The panther was the pride of the Littlefield Collection.
You may have been familiar with this vehicle
from seeing it on the TV show “Tank Overhaul”,
however, at the time the show was filmed,
the vehicle’s restoration had not yet been completed,
so now is as good a time as any
to have a look at this masterpiece of restoration.
The vehicle itself was completed
just prior to Mr Littlefield’s death to cancer.
He did get to drive it,
and it is his crowning glory.
The search to develop a replacement
for Panzers III and IV started in 1938.
The brief the engineers
were given by Inspectorate 6,
the department in charge of acquisition,
was actually very broad.
It simply said
“Make it better than the previous tanks,
and don’t make it over 20 tons.”
As a result, the engineers were free
to start developing new technologies
which eventually found their way into the Panther.
By 1941, though, it became obvious
that a 20-ton design just wasn’t going to cut it.
Amongst the improvements, a bigger gun.
Now, it wasn’t that the bigger gun was absolutely critical,
the 5cm/60 was proving
quite capable of killing T-34s,
but there was also a morale effect.
Guderian pointed out that as long as at least of some guns
in a Panzerabteilung were capable of dealing with the KVs,
the crews would feel a lot more confident.
This was an effect noted with Sherman as well,
warfare is as much a battle of wills as it is
whether or not you can actually kill each other.
In fact, it’s probably more a psychological issue.
In any case, the other factor
with the larger guns being seen on the battlefield
was that it was about time, the Germans thought,
to start putting more of a slope onto their armored vehicles.
It came down to a choice between two manufacturers,
Daimler Benz and M.A.N.
The Daimler design, the VK 30.01D,
was effectively a teutonic T-34
with interleaved roadwheels.
The MAN design was a little bit more complicated
and they weren’t entirely sure how it would work out.
Hitler thus approved
the Daimler Benz design for production.
However, a special commission was set up to,
really, thoroughly investigate the two designs a bit more
and they convinced Hitler unanimously
to change the decision
that the MAN design was better suited
to the German situation, not least
because it didn’t have to wait around
for the production of turrets and motors.
And thus Panther was born.
It had a fairly inauspicious start to its career,
a lack of reliability being chief amongst the problems.
Over time the design was changed a little bit,
the initial model, Ausf D,
being replaced by the Ausf A
with Panther number 831.
The A model was basically
an all-new turret
installed onto an effectively unchanged D hull,
and the vehicle behind me is an A.
We’ll do this of course, in the usual manner.
Exterior first, hull and turret,
and then we hop inside
and we get to see what the crew got to play with.
The front of the tank is where it got its reputation for armor.
8cm at the top,
6 down below,
although by the time Panther As were in production,
they were no longer face-hardened.
Detail points:
Only one headlight now,
as opposed to two on the earlier versions.
You can see the front part of the side hull plate,
4cm thick, and you can see
the eyelet used for towing.
Now, unfortunately,
in order to get your clevice or whatever you’re going to use in,
you have to remove the front fender.
So, the wingnuts are up top here,
which is convenient enough,
but unfortunately they seem to be regular bolts down here.
Once you have this off,
you can then attach your tow hooks,
tow ropes, what have you.
Moving a bit further in,
the driver’s direct vision port was eventually removed,
but obviously by the time this vehicle was built,
it was still being used.
Earlier panthers had
what they called the “Letterbox” machine gun port.
Part-way through the A-series production run
they replaced that with the more familiar ball mount.
But because the ball mount has an optical sight of its own,
that meant that they removed one of the periscopes
that the radio operator had to him.
Outside of that, lets hop around to the right
and have a look at the suspension.
Moving down to the running gear,
we’ll start off with the nice wide tracks,
66cm wide, in fact.
There are 86 links per side
and they are held in place,
the single, dry-pin track links,
by a retaining clip
and a little spreader pin.
There is one return roller,
or support roller, on the tank.
A lot of people will miss it,
it is right behind the sprocket wheel up here,
and as near as I can tell
its primary function is to stop the track
from folding in on itself when the tank goes in reverse.
For going forwards it doesn’t seem to be all that necessary,
though perhaps maybe it does help with the feeding onto the teeth.
The wheels.
16 roadwheels per side, interleaved.
This is an example
of an engineer’s dream, and a tanker’s nightmare.
Now, the theory is simple enough.
In order to spread the weight of the tank
over as many axles as possible, you need to have
as many wheels as possible:
It reduces single point pressure.
In order to keep the tank easy to steer
and not too long, you need to reduce
the length of the ground contact area.
Finally, in order to get the wheels
easily over bumps of different sizes,
you want to have nice big wheels.
Well, pretty much the only way you can get
big wheels in a short contact area
is going to be if you start overlapping them,
hence this design.
And it worked.
Technically speaking, this is fantastic.
You have a look at a Panther going over the bumps on the test track,
the thing is beautiful.
The problem is from the perspective of the end user.
Problem number 1:
Let’s say I want to replace this roadwheel back here.
In order to get at that,
I’ve got to pull off this one,
both wheels here,
and both wheels on the axle behind it.
And this is all unsupported track
so every time you pull a wheel off, you have to have
a couple of lads with tanker bars lifting up the track
to get the wheel off.
Secondly, and granted I haven’t seen primary evidence
though it does make a bit of sense,
the wheels are all close together,
mud will get caught between them,
so let’s say it’s a cold winter’s overnight,
the mud would freeze between the wheels
which meant that when you woke up the next morning,
you’d either have to melt the mud or break it apart with a prybar.
Now, granted, you probably need a heck of a lot of mud
to overwhelm the power of a tank in low gear,
but that said, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.
The bogies themselves,
the inner ones are the ones
primarily used with the guide horns,
there are two horns on each track link.
The roadwheels are mounted on arms
attached to double torsion bar suspension.
The arms on this side are all trailing arms,
the roadwheel arms on the left side of the tank
are all leading arms,
I guess it simplified production.
I can’t think of any tanks after WW2 which had this design.
On the Russian front, Panthers were being lost
to 14.5mm rounds punching
through the 4cm thick side armor of the lower hull.
As a result, a program was started
to develop a new, tougher tank,
the Panther II.
However, somebody had the bright idea of just putting
soft steel skirting on the sides of the hull,
and to see if that worked.
Well, they tested it against a 14.5mm rifle,
they tested it against HE rounds,
and it did indeed provide
proof against those weapons.
It was not initially designed or tested
against shaped charge rounds,
contrary to a fairly common misconception.
As a result, because the schurtzen protected the side hull upper,
and the roadwheels protected the side hull lower,
it was determined that there was no need
to put Panther II into production,
it was a hell of a lot easier
just to put Schurtzen onto the side.
As a result, Panther 1 continued in production.
Had the schurtzen failed
to provide the required protection,
Panther II would have been built.
The upper side hull is also 4cm thick,
although this one is angled.
You have recovery tools,
wire cutters, fire extinguishers…
big wooden block,
you’d put your jack on this
to stop it from sinking too far into the ground…
sledgehammer, and of course
when you get to the rear of the vehicle,
spare track link.
As we move to the back of the vehicle,
outboard we have two very large stowage boxes,
secured by the standard German army key padlock,
and it’s a similar key you’ll see on all sorts of vehicles
and padlocks throughout WW2.
Moving a bit further inboard
you can see a marker light for convoys,
two exhaust pipes.
Now, you’ll see on some Panthers
that there are two more exhaust pipes here.
These are actually cooling vents
for the exhaust manifold.
Down underneath we have various access ports,
this is the jack that you would use
to change roadwheels.
As near as I can tell,
the outermost access ports are for track tension,
because the idler is,
as you can see, on a bell crank,
and it moves outwards and inwards
as you would expect an idler to do.
However, darned if I can find out
where it is tensioned from
and the manual I have doesn’t say.
So I would assume that you would insert a tool,
maybe a worm gear a bit like a T-34.
Finally on the outside,
you can also have a good look at the thickness of the side plates,
4cm both vertical and angled on the side.
These plates go all the way from the front to the back,
so these eyelets are on the same plate of armor metal
as the eyelets at the front of the tank.
The covers with the hoops on them
indicate that underneath the engine deck
is the Maybach HL 230 P30.
Let’s see if we can open it up.
Oh, good lord, this is heavy.
Lift with your legs not with your back.
This really is heavy.
Look at this.
This is a 23 litre water-cooled V12,
cranks about 700hp at 3,000 rpm.
That said, reliability issues
led to it having a governor installed to 2,500 rpm,
so in practice it never really got to that.
Still, it was enough to bring it along
at a reasonable 55km/h before the governor was installed,
and about 47 afterwards.
Fluid capacities, 170 litres of water,
25 litres of motor oil,
and 730 litres of fuel of which about 130 was the reserve.
The engine was rated to drink
about 3.5 litres per kilometer travelled.
Well, that’s about it for this,
we’re going to close it up and move on.
Other items on the back deck,
ports for filling,
fuel on the right rear,
water on the left rear.
Two distinctive radiator fans.
Of interest, they are not of the same type.
This is a spiral shape,
this a more radial one.
It was not uncommon to find Panthers produced
with a mixture of the two types.
Cooling air would be drawn
in through the inlets
on both sides of the radiator fans.
As we move to the turret,
the back of the turret is the loader’s hatch.
Initially this was not the primary way
of getting in and out of the vehicle,
there was no handle
for people to hold onto
and it was more of an escape hatch
or an access hatch for putting in ammunition into the vehicle
without having to lift it all the way up
into the turret.
It’s a relatively complicated system to pull out,
but it does lock…
eventually,
to one side,
and it can be held in place
by a latch.
Also while I’m at the back here,
I’ll take the advantage to talk about the zimmerit,
it’s the anti-magnetic mine paste.
I don’t seem to recall
that people can exactly remember what goes into it.
It’s a sort of a mix of concrete,
zinc, and a few other things.
Combined with the rough texture,
it’s designed to make it very difficult
to attach magnetic mines to the vehicle.
Now, it turned out
that pretty much the only people
to actually use magnetic mines in Europe were the Germans,
so it was a case of protecting
against something that wasn’t necessary.
Combined with the fact
that there were reports coming in
that it was additional fire hazard,
in September ’44 the Germans decided
that it just wasn’t worth
putting zimmerit onto the vehicles any more,
so they ceased using it.
The other thing I’ll talk about while I’m here is the color scheme.
Most Panthers left the factory dark yellow
and the browns and greens
were added by units in the field.
In September ’44 they gave up doing this,
they simply left the factory in the red oxide primer,
and the units in the field
were to apply all three colors
to their taste once they received the vehicle.
The turret roof is relatively sparse.
The first thing you’ll note
is the total lack of a loader’s hatch for him to use ordinarily.
He’s pretty much confined to that one on the back wall.
This is the self-defense grenade launcher.
It was installed to replace the pistol ports
which had been installed into the side walls
in earlier vesions of the vehicle.
Forward we have the loader’s periscope,
it’s his only way of seeing what’s going on in the outside world.
You’ll note it’s angled a little bit to the side,
which makes a bit of sense
since you’d expect that the gunner is going to be looking forward anyway,
after all, that’s where his sight is.
And finally, forward of it,
is the ventilator, used for the turret ventilation system.
Next we’re going to have a dive into the cupola,
and see what the inside is like.