Sd.Kfz. 234/2 Puma

The Sd.Kfz. 234 was specified for North Africa. Everything unusual about it follows from that: an air-cooled engine, because there is no water to boil away and none to replace it; enormous fuel capacity, because a scout car in the desert operates at distances no European road network requires; and a Tatra Type 103 V12 diesel of 210 hp, chosen for the same reason.

Production began in December 1943. North Africa had surrendered in May, eight months earlier. The vehicle drawn for Libyan gravel went instead to Normandy and to the Eastern Front, where its air-cooled diesel and its 1,000 km of road range were qualities nobody had asked for and everybody was glad of.

The earlier German eight-wheeler, the Sd.Kfz. 231, was armour plate bolted onto a lorry frame — two structures doing one job, each carrying the other’s weight. The 234 abandoned that for a monocoque hull: the armoured body itself was the chassis, with the running gear hung directly from it.

It was the first German armoured fighting vehicle built that way, and the gain was in both directions — a stiffer structure and a lighter one, which on a wheeled vehicle translates directly into range and speed. Frontal protection was about 30 mm, enough for small arms and splinters and nothing more, which for a vehicle whose job was to see and leave was the correct trade.

All eight wheels were driven and all eight steered, on independent suspension — a configuration that gave the car cross-country performance no other wheeled vehicle of its size could match, and a turning circle that embarrassed vehicles half its length.

The detail that mattered most in action was at the back. The 234 carried a second driver facing rearwards, with his own controls: on making contact the car did not need to turn round, which is when a scout vehicle dies. It simply went backwards, at full speed, on the same eight driven wheels. For a machine whose entire purpose was to find the enemy and survive the finding, that was worth more than armour.

The Puma is the one member of the family with a fully enclosed turret, and it got it second-hand. The turret and its 5 cm KwK 39/1 L/60 had been designed for the VK 16.02 Leopard, a light reconnaissance tank in the Panzer II class that was cancelled before production. With the turrets drawn, tested and no hull to put them on, they were mounted on the 234 chassis instead.

The other variants stayed open-topped and lighter-armed: the 234/1 with a 2 cm cannon, the 234/3 with a short 7.5 cm for support work, the 234/4 with the 7.5 cm PaK 40 anti-tank gun in an open mount. Only the 234/2 could fight with its hatches shut.

Scout cars are normally armed for self-defence, and the comparison makes the point. The American M8 Greyhound carried a 37 mm gun that was already obsolete against tanks when it was issued; the Italian AB 41 had a 20 mm automatic cannon, adequate against trucks and infantry and nothing else.

The Puma’s 5 cm L/60 was the gun of the late-production Panzer III — a genuine tank weapon, able to destroy light armour outright and to threaten the flanks and rear of a Sherman or a T-34 at ordinary combat range. It did not make the Puma a tank: thirty millimetres of plate settled that. But it meant a reconnaissance unit that ran into something could kill it rather than only report it.

Büssing-NAG built 101 Pumas between December 1943 and September 1944, and that figure is the whole strategic story. They went to the Panzeraufklärungs-Abteilungen, the reconnaissance battalions of the panzer divisions, a handful to each — enough to equip one company, not enough to change how a division scouted.

They served in Normandy from the summer of 1944 and on the Eastern Front through to the end, and they were valued by the units that had them. There were never enough for that to matter beyond the tactical scale, and production stopped in September 1944 in favour of the cheaper 234/1 and the gun-armed 234/4.

The Puma is the most complete expression of what Germany could do with a wheeled fighting vehicle: monocoque construction, eight driven and steered wheels, a diesel engine, a thousand kilometres of range, a driver at each end and a tank gun in a closed turret. Nothing on the Allied side combined all of it, and the vehicles that carried a heavier gun — the British AEC and Staghound with their 75 mm — gave up mobility to do it.

It arrived eighteen months after the campaign it was designed for had ended, and it was built at a rate of roughly eight a month. The German army of 1944 was short of fuel, of trained crews and of time, and it spent part of what it had on a hundred and one superb scout cars — which is the same sentence that can be written about the Tiger, the Panther and the Elefant, in a smaller size.

• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Panzer Tracts No. 13: Panzerspähwagen (Darlington Productions).
• Walter J. Spielberger, Die Räder-Fahrzeuge des deutschen Heeres 1870–1945 (Motorbuch Verlag).
• Gordon L. Rottman, German Armoured Cars and Reconnaissance Half-Tracks 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).