And welcome back.
We are having a look at the MVTF Panther,
and now we get to dive inside and see
what a factory fresh panther would have looked like.
So when you come into the commander’s position,
firstly, of course, he’s got a cupola.
It’s up to 10cm thick, and has seven persicopes
that he can look out of.
Out the front periscope is actually
a… it’s effectively a vane sight, a front post, rear notch,
and he can use this to help guide the gunner onto target.
In terms of space,
I have been a lot happier.
I am cramped on the right by the recoil guard of the 75m,
and on the left, this little attachment here
was annoying the heck out of me
until I could figure out how to move it forward.
If memory serves, this was used for a periscope,
we’re talking a submarine-type periscope,
a big long thin thing, which could be used for observation
when the vehicle was completely turret-down.
Forward of that is the control for the hatch,
and we’ll come back to that in a second.
As an example of,
I’m going to say un-necessary engineering,
is an azimuth ring around the outside of the cupola.
What this does is it’s connected to the turret ring by this
of this rod system here, it’s a system of gears
that no matter which way the turret is facing,
12 O’clock is always at 12-o’clock on the vehicle.
Now, it’s off-set a little bit, the actual reading point
is directly above the linkage.
So, with the turret now pretty much directly forward,
I look at it to my right and the number 12
is directly on top of the linkage.
But as the turret would spin around,
the cogs would keep the azimuth indicator static,
so I could see by looking at the azimuth indicator
where my turret is compared to my hull.
My immediate thought is two-fold.
Firstly, if the vehicle is moving,
you don’t need this, you can just look at the movement of the terrain
and you can tell pretty quickly which way your turret is facing.
The other is that you have a great view of the hull
from up here, so I can see hull components
around the inside so, by just looking down,
I’ve a pretty fair idea which way the tank is facing anyway.
So a little bit overcomplex, and indeed
for part of the production run Panthers lost this linkage system.
It was eventually put back a little bit later
as I recall for the infra-red system,
I could be slightly wrong on that.
Right, the hatch controls. This is a fun hatch to operate.
First thing you want to do, let’s say it’s in the open position right now,
it’s lowered into a rest which stops the hatch
from swinging around and decapitating you,
which would probably be a bad thing to happen,
very disturbing for the gunner and loader.
You first crank the hatch up
off of the rest, you can rotate the hatch forward,
this brings you to the open protected position,
so you can actually look around relatively safely
from overhead attack from snipers,
from artillery, much, much better than the periscopes
and I’m actually at a bit of a loss to think of many other WW2 tanks
that would do this.
Once you have it closed, you then lower the hatch into position,
hatch is now secure.
Now, here is why I fully believe
that only in the most extreme emergencies
would a German crewman close
the hatch all the way,
because, frankly, I think that open-protected
would be pretty good.
I’m going to start what I will call
the “Oh, bugger, the tank is on fire” test.
You will have seen how long it took me
to simply open up the hatch on a T-34,
or even squeeze through the hatch on a comet,
so imagine if you would
you’ve just had that significant emotional event
of a shell penetrating your tank,
and a fire has now started.
OK, it’s lovely and toasty and warm,
you’re on the Russian front, a little bit of flame is good,
but you decide, “Let’s get out”.
So: “Oh my God. The tank is on fire.”
Crank up the hatch…
to open protected,
come right,
get the periscope out of the way,
well, you probably wouldn’t bother
with lowering it, but then you’ve got to get out.
This takes a while.
Now, the other way out of this turret
is through that loader’s hatch in the rear,
which you saw was really thick and heavy.
Of course, the loader is probably well motivated
to get the thing open.
Once he squeezes out
the gunner and the commander are now fighting each other
to get under the gun, or if the gun is elevated,
over, whatever way they can get around,
and then get out the same hatch.
Privilege of rank, maybe the commander gets out first?
I’m not sure which is faster, for the commander
to get out this way and the gunner to get out
the loader’s hatch, suffice to say
I would call this a design flaw,
I’m not sure it is worth closing the hatch, ever.
But as I said, the open protected is good enough.
In Iraq I almost never closed my hatch, even under fire.
Only in the most significant threat did I even go to open-protected,
I strongly suspect that the German tank commanders
had a similar philosophy.
Keep your head out,
see the enemy,
don’t close your hatch.
Outside of that,
the last thing I will say is that the man’s legroom is reasonable.
He’s got two footrests, one directly underneath him,
he brings his knees inwards,
and he also has one to the right of the gunner.
So although his upper body is very cramped,
his feet are kind of OK.
The catch, as I’m looking at it, is that if he has his right leg
on the side footstep next to the gunner,
he is going to interfere with the gunner’s elevation,
which is probably a bad thing.
Anyway, that’s it for the commander’s seat,
forward to the gunner.
Moving forward to the gunner’s position
and… I’ve been in worse.
The handles are certainly big and in his face (not literally),
the commander’s leg could go here to his right,
so as long as he’s cranking
without his commander’s leg in the way he’s OK,
and he’s got a fair bit of space
between the seatback and his own back, especially, of course,
when he’s leaning forward and into the sight.
Now, earlier Panthers were built with a Tzf 12 binocular sight,
and they would be identifiable by twin holes in the mantlet.
You’ll see it on earlier Tigers as well.
This was a fixed x2.5 sight,
so not exactly a high level of magnification.
This was replaced by a selectable Tzf 12a,
this was either a x2.5 or a x5.
Some Panthers, like this one,
were built with a two-hole mantlet,
and a monocular sight.
Basically they were just building off
whatever the production line had in terms of stock for mantlets.
Panthers like this had a metal weld,
a metal plug in the second hole, it was just too much of a liability.
The sight itself, in low magnification,
and the selector is here for low mag to high mag,
if you look through it the field of vision
is… I would call it narrow.
You need to be pretty much aiming at the target in order to see it.
And heaven help you if you go to high magnification,
high magnification is purely for servicing the target.
He has no other way of seeing outside.
So if I was in, let’s say, a Sherman, there would be
a unity sight and a secondary periscope
to use in a hull-down position,
you can’t use this sight in a hull-down position..
I mean a turret-down position, forgive me.
The Russian vehicles also had a roof sight
to give the gunner more observation, lower magnification.
This gunner is absolutely relying upon his commander
putting him onto target.
OK, I think I’ve beaten that one to a pulp.
Now, the other controls.
Power traverse is conducted by means of a foot rocker pedal,
so depending on which way you rock it, the controls would go left or right.
The pedal to the left of the rockers is the coax trigger.
It’s a simple cable,
the main gun is fired by use of a trigger
on the elevation control handle.
Initially it was a fixed power traverse system,
to do a full 360 degree turn took 60 seconds.
Not ideal.
Eventually, actually, fairly soon in production,
it was changed out in the Ausf A to a variable speed power traverse
and it was dependant on the speed of the motor.
So a full circle would be 15 seconds with the engine in high revs.
It actually slowed down a little bit, I think to 18 seconds,
once you put the speed governor on it, limiting it to 2,500 rpm.
That was the coarse lay, fine lay was still done
by use of manual traverse,
and I have to say, it’s a very, very light traverse,
a very well balanced turret.
Elevation is on the gunner’s left hand,
so you can see these pipes
are going everywhere in front of him.
It’s a little bit stiff on this vehicle, I suspect because
it hasn’t been used in God-knows how long.
The sight itself is selectable by range,
so there’s a little pointer at the top,
and you dial in the range by use of the knob on the left, here.
That will raise the reticle up or down.
If you want to have a look at the range estimation
with the German sight, go ahead and look it up,
it’s all to do with mils and triangles.
The sight is graduated to 100m increments, up to 2,000m
with the Panzergranate 40/42, 3,000 for the 39/42
and as memory serves, 4,000 for HE.
The gunner’s toy, of course, is the KwK 42 7.5cm cannon.
It is noted that it’s actually much higher up
compared to the gunner.
Usually your breech for a gun is somewhere
around here, it’s level, but the breech
in this case is way up here,
the gun is mounted much higher,
or the gunner is mounted much lower
compared to a lot of other tanks.
Also as a point of trivia, the gun is mounted 6cm off-center
on the turret because the turret itself is mounted a little off-center
on the hull. I’m sure model-makers
will get annoyed by that.
Ammunition, two types of AP round.
Your standard AP was the 39/42,
this was rated as penetrating 111mm of armor
at 1km sloped at 30degrees.
The super ammo was the tungsten-cored 40/42,
that was rated at 149mm under the same conditions.
Interestingly, the Germans were kind of pessimistic
about gun performance.
We’re all familiar with the 7.5 being one of the wonder-weapons,
shall we say, in terms of armor performance.
In actuality the Germans only estimated that this gun
would punch through a Sherman’s front hull
at 100 yards.
Now, in the German defense,
firstly they assumed that the hull is angled at 30 degrees,
so it’s not a direct slope,
but on the other hand
it is an indicator as to just how tough it can be to score kills.
On the third hand, of course, what the paper says
and what reality says are two different things.
It was always a lot easier to knock out tanks
than perhaps the engineers said it should be, on both sides.
Now, if you’re curious,
the German documents rated that they would punch
through the front hull of a Churchill at 1,700m,
and a T-34’s front hull at 300m.
Of note, this gun is equipped with a bore evacuator.
Not the traditional bulge that you see on most modern tanks
so that might throw you a little bit,
but it is the compressed air system similar to that you would find
on modern French vehicles,
the pipe for which comes all the way down from the front,
comes alongside the traverse system, and disappears into a compartment
next to the shell casing collector.
We’re about done in here, final points to note:
He has an azimuth indicator here to his left side,
just in case he also doesn’t know which way he’s facing
compared to the hull, although it does seem to be in need
of a bit of recalibration right now, and finally the turret ring
could be sealed by use of an inflateable pump
for deep-water fording.
Of course, once this seal was inflated,
you couldn’t traverse the turret.
So I’m now going to extricate myself from the gunner’s position,
move over to the loader’s side.
I have to say, one advantage, now that I’m down here,
looking at the higher gun position,
is that it’s much easier, assuming that the gun is level,
for the gunner to get from one side of the tank to the other.
So maybe getting out isn’t as much of a chore
as I thought it would be from the TC’s side;
still, I suspect it’s less than ideal.
Oh my god, the tank is on fire.
Oh shi…
What the hell do those pulleys do?
Eh… something fell which should not have fallen.
Pause.
It’s a recoil system? Good lord.