Marder II

The Marder II answered the same emergency as its cousin on the Czech chassis. The T-34 and KV-1 had made the Wehrmacht’s towed anti-tank guns look ridiculous in 1941, heavier guns existed but had to be dragged into position and dug in, and the German army needed something that could drive to the threatened point and kill a Soviet tank when it got there.

The chassis was chosen for the same reason too: it was available and it was finished as a tank. The Panzer II had led the spearheads into Poland and France with a 2 cm cannon that by 1942 could not hurt anything worth shooting at, and hundreds of them were either in service with nothing useful to do or coming off the production line for want of a replacement. Stripping off the turret and mounting an anti-tank gun turned a useless light tank into a useful gun carrier overnight.

The first version used the same expedient as the early Marder III. Captured Soviet 76.2 mm guns — rechambered to take German 7.5 cm PaK 40 ammunition, which improved their already good penetration — were mounted on the chassis of the Panzer II Ausf. D and E, the fast variant with Christie suspension and four large road wheels, along with some Flammpanzer II hulls. Alkett and Wegmann produced 201 of them between early 1942 and early 1943 as the Sd.Kfz. 132.

It was an ungainly machine. The gun sat high on a tall superstructure, the silhouette was conspicuous from any angle, and the Ausf. D/E chassis had never been built in numbers large enough to sustain the type. But it reached the Eastern Front in the spring of 1942, when the German army had almost nothing else that combined a tank-killing gun with the ability to move it.

The version that mattered came a few months later. The Sd.Kfz. 131 carried the German 7.5 cm PaK 40/2 on the far more numerous Panzer II chassis — first hulls of the Ausf. A to C withdrawn from front-line service, later newly built Ausf. F chassis produced specifically for the conversion. FAMO, MAN and Daimler-Benz delivered 576 between June 1942 and mid-1943.

A further 75 were converted from mid-1943 to early 1944, when the last Panzer IIs were finally taken off active service — the chassis being worth more as a gun carrier than as a tank right up to the moment the supply ran out. Counting both variants gives roughly 850 vehicles, though published totals differ by several dozen depending on how the late conversions are attributed.

Of the whole improvised family, the Sd.Kfz. 131 was the best proportioned. Its fighting compartment sat lower than the tall riveted box of the 38(t)-based Marder III, the gun was better integrated into the hull, and the whole vehicle looked less like an anti-tank gun that had been lifted onto a tank and left there. For a weapon whose survival depended on being seen late, that mattered more than any specification.

The two versions are easy to tell apart in photographs, and the difference is in the running gear: the Sd.Kfz. 132 rides on the four large road wheels of the Christie-suspended Ausf. D/E, while the definitive Sd.Kfz. 131 has the five road wheels on leaf springs of the standard Panzer II. It is the same test that separates a Marder II from a Marder III, which carries four large wheels on the Czech 38(t) chassis.

It fought exactly as the rest of the family did, because the doctrine was written for the weapon rather than the vehicle. Armour ran from 10 to 35 mm — enough against splinters and small arms, nothing more — and the fighting compartment was open at the top, so an airburst over the position or an infantryman with a grenade could end the vehicle without touching its armour at all.

The three-man crew therefore fought from cover or not at all: site the vehicle behind a rise or in a treeline, wait for the enemy armour to come into range, fire, and reposition before the answering fire arrived. Used that way the 7.5 cm PaK 40 made it lethal against any Soviet tank it was likely to meet. Used as a substitute for a tank — leading an attack, holding ground under fire — it was destroyed with very little effort.

The great majority went east, issued to the Panzerjäger detachments of infantry and panzer divisions, and they were in continuous service from 1942 until the end of the war. As with the Marder III, this was the anti-tank capability of formations that had no armour of their own: a handful of vehicles per division, held back as the mobile reserve that could be sent to whichever sector Soviet tanks had broken into.

Their numbers thinned steadily as losses mounted and no replacement chassis existed — the Panzer II production line closed, and every Marder II destroyed was gone for good. By the last year of the war the type was being replaced in the Panzerjäger units by the enclosed Hetzer, and the survivors soldiered on in whatever role the retreat left them.

The Marder II is best read as the middle term of a three-part improvisation. Germany built the Marder I on captured French Lorraine tractors, the Marder II on its own obsolete Panzer II, and the Marder III on the Czech 38(t) — three different chassis, one idea, all of them adopted because there was no time to design a proper vehicle and no capacity to build one if there had been.

Judged against the enclosed tank destroyers that replaced it, the Marder II fails on every count of protection and survivability. Judged against the alternative actually on offer in 1942 — a towed PaK 40 that took minutes to bring into action and could not leave once the shooting started — it was a considerable advance, and it killed a great many tanks. Its own crews knew precisely what they were riding: a very good gun, on a chassis that had outlived its first purpose, with just enough steel around them to stop a rifle bullet.

• Peter Chamberlain & Hilary L. Doyle, Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Panzer Tracts No. 7-2: Panzerjaeger (Panzer Tracts).
• Bryan Perrett, German Light Panzers 1932–42 (Osprey, New Vanguard).