Jagdpanzer 38(t) Hetzer

The Hetzer was born from a factory’s limitation and an army’s emergency. In November 1943 Allied bombing wrecked the Alkett plant, the main producer of the StuG III — Germany’s indispensable assault gun — just as Heinz Guderian, Inspector-General of armoured troops, was pressing for a light, cheap tank destroyer to give the infantry divisions their own anti-tank teeth.

The BMM works in occupied Prague could not build the 24-tonne StuG: its lines and cranes were sized for the little Panzer 38(t) it had produced for years. The answer, sketched in December 1943 and in production by April 1944, was to widen the proven Czech chassis and clothe it in a completely new, sharply sloped casemate — a purpose-designed vehicle rather than a conversion, delivered at a speed no other German programme of 1944 matched.

Everything about the Jagdpanzer 38 served concealment and cost. On a hull just 2.17 m tall and about 15.75 tonnes, the frontal plate was only 60 mm thick — but angled at 60 degrees, giving effective protection that routinely defeated the 75 mm and 76 mm guns of Shermans and T-34s head-on.

The gun was the standard 7.5 cm PaK 39 L/48, the same weapon as the late StuG III and Jagdpanzer IV, able to destroy a T-34 or Sherman at over 1,000 m. A remote-controlled MG 34 on the roof let the crew defend against infantry without opening a hatch. A Praga six-cylinder of about 160 hp drove it at up to 42 km/h on roads.

The price of squeezing all this into so small a hull was paid by the four-man crew. The gun sat far to the right with only 5° of left traverse, the loader worked on the wrong side of the breech, vision devices were poor, and the side armour — a mere 20 mm — could be penetrated by almost anything on the battlefield. The Hetzer was a weapon for the ambush, not the fair fight.

Officially the vehicle was the Jagdpanzer 38; the name “Hetzer” (“baiter”, the hound that harries game) appears to have belonged properly to the unrelated E-10 project and attached itself to the little Jagdpanzer through confusion in 1944 correspondence.

The troops, however, used it — a rare case of a wartime misnomer sticking so completely that it became, after 1945, the vehicle’s universal name. It suited the machine: a small hound that bites from cover.

From July 1944 the Jagdpanzer 38 was issued to the Panzerjäger battalions of infantry and Volksgrenadier divisions on both fronts — exactly the units that had been fighting tanks with towed guns and courage. Dug in along a treeline or covering a village street, it was a vicious opponent: many Allied and Soviet crews never saw the low silhouette that killed them.

It fought in the retreat through Poland and East Prussia, in the Vosges and the Ardennes offensive, and in the final battles for Hungary, Silesia and Prague. Its weaknesses showed whenever it was forced to move or counterattack in the open: thin sides, slow traverse and blind spots made every unplanned engagement dangerous.

The chassis spawned a family: the Flammpanzer 38 flamethrower (about 20 converted for the Ardennes), the Bergepanzer 38 recovery vehicle, and a 150 mm sIG 33/2 self-propelled gun. Production at BMM and Škoda reached about 2,827 vehicles by the war’s end — more than Panther output in the same months, at a fraction of the cost.

Uniquely among German AFVs, the Hetzer outlived the Reich on the production line: Czechoslovakia completed and built more as the ST-I, and Switzerland bought 158 new-built G-13s, which served into the early 1970s — the last descendants of the 1938 Czech tank still on active duty.

The Hetzer was the most intelligent German armoured design of the late war: not a wonder weapon but an honest calculation — how much anti-tank capability can be bought with the industry, steel and fuel actually left in 1944.

Cramped, half-blind and thin-skinned, it nonetheless gave decimated infantry divisions a tank-killer they could actually receive in numbers. Among the giants of the German menagerie, the little baiter from Prague may have been the most cost-effective of them all.

• Peter Chamberlain & Hilary L. Doyle, Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Hilary L. Doyle & Thomas L. Jentz, Jagdpanzer 38 ‘Hetzer’ 1944–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).