The Jagdpanther is probably the most impressive German tank destroyer design of the Second
World War because it has that great combination of firepower with the PAK 43 88 millimetre
gun and the proven Panther tank chassis which is reliable and also very well defended. The
best tank destroyer of the German army of the Second World War.
So this is an Sd Kfz 173 Jagdpanzer tank which
means 'hunting panther' in the literal translation,
it was named by Hitler himself. It's based on the Panther chassis and is a tank destroyer,
not a tank because it hasn't got a turret.
The idea for the tank destroyer principally comes about in the German army because they
are much easier to manufacture and cheaper to manufacture than turreted vehicles, much
less moving parts. The Germans by the late stage in the war when these are deployed are
on the strategic and tactical defensive. So there's no real need for a tank to be able
to fire in all directions at the same time because they're waiting for the Allies to
come on to them. So instead of producing more and more turreted tanks as the war goes on
instead, they make more and more of these tank destroyers, these Panzerjäger as they're
called, and Hitler comes up with the idea of placing a heavy 88 millimetre gun on a
Panther tank chassis, another really good really well-designed tank, and because it
uses this proven design as the basis of everything else that's built up on top of it it becomes
a very reliable gun platform. The best tank destroyer of the german army of the second
world war.
"And there silhouetted coming down the road behind us was just about the largest tank
I'd ever seen. Turned out to be a German Jagdpanther
and the muzzle of the 88 millimetre which
these Jagdpanther carried and that muzzle seemed to come on and on across the ride forever
and ever."
Initially, there are supposed to be 150 of these produced every month, but fortunately
for the Allies, by the end of the war only about 400 have been actually built and that's
primarily because of the strategic bombing campaign against the German factories which
cuts back their war production cuts back German war production to about, in this case, to
less than a quarter of the number of vehicles that were supposed to be manufactured.
The Jagdpanther was armed with an 88 millimetre PAK 43 gun which is a development of the very
very famous German 88 of the Second World War with an even higher muzzle velocity than
the earlier versions which are used on the Tiger tank. This was also used on the King Tiger,
the huge battle tank used right towards the end of the was, so this was in effect the
best German tank killer gun they had.
"Our second in command was called Sydney Cuthbert and he came full-on with one of these Jagdpanthers
which you remember had the very latest 88mm in them. And his tank was hit, the tank split
and the turret blew off the tank and his crew
were completely and he were completely incinerated."
The significant advantage that the Jagdpanther has got is the degree of slope on the front
of the vehicle if the enemy is coming at you straight on which is 30 degrees. This means
that a lot of incoming enemy shells will simply ricochet off and won't even attempt to penetrate
the armour. The Jagdpanther's frontal armour is 80 millimetres thick rising to 100 millimetres
around the gun mantlet, which is very, very thick for armour of this type of the war and
on the sides it's still 5 centimetres thick which is still pretty damn good.
The first time the Allies come across this is at the end of the Normandy campaign just
as the Allies are breaking out into the interior of France and there's only a very, very small
number sent over, about 12 to 16, sent over to face the thousands, literally thousands,
of Allied Sherman tanks that are coming in the opposite direction. But even though it
appeared in very, very small numbers there was an immediate impression on the British
armed forces. This was another vehicle, like the Panther, like the Tiger, it was another
vehicle that the Allies couldn't really deal with because it was too good.
"I mean there was eleven of us went over the hill and there it was picking us off. We had
no answer to them, we couldn't see where they was coming from. Oh, it was a marvellous tank.
A very sloping glacis front and then the gun was fixed and it can only go 15 degrees. So
if we had known they couldn't have picked all 11 of us off. Anyway there was about seven
of our chaps killed in the action and a few wounded."
The Allies had only one tank called the Sherman Firefly that stood any chance of knocking
one of these out in a face-to-face encounter. But the Sherman Firefly, although it had a
gun that could penetrate the frontal armour of the Jagdpanther, its frontal armour was
paper thin by comparison with the Jagdpanther and if it was a one-to-one dual and both of
them could see each other the Jagdpanther would usually win.
This vehicle so impressed the Allies that at the end of the Second World War when the
production lines were captured they continued manufacturing them for a little while under
British armed forces supervision and made 10 more so the British army could test and
evaluate them and see what lessons they could learn from them in their attempts to design
better tanks for the post-war period.
"Here too, tanks captured from the enemy in wartime, give up their secrets in the finest
equipped testing bays in Europe.
All this experimental work is vital for our tank supremacy."
The vehicle here, it was tested by the department of tank design in the immediate post-war period
and got knocked about in that process. But they did take photographs of it so this has
been repainted but from those original photographs.
So it's got a copy of the exact original paint
scheme on it and even the number zero one on the side is the number it was carrying
the day was knocked out. The camouflage pattern colouration on the German vehicles this is
standard for German vehicles of this period
of the war 1944. They've moved away from the German
grey that everybody tends to think of when you're thinking of German armour and they've
moved to what's called a dunkelgelb camouflage scheme, dunkelgelb just meaning 'dirty yellow'.
It's a standard sort of five-man crew, most large battle tanks Allied and Axis at this
period of the war have five-man crews, so the wireless operator is also the loader in
this case. So you've got wireless operator/loader, gunner, commander, driver, gun layer and they
all sit inside that. That looks quite a room roomy vehicle in terms of it's interior capacity
but I can assure you that when you're inside it you are almost literally cheek by jowl
with the other members of the crew. So if for instance, if you're the driver the commander
sits behind and above you. His feet are on your shoulders.
But obviously, as you can see, there's very limited vision as well at the front you've
got one slit on the front left-hand side in front of the gun and there's nothing on the
sides. So the only real way that you can get some surety of what's going on around you
is by the commander of the vehicle sticking his head and shoulders out of the top which
obviously makes him you know a target for snipers or gunfire or shellfire. Because it's
got no turret, it's got a very limited traverse its gun can only turn 12 degrees on each side.
So if it's attacked from the side or the rear it's at a very distinct advantage because
it can't fight back which is actually what happened to this particular vehicle when it
was destroyed.
So this particular vehicle has got something of a contested history. It's claimed that
it was knocked out at the beginning of September 1944 by a captain of the Welsh Guards Captain
Griffiths, who became later a peer of the realm became Lord Griffiths. He supposedly
outmanoeuvred it and put three rounds into the interior of the tank and one round into
the fuel tank which knocked the vehicle out.
"We all knew that the 75 millimetre gun we carried was quite incapable of piercing the
front and if you were going to disable it you had either got to get it in the side or
round the back where the armour was thinner. But fortunately, he hit it right on the side
at the rear in the engine and the tank stopped immediately and the crew started to scramble
out and we then pumped three shots into the side of the turret of the tank."
There are other claimants to the kill if you want to call it that. One of them coming from
a German survivor of a Jagdpanther company an ad hoc battle group called Panzergroup
Lex which lost its Jagdpanther in early April 1945 in Germany and that was also coincidentally
knocked out by a very small grouping of three rounds in the side of the vehicle which also
fits the evidence. So we have two sort of contestants for who knocked out the Jagdpanther.
The main reason why we can't tell exactly when this vehicle was destroyed and even its
exact production date is the fact that a large piece of armour plate was taken off the side
of the vehicle when it was brought back to the United Kingdom for the school of tank
technology. They didn't note down where it was knocked out, who captured it, or even
how it got back to the United Kingdom, all they were interested in was testing it to
see how good it was. And as part of that testing process, they took a large piece of armour
plate out of the side, it happens to be the bit with the armour the stamp on the plate
which tells you the date of manufacture. So we don't know exactly which production number
this vehicle is.
The hunting tank destroyer idea that was developed by the Germans in the Second World War, which
really came out of a necessity in that they couldn't continue manufacturing the numbers
of turreted tanks that they otherwise would have done, really dies out in the post-war
period because of advances in armour penetration and especially in range finding and the ability
to hit on the move. Tanks become much more back into vogue because you can fire and you
can hit from any angle at any speed. The Jagdpanther
is sort of the last of the tanks firing and
fighting on a static battlefield. Sort of the pinnacle, the apex of the tank
destroyer design.
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