See Inside King Tiger | Tank Chats Reloaded

If you've seen our 47th

tank

chat, you'll have heard our curator David Willey talk about this vehicle in the Tiger 2, also known as the King Tiger uh, Koenigs Tiger, uh or by the British Army, the Royal type in the chatri

tank

loaded. I'll be revisiting old favorites from the tank chat series and ta

king

another look at these Fighting Machines. Remember to subscribe or click the little notification bell if you don't want to miss these videos and I would like to thank all our sponsors for ma

king

this possible, join them if you can. There are now seven of these vehicles in various collections of our Tank Museum.

We are incredibly lucky because we have two, one with what is popularly known as the Porsche turret and one with what we have here is the Hensel turret, that's a misnomer, it's not accurate, we'll talk about that a little later, but it What I want to do in this movie is look at a little more detail of this tank and specifically take a look at the inside, the first thing that strikes you when you look at this tank is its sheer presence, its mass and I would have to say it's disturbing I guess. You call it a sense of threat.

Allied tank crews were either intimidated or found Title One encountering one of these on the Russian stairs at the Normandy bocage. I think it would be a very bad day at the office. The Tiger 2 arose from a meeting between Adolf Hitler and the Woffordam committee for the development of tanks. On 26 May 1941, Hitler ordered a tank to be designed to mount a tank version of the Rhine metal 88-millimeter Flack 41 anti-aircraft gun with an improved bullet that was capable of penetrating 100 millimeters of armor at 1,500 meters. would be produced to provide 20 for each Panzer Division to act as a heavy tank spearhead, a bookwagen dagger capable of piercing enemy defenses and breaking up enemy attacks should this not happen and the Tigers Two were deployed as an army or SS schfera.

Panza abdalungen heavy tank battalions of 45 tanks each, two rival bids were submitted for the hull and mechanics, once, henschel and one from Porsche, the turret was to be built by the criminal Dr. Porsche Design Se They revised the ideas he had suggested for the title 1 project, but the complicated and radical concept of dual-gasoline electric power coupled with a new cannon did not come together quite well in Testing; It also could not be built using existing facilities and the copper cable needed for its electric motors was required for submarines using diesel electric motors, unsurprisingly the contract was awarded to Henschel.

Now this is where the confusion arises about the so-called Porsche and Henchy turrets. Now, as I said before, all the turrets for the target series were to be built by crop, but there is a pre-production model um, which is quite complex, has a rounded front and mantlet and has a bulge on the side to accommodate the cupola of the commander. um, it was decided not to use those that were too complex to build and the other problem with them. was that, uh, the bullet with the front is effectively a short trap, it would possibly cause an incoming bullet to deflect into the hull, but then we move on to what's called the Syrian term, the production tourist and that's what we have here.

Flat front, so it eliminates the impact trap. It is simpler to build, so this was the accepted design, but it is incorrect to think that it is a Porsche or a hinge. This is a better design, but as it was wartime, the 50 prototypes already produced were used anyway and installed. To the first 50 Tiger Twos built, the remaining 450 Tiger Twos like this one had the production turret. Krupp also redesigned the Mark Ryan metal gun almost entirely producing his own 88 millimeter tank gun, the kwk-43 l71, the Henschel design for the hull was much more conventional now, the initial idea Hensel came up with was an armored version of the

tiger

wall that wouldn't work because this weapon, the l71, is a much larger web, so what they finally came up with was effectively an extended version of the type. 1 in many ways, but with the armor sloping at the front, rear and also the sides, it is surprising that Henschel and the other production facilities managed to produce so many of these when you consider that the USAF and RAF, between them, they finally managed to destroy 95 henshelgrack looking at the tank as a whole it is massively armored the upper part of the front armor is inclined 150 millimeters backwards at an angle of 40 degrees the front plate of the turret is 180 millimeters at 10 degrees from the vertical even the Sides and rear of the hull are 80 millimeters thick, the degree of inclination, of course, is important because it increases the amount of armor thickness that benefits from the incoming Ram, so at 40 degrees, 150 ml of armor is converts to 195.

Now, mechanically, this design was ambitious. but in reality it was quite far from being perfect the engine was the Maybach h0230v12 it is a good engine but there is also the same engine designed to power the

tiger

and later used in the Panther tanks which are 14 and 24 tons lighter the 700 horsepower hl230 of strength was severely overworked in a 68 and a half ton tank and was also monumentally thirsty. One liter of gasoline would take the tiger 162 meters down the road, much less across the country. Fuel consumption would be a major problem with these heavy tanks and sometimes they had to be abandoned. simply because they had run out of fuel, the most famous example being the Piper chemical tank, parked in the village church of La Glace since 1944.

The suspension is like most German taxiders of the time, it is bar transverse torsion. type and there are nine overlapping wheels on each side. You could say it's an improvement over the tiger, which has a large mass of intertwined strings. I mean, there are three on each strut and that causes huge problems if something goes wrong. It's an absolute swan to fix the main problem here, although it's actually with the transmission. Now the Maybach Olvar transmission is quite sophisticated, it gives you eight forward and four reverse gears, but it really wasn't up to the job, the weight of the tank causes enormous problems with the transmission, the final drive, the drive train and we have a lot of mechanical breakdowns right after that, on the Eastern Front in August 1944, Sierra hears that Panzer AB tailung 501 had only eight tigers two of 45 operational. most of the rest were out With external drive failures, this tank has undergone quite a bit of restoration, but it gives you a good idea of ​​what it would look like over its lifetime.

Now the camo pattern is not exactly the interior, Ambush camo or the last part of the war, but what we have is a base layer or Dunkle Gelb of doculo that is divided with stripes or Rock Brun and Olive Red Brown on olive green. This is quite a good and useful camouflage for Western Europe and particularly for the Normandy campaign. Much of the zimmerit in this tank is rebuilt as the original had deteriorated, but as most of you probably know, this is an antimagnetic paste developed to prevent magnetic Minds from sticking to the tank, it also minimizes the brightness of the tank. flat metal surface and helps with camouflage. the tank has the insignia of its original unit dial SS panzaab tolung 101 SS Heavy Tank Battalion 101 we know from surviving records that it was a tank of the HQ company commanded by obeshaviour sep franzel a tank had been built in July 1944 in a time when the battalion's spare crews were re-equipping the Tiger Twos that had previously been on the Tigers.

Its useful life was going to be short. The reason we have this tank is that it was captured and was apparently found abandoned in a field that, to my north. from Paris on August 30, 1944. She ran into a troop of Shermans of the British of the 2030s and upon seeing this monster, a tank commanded by Sergeant Roberts launches three armor-piercing bullets on the left side, now one. The round hits a road wheel, rips off a suspension arm, if the tank had been moving that would almost certainly cause the loss of a track, it would have immobilizer, um, that doesn't happen, but the other two rounds and we we remove the back shirts. here so you have a little better view.

You have a little bit of damage here and then a little further down, these rounds come in at a pretty steep angle. It takes out the top hole a bit, but then there is a chalk circle a little further down where the bullet simply bounces off the bottom of the hull and does virtually no damage, which is a tribute to the excellent degree of armor protection it offers. the Tiger. Having been found immobilized but intact, the tank was taken. I returned to England for an evaluation and finally found my way to the Tank Museum. Before we get into the tank, I'd just like to point out some of the features on the rear covers.

You have the armored cover. So the fuel tank. right under my feet here, um, you also have these big ones, I mean, they're pretty big, uh, mobile fan attachments, uh, fans, um, this is the rear turret hatch and you can see how thick it is, it's enormously heavy, I don't know. I think it's possible to close the interior, but it would be useful for replenishing ammunition, you know, in a secure area behind the lines. The latest is the track mounts, they are now a later edition. They started adding them since July 1944 and there is a reason. for that, um, there is a weak point here, the ammunition is stored inside the rear of the turret and in fact, they lost three Tigers through um, hit all the turrets by placing their ammunition to the north, so the track handlers were actually put on only for a moment. of additional armor protection, one of the things you realize when working here is the condition of the tanks and the abandonment varies greatly, especially the interiors, there are some like our Panzer 4 that we saw last time, they are almost perfect internally, others like our oral. hetzer um lived for years outside, not here.

I hasten to add um, the floral hetzer is a pretty rusty bucket, this one is almost mediocre um now, as I said before, uh, the vehicle was captured and taken away for evaluation and while that was happening um a lot of things were removed, so we're missing things like the engine, while the transmission, the gearbox, a number of other components, from a corrosion perspective, it's not that bad, that is, in tank terms, it's a Ruby turret quite big, but like you. I could imagine that what's right in the middle dominating the proceedings is the gap for this huge 88 millimeter L71 cannon, as you can see, it's a little bit off center and that's to make room for the side of the gun next to it.

This is a tremendously powerful weapon. The gun has an 88 millimeter bullet, the same as the Tiger, but the difference with this one is that behind that bullet is twice as much propellant in a huge brass casing. What that does is it produces a muzzle velocity of about a thousand. meters per second, that is the speed at which the bullet travels when it exits and shoots out the side of the gun. I'm afraid it's not present here, but you can see the mats while filming the terms with your 9d. Excellent optics with lights and adjustable magnification of 2.5 or 5 times with a wider or narrower ability Even sight that with the almost flat trajectory of this enormously powerful weapon and which is a truly formidable weapon is capable of taking down most tanks allies up to three kilometers away, the other important aid to the artillery here is the transverse turret engine, the Burringerstorm L-43, it is double speed, either 19 or 6 degrees per second, controlled by the pedal or the transverse lever.

It could also achieve a full 360-degree rotation of the turret in 19 seconds, allowing for rapid rotation. and precise placement of the weapon on a target by simply using the reverse hand for fine adjustment. This may seem like a technical detail, but anything that allows the gunner to aim at a target faster is a big improvement looking beyond the turret, um, you have the usual type of crew layout with the commander's seat at the rear and the loader, where I'm now on the right side of the turret and then to the left is the gunner's position and the gunner's seat at the rear of the turret. there is shell storage, this is what we call the rack space ready for 22 88 millimeter rounds and then right at the rear is the big and very, very heavy hatch, actually at the rear of the turret, these Things don't really belong.

Here are the exhausts that separated when the engine was taken apart, so we kept them here for storage before leaving Gunnery. I would just like to mention the recoil cylinders that you can see here on the top of the gun. mounting on a gun now this powerful recoil is a major factor and the way we handle it is a combination of the muzzle break thatit's on the front at the end of the barrel and the recoil cylinders here, these hydraulic cylinders, what they do is dampen the recoil and they just make sure that when the gun jumps back it doesn't damage itself, it doesn't damage the carpet , there is another consideration here, what happens if you have to abandon your tank and it could be recovered by the enemy, how do you put the gun out of commission?

Where it's really simple, you drain the fluid from the recoil cylinders and then fire the gun, it crashes into its mounts and crashes into the turret and after that of course it's completely useless looking at the features. from the turret roof here you have the Commander's tubular that has attachments for our vision locks, so the released commando has a 360 degree vision here, right above me, uh, that's the loader hatch and the loader has a single vision block in the front um and then you have other things you have here for a fan that was supposed to remove some of the dirt from the atmosphere, but the crew complained that they were notoriously inefficient.

There's a little hatch right here that's to get rid of the spent brass on the casings to get them out of the way so they don't clutter up the interior and then there were a couple of accessories here that are the travel lock for the gun and the campers so that when the tank is moving across the country. The weapon does not move too much or damage its mounts. A small miraculous survival. Here's this one, now it's drafted vertically and it's setting the ceiling of the target. It's a close defense mortar, so the idea is to open it. up and you can shoot grenades uh we can smoke flares away um spring I mean close it like this and then this is the firing mechanism um I'm really surprised that it's still here and it's complete down to its original Baker light aperture.

Go ahead, now let's look at the last two positions of the crew, the driver and the radio operator, all the machine gun, I'm afraid this area is really stripped, but the tiger was unusual in tank terms because it had a steering wheel. Unlike the usual paddles, this one had hydraulic assistance, so the steering was very light and it also had a preselected gearbox, meaning you only need to use the clutch when starting, then the driver selects the gear he needs. to then place the ribs correctly and the gear changes automatically. The advantage of this is that the Tiger is physically very easy to drive, but requires quite a bit of skill and finesse.

Rough or clumsy handling could lead to catastrophic failure of the gearbox drive or, as in our example and many others, a final drive advantage, if any part of this area of ​​the tank were removed because they obviously removed the gearbox. and they removed the transmission, is that right at the bottom of the hull you can see the transverse torsion bars of the suspension system, so while the goal is a success, well, I think we could honestly have an endless debate about that, um, on the plus side, a massive degree of armor protection, no Tiger 2 was defeated by a frontal hit, um, and the firepower was excellent.

It must be absolutely terrifying for Allied tank crews to encounter one of these knowing that it could take them out long before they are in range to strike back. In terms of mobility, I mean, 21 miles an hour, it's not exactly fast, but that's what you get when a 68 and a half ton tank is pulled by a 700 horsepower engine across the country. , apparently it was relatively agile if driven well on the negative side, a lot of mechanical unreliability, endless problems with the transmissions, er, with the double spoke steering mechanism, what this means is that many more tigers were lost two by mechanical failures that due to enemy action, also cost 830,000 rice marks, now you get two tigers and actually meet almost 10 Germans despite that and all the good and logical logins.

I have seen and heard. I have never seen anyone stand in front of this tank and not be impressed by what an incredible piece of armor it is.