Looks as though they could attach a muzzle brake or something to the barrel,
but I've never seen an example of a German World War Two Hetzer in war service with a muzzle brake.
So there you have it, the Hetzer. Now a lot of people looking at this think,
"Well, it's got a cool name, and it looks pretty cool."
And do you know it did do its job, so well done to the Hetzer.
And people like making little models of it, and painting it up, and sticking it on the wargaming table,
and rolling dice and so forth.
But,
I am very, very (and frankly, I think you should be very, very too)
glad that neither of us ever had to fight in this thing.
Because you're in a thinly-armoured (apart from the front) little cramped box packed with ammunition.
And if you're in that vehicle at all, then you're at a stage in the war when you're losing.
So yeah, if you get in a time machine, go backwards, don't get into a Hetzer, that's a really, really bad idea.
But one thing that was really good about the Hetzer was they were really cheap.
And crews just love that.
[ Three Trappist Hetzers were going down the lane, when one turned to the others and didn't say anything. ]
Lindybeige!
[ Q: How can you tell whether there is a Hetzer in your bed? A: By the H on its pyjama pocket. ]
[ Q: What has six legs and would kill you if it fell on you out of a tree? A: A Hetzer with a dead fly glued to it. ]