Panzerkampfwagen V Panther

The Panther was born directly out of shock and humiliation. When German tanks met the Soviet T-34 in the summer of 1941, they found a machine whose sloped armour their guns could barely penetrate and whose own weapon could destroy them with ease. A panicked investigation commission sent to the Eastern Front recommended the most radical solution imaginable: copy the T-34 outright. German pride — and German industry, ill-suited to the Soviet tank's rough simplicity — recoiled from a straight copy, but the lesson was taken to heart.

Instead, firms were ordered to design a new medium tank that answered the T-34 on German terms: sloped armour for protection, a long high-velocity gun for hitting power, and a mobility to match. MAN's design was chosen over Daimler-Benz's more overtly T-34-like proposal, and was rushed into production as the Panzerkampfwagen V Panther — a tank that many consider the best balance of firepower, protection and mobility of the entire war, had it only been reliable.

The gun was the reason the tank existed. The 7.5 cm KwK 42 L/70 drove a PzGr 39/42 out of the muzzle at 935 m/s and put 138 mm through armour at 100 m and 111 mm at 1,000 m, measured against plate at 30°. A Sherman presented a 51 mm glacis at 56° and a 76 mm turret front; a T-34 presented 45 mm at 60°, about 90 mm effective. The Panther could defeat either well beyond a kilometre, at ranges from which the American 75 mm and the Soviet 76.2 mm could not reply at all.

Velocity bought something besides penetration. A shell leaving at 935 m/s against the Sherman 75 mm’s 619 m/s flies a much flatter arc, which means a gunner who has misjudged the range by a hundred metres still hits. Combined with good German optics, that made first-round hits at long range routine rather than lucky, and it is the single quality that made the Panther dangerous out of proportion to how many of them there were.

The defect that defined the Panther was in its transmission. The design weight rose through development while the drivetrain did not grow with it, and the final drives — the last gear stage before the sprocket — were never able to take the torque of a 45-tonne tank driven hard. Teeth were stripped, bearings failed, housings cracked. A Panther with a broken final drive could not be repaired in the field and usually could not be towed by anything lighter than another Panther.

The record can be read as a curve. The operational rate stood at 16 per cent at the end of July 1943 and had reached 37 per cent by December. In September and October 1944 a series of modifications went into the final drives against the reported failures — chewed gear teeth, broken parts, damaged bearings and insufficient lubrication. They reduced the problem and never removed it, and the Panther went out of production with the same weakness it had entered service with.

The Panther was committed to Operation Zitadelle before it was ready because the offensive was waiting for it. 200 Ausf. D equipped Panzer-Abteilung 51 and 52, brigaded together as Panzer-Regiment 39, and the German command expected them to decide the battle. By 08:00 on 5 July, the first morning, 16 had already broken down on the approach march.

It got worse from there. After two days fewer than a quarter of the force was still running, and by the evening of 7 July the brigade reported seven combat-ready tanks out of two hundred. Very few of the missing had been destroyed by Soviet fire: they were burning from engine fires started by fuel and oil leaking onto hot metal, or sitting immobile with wrecked final drives on ground the Germans would shortly have to give up. The tank that was to answer the T-34 spent its debut being recovered.

The Ausf. D of 1943 ran to 842 vehicles and carried every fault the type would be remembered for. The Ausf. A that replaced it was built in far greater numbers — about 2,200 — and fixed what could be fixed without redesigning the tank.

The changes were unglamorous and mattered. The drum-shaped commander’s cupola of the D, which stood proud of the turret roof and made an obvious aiming mark, gave way to a cast cupola set lower into the roof. The hull machine gun, which on the D fired through a vertical letterbox flap that had to be opened, became a proper ball mount that could be aimed and that did not leave a hole in the glacis when in use. The turret pistol ports and the vision slits that weakened its sides were progressively deleted.

The Ausf. G of 1944 was the definitive Panther and the most-produced: roughly 2,961 vehicles, close to half of all Panthers built. It also, at last, corrected a defect that had been in the tank since the first Ausf. D. The early Panther’s rounded gun mantlet was a shot trap: a round striking its lower curve could be deflected downward, through the thin plate over the driver’s compartment — the frontal armour doing precisely the opposite of its job. Late Ausf. G production added a squared-off chin to the mantlet to stop shells being funnelled into the hull roof, roughly two years after the tank entered service.

The intended successor never arrived. The Ausf. F was to carry the Schmalturm, a narrow turret with a 120 mm front plate and a stereoscopic rangefinder, presenting far less area to be hit. No Schmalturm reached series production. Daimler-Benz completed eight Ausf. F hulls in 1945 and the two halves were never brought together: the narrow turret was tested on an Ausf. G chassis, and the Ausf. F hulls that existed were fitted with Ausf. G turrets in small numbers in April 1945.

The chassis carried two vehicles that outlived their parent’s reputation. The Jagdpanther put the 8.8 cm Pak 43 in a low, well-sloped casemate and is rated by most authors the best tank destroyer of the war; 415 were built between January 1944 and the end.

The Bergepanther was the other, and it existed because of the final drives. An armoured recovery vehicle on the Panther hull, with a 40-tonne winch and a 1.5-tonne crane boom, it was the only German vehicle that could reliably drag a stranded Panther clear, and most were built by Demag from the start of 1944. Production figures run from about 297 to 339 depending on the ledger — authors differ over whether to count only purpose-built hulls or to include tanks converted after damage.

The verdict that the Panther was hopelessly unreliable is built on Kursk and stops there, and the later returns do not support it. Averaged across 1944, operational rates ran at 61 per cent for the Panzer IV, 55 for the Tiger and 54 for the Panther. The gap between the Panther and the tank everyone calls dependable was seven points.

The figures need reading with care, which is why published ones vary so widely. A readiness return measures the whole situation and not only the machine: a unit that is retreating, without recovery vehicles, spare parts or fuel, reports a low percentage whatever it is driving, and from mid-1944 German units were almost always retreating. The Panther was a difficult tank kept by an army that had lost the ability to maintain anything.

Once the worst faults were addressed and crews learned the tank’s ways, the Panther became a formidable weapon. In the defensive battles on the Eastern Front, in Normandy and across North-West Europe, a well-handled Panther firing from a prepared position or hull-down could dominate the battlefield, picking off Shermans and T-34s at long range before they could close. Its sloped armour and superb 7.5 cm KwK 42 L/70 gun made it, in a straight duel, arguably the finest medium tank of the war.

The answer was to stop fighting it from the front. Its hull sides were 40 mm and its turret sides 45 mm, against a glacis of 80 mm at 55° worth about 140 mm effective — so Allied and Soviet doctrine became to fix a Panther’s attention frontally and kill it from the flank, which is exactly what the Panther’s own crews had learned to do to the T-34 three years earlier. Germany built around 6,000, and a great many were lost not to gunfire but to breakdown, abandonment and empty fuel tanks.

Counted by chassis number the total comes to 6,003 — 842 Ausf. D, about 2,200 Ausf. A and roughly 2,961 Ausf. G. Counted from monthly factory completion records it comes to 5,984, and the difference is the usual one between what left the line and what was booked as accepted. In its mature form the Panther combined a war-winning gun, excellent frontal protection and real mobility in a package that shaped tank design for a generation — the conceptual ancestor of the post-war main battle tank.

The clearest verdict on it was passed by the people it had been used against. The French army took the surviving Panthers into service after the war and gave fifty of them to the 503e Régiment de Chars de Combat, which ran them alongside Shermans and kept them until 1950, retiring them for lack of spare parts five years after the surrender.

• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Germany’s Panther Tank: The Quest for Combat Supremacy (Schiffer).
• Walter J. Spielberger, Panther & Its Variants (Schiffer).
• Steven J. Zaloga, Panther vs Sherman: Battle of the Bulge 1944 (Osprey, Duel).
• Roman Johann Jarymowycz, Tank Tactics: From Normandy to Lorraine (Lynne Rienner).
• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Panzer Tracts No. 5 — the chassis-number production figures.