Panzerkampfwagen 38(t)

The Panzer 38(t) was not a German design at all. It began as the ČKD/Praga LT vz. 38, a light tank developed in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s by a firm that had already made itself one of Europe’s more successful tank exporters — variants of the same family had been sold to Peru, Switzerland, Iran and the Baltic states before the war. The Czechoslovak army ordered it, and not a single one had been delivered when Germany occupied the country in March 1939.

The Germans took the factory with the country. The manufacturer, renamed BMM in occupied Prague, went on building the tank for the Wehrmacht as the Panzerkampfwagen 38(t) — the “t” standing for tschechisch, Czech — and it became the most important foreign design in the German inventory. Sweden, which had ordered the type and never received it, built its own version under licence as the Strv m/41: the same Czech tank fought the war on both sides of the neutrality line.

The 38(t) was armed with the Czech 37 mm Škoda A7 gun — comparable to the German 3.7 cm, and able to defeat most light and medium tanks of 1939–40 — plus two 7.92 mm machine guns. It was respectable armament for its day, no worse than what the standard German medium tanks then carried, and the Germans thought well enough of the design to make one change: they added a fourth crewman as a dedicated loader, where the Czech original had made do with three and left the commander to serve his own gun.

Its protection was the old-fashioned part. The armour was riveted rather than welded, about 25 mm on the front and later increased to roughly 50 mm with bolted-on plates, and it carried the well-known danger of riveted construction: a strike that the plate itself survived could shear the rivet heads and send them scything through the crew compartment. By 1941 both the rivets and the 37 mm gun were falling behind the pace of tank design.

What set the 38(t) apart was neither gun nor armour but reliability and ease of maintenance. A Praga EPA six-cylinder petrol engine of about 125 hp drove the 9.7-tonne tank at roughly 42 km/h, and the leaf-sprung suspension on four large road wheels was robust, simple and quick to work on in the field — qualities that decide campaigns more often than muzzle velocity does.

German crews rated it mechanically superior to their own early Panzer I and II, and it was that automotive soundness, not its firepower, that made it valuable. As a gun tank it would be obsolete against the T-34 and KV-1 within two years. But a tough, dependable chassis was exactly what German industry could keep using long after the turret on top of it had had its day: the same running gear went on to carry the Marder III and the Hetzer.

The 38(t)’s finest hour came in France in 1940 with the 7. Panzer-Division — Erwin Rommel’s “Ghost Division”, so called because it moved so fast that the German high command frequently did not know where it was — where Czech-built tanks made up around half of the division’s armour. Driving from the Meuse at Dinant to the Channel coast and then south to Cherbourg, the division advanced faster and further than any formation in military history to that date.

The campaign made the point emphatically. What won in 1940 was not armour thickness or gun calibre — the 38(t) was modest in both, and French tanks like the Somua S35 and Char B1 outclassed it comfortably on paper — but mechanical reliability, a radio in every tank and relentless tempo. In those currencies the little Czech tank was rich, and the ones that mattered were the currencies the French had not thought to count.

The Panzer 38(t) equipped several panzer divisions through Poland (at first from captured Czech stock), the campaign in the West in 1940 and the opening of Barbarossa in 1941, where around 760 took part in the invasion — still a substantial fraction of the German armoured force two years into the war. In the fast battles of 1940–41 its 37 mm gun and its reliability made it a genuinely effective fighting tank.

Against the T-34 and the KV-1 it was helpless, and the discovery was immediate: a 37 mm gun could not penetrate either of them from any angle at any range that mattered. From 1942 the type was withdrawn from front-line tank units. As a gun tank its career was over after three years — but the chassis beneath it was not yet halfway through its war.

As a tank the 38(t) ran through versions A through G, with around 1,400 built as gun tanks. Its real importance lies in what came after, because the dependable chassis became one of the war’s great conversion platforms — and the arithmetic is startling. Roughly 1,700 Marder III tank destroyers and some 2,827 Hetzers were built on it, along with the Grille self-propelled 150 mm infantry gun and a range of reconnaissance and anti-aircraft vehicles.

Set those figures side by side and the 38(t) produced roughly three times as many fighting vehicles after it was obsolete as a tank as it ever did as a tank. Gun-tank versions also served the armies of Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and production continued in Czechoslovakia after the war — the factory in Prague building the same running gear for a fourth decade under a third political system.

The Panzer 38(t) is the classic case of a captured design serving its conqueror well. A sound, reliable Czech light tank, it filled out the German panzer divisions at the moment they were thinnest, carried Rommel to the Channel, and performed creditably through the Blitzkrieg years before its riveted armour and light gun made it obsolete. Germany did not build it, did not design it and did not pay for the factory: it simply took all three in March 1939.

Its lasting significance is mechanical rather than tactical. The same running gear that carried a 37 mm turret into France in 1940 was still carrying a 7.5 cm anti-tank gun into Germany in 1945, first bolted on top as the Marder III and finally built into the hull as the Hetzer. Few armoured vehicles of the war are remembered less for their own battles and more for the long line of machines they made possible.

• Peter Chamberlain & Hilary L. Doyle, Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Steven J. Zaloga, Panzer 38(t) (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Vladimír Francev & Charles K. Kliment, Praga LT vz. 38 / Panzer 38(t) (MBI).