Marder III

The Marder was born of a specific shock. In the summer of 1941 the Wehrmacht met the T-34 and the KV-1 and discovered that its standard towed anti-tank gun, the 3.7 cm PaK 36, could not penetrate either of them — the crews nicknamed it the Panzeranklopfgerät, the “door-knocker”. Heavier guns existed, but a towed gun has to be hitched, moved, unlimbered and dug in, and a Soviet armoured breakthrough did not wait for any of that.

What the army needed was an anti-tank gun that could drive to where it was needed and shoot from there. What it had available was a supply of obsolete tank chassis — above all the Czech Panzer 38(t), useless as a gun tank by 1942 but mechanically reliable and still in production at BMM in Prague. The solution was as crude as it was fast: take the chassis, remove the turret, bolt the biggest available anti-tank gun on top behind a shield, and send it to Russia.

The first version used a weapon the Germans had not built. The advance of 1941 had captured Soviet 76.2 mm F-22 field guns in quantity, and they turned out to be excellent anti-tank weapons once rechambered for a more powerful German cartridge. Reworked as the 7.62 cm PaK 36(r), they were mounted on the 38(t) chassis as the Sd.Kfz. 139, of which about 344 were built from April 1942.

The result was a small monument to the improvisation of that year: a Czech chassis, built in an occupied capital, carrying a Soviet gun rebored in Germany, sent east to destroy Soviet tanks. It worked. The PaK 36(r) could kill a T-34 at ranges the crews had not enjoyed since the war began, and for the first time the Panzerjäger units had something mobile that could do it.

Captured stocks were finite, and the German answer to the same problem — the 7.5 cm PaK 40 — was by then in production. Mounted on the 38(t) as the PaK 40/3, it produced the Sd.Kfz. 138 Ausf. H: fighting compartment in the middle, engine at the back, the gun firing over the driver’s position. About 243 were built new between November 1942 and April 1943, and a further 175 were converted from existing Panzer 38(t) gun tanks.

Those conversions are the clearest statement of where the 38(t) now stood. Vehicles that had led the spearheads into France and Russia were being taken out of service as tanks and rebuilt as gun carriers, because a 37 mm turret was worth less in 1943 than the chassis underneath it.

The final and most numerous version rearranged the vehicle properly. On the Ausf. M the engine was moved forward to the centre of the hull and the fighting compartment placed at the rear, which lowered the gun, improved the crew’s working space and made the whole thing quicker to build. Roughly 942 were produced between April 1943 and May 1944.

Counting all three types gives about 1,700 Marder IIIs, though published totals vary between roughly 1,580 and 1,740 depending on whether rebuilt vehicles are counted as new production. It was, by any of those figures, one of the most numerous German tank destroyers of the war — and every one of them was an interim answer that stayed in service because nothing better could be spared.

The Marder was a gun with transport, not a tank, and treating it as one killed crews. Its armour was 10–15 mm — proof against splinters and rifle fire and nothing else — and the fighting compartment was open at the top and largely open at the rear, so that an airburst, a mortar bomb or a grenade could sweep it out. It stood about 2.5 m tall, which on the open steppe was a great deal.

Used as intended, it was deadly. The Panzerjäger doctrine was to site the vehicle in cover, let the enemy armour come into range, fire, and then move before the return fire arrived — the mobility existed to reposition the gun between engagements, not to charge with it. The 7.5 cm PaK 40 could punch through roughly 100 mm of armour at 1,000 m, which meant a T-34 was killable at any range at which its crew could realistically be seen. Caught in the open, or asked to lead an attack, the Marder died quickly — and its own crews, standing waist-high above the hull behind a 10 mm shield, died with it.

Most Marder IIIs went east, where they were in continuous service from 1942 to the end of the war. They were distributed among the Panzerjäger detachments of infantry and panzer divisions, typically a company at a time, as the mobile core of an anti-tank defence that otherwise depended on towed guns and horse-drawn transport. For an infantry division holding forty kilometres of the Eastern Front, the Marder company was not a supplement to a tank force — it was the entire capacity to intervene where Soviet armour actually broke through.

They also fought in the Mediterranean. The Afrika Korps received its first Marders in May 1942, and Panzerjäger-Abteilung 39 — which had lost all of its vehicles by the end of that October, in the fighting around the encircled units of the 164th Light Division — was reformed and re-equipped with them in March 1943. Ausf. Hs reached Tunisia that year, and the type went on to serve in the defensive battles up the Italian peninsula.

The Marder III was not a good armoured vehicle and was never intended to be one. It was an anti-tank gun that could drive, produced quickly on a chassis that was available, and its value was measured entirely by whether that gun was in range of the right target at the right moment. Judged as a tank destroyer in the later sense — armoured, enclosed, able to survive being seen — it fails every test.

What makes it worth understanding is what came next on the same chassis and in the same factory. The Hetzer of 1944 was the considered answer to the question the Marder had answered in a hurry: the same 38(t) running gear and roughly the same gun, but enclosed, sloped and low enough to hide behind. Between them the two vehicles describe how the German anti-tank arm changed between 1942 and 1944 — from bolting the gun on top of whatever was to hand, to building the vehicle around it.

• 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).
• Bruce Culver, Marder III (Squadron/Signal Publications).