Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger

The Tiger was born of a shock. When German tanks first met the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 in the summer of 1941, their crews discovered to their horror that the standard guns of the Panzerwaffe could barely penetrate these well-armoured machines, while the Soviet tanks struck back with ease. The German Army’s existing designs had been outclassed almost overnight, and the demand for a heavy tank that could dominate any opponent on the battlefield became urgent.

Heavy-tank studies had in fact been running on a low priority since the late 1930s, but the Eastern Front gave them sudden importance. Two firms, Henschel and Porsche, were ordered to produce competing designs around a powerful new weapon — a tank version of the formidable 8.8 cm anti-aircraft gun. After trials in 1942 the more conventional and producible Henschel design was chosen, and it entered service as the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger.

The Tiger combined three qualities that, taken together, no Allied tank of 1942 could match: a devastating gun, very heavy armour, and a turret that could traverse a full 360 degrees to bring that gun to bear. Its 8.8 cm KwK 36 could destroy almost any enemy tank at ranges far beyond those at which its opponents could reply, and its flat 100 mm frontal plates were nearly impervious to the standard Allied anti-tank guns of the day.

These virtues came at a steep price. At nearly 57 tonnes the Tiger was enormously heavy for its time — too heavy for many bridges, a strain on its drivetrain, and a constant challenge to the engineers who had to recover or repair it. Its interleaved road wheels gave a smooth ride and excellent weight distribution but could pack with mud and ice that froze solid overnight, immobilising the tank until it was chipped free. It was thirsty, mechanically complex and slow to build, and it demanded skilled crews and a well-organised maintenance system to keep it running.

Production was therefore deliberately limited and the Tiger was treated as a special weapon. Rather than being scattered through the ordinary Panzer divisions, most were concentrated in independent heavy tank battalions (schwere Panzerabteilungen) held at corps or army level and committed where the fighting was hardest.

The Tiger I changed relatively little across its production life, a sign of how complete the basic design had been. Early vehicles used the Maybach HL 210 engine and were fitted for deep wading, while later ones received the more powerful HL 230 and simplified fittings. From 1943 the tanks were coated in Zimmerit anti-magnetic-mine paste, and the early commander’s drum cupola gave way to a safer cast cupola with periscopes.

The chassis also spawned the massive Sturmtiger, a close-assault vehicle mounting a 38 cm rocket mortar intended to flatten buildings and fortifications. But the Tiger I was never the basis for the broad family of derivatives that grew from the Panzer IV — it was too heavy, too costly and too few in number, and by 1944 it was being superseded on the production lines by the even larger Tiger II (King Tiger).

The Tiger went into action for the first time on 29 August 1942, at the railway junction at Mga, south-east of Leningrad, with the four tanks of 1./s.Pz.Abt. 502. Three of the four broke down before they reached their assigned position. The battalion commander, Major Richard Märker, had argued against the deployment before it happened: the sector was heavily forested, badly drained and full of soft bog, ground on which a 57-tonne tank could neither manoeuvre nor be recovered when it stuck. He was overruled, and the Tiger made its debut in the worst terrain that could have been chosen for it.

Committing it there threw away the one advantage it held over everything the Red Army fielded — an 8.8 cm gun that killed at ranges its opponents could not answer. Among trees and marsh the engagements were short-range, the flanks were open, and the ground did much of the Soviets’ work for them. Through that autumn the battalion depended on technicians sent out from Henschel and Maybach to keep the tanks running at all, a factory support arrangement no other German tank required and one that followed the Tiger for the rest of the war.

The ground Märker had warned about produced its consequence five months later. During Operation Iskra, the Soviet offensive of January 1943 that broke the land blockade of Leningrad, s.Pz.Abt. 502 lost several Tigers bogged down in the swamps. One was taken on 16 January after being hit by artillery, a second and almost undamaged one on the 17th, and on 18 January the tanks carrying turret numbers 100 and 121 were captured whole — not shot out, simply sunk in and impossible to tow clear.

Both were at the Kubinka proving ground by April 1943, where 121 was shot at to measure its armour and 100 was used to fire its own 8.8 cm at Soviet plate. The findings settled several arguments at once: the 76.2 mm F-34 and ZiS-5 carried by the T-34 and the KV could not defeat the Tiger’s frontal armour at any survivable range, while the 85 mm 52-K anti-aircraft gun could. The SU-85 tank destroyer was in production by that summer, and the same 85 mm went into the turret of the T-34/85 from January 1944.

The Tiger reached North Africa with s.Pz.Abt. 501 from November 1942, and the theatre produced the most lopsided loss record the type ever compiled. Of the 31 Tiger I written off in Africa, 6 were destroyed by enemy action; the other 25 were lost to mechanical failure, fuel exhaustion or demolition by their own crews. In a campaign that ended in surrender there was nowhere to send a broken tank, and a Tiger that could not move was a Tiger already gone.

One of them became the most valuable single vehicle the Allies captured in the war. The received account — the one the Tank Museum itself told for decades, resting on Lieutenant Peter Gudgin’s testimony — places the capture at Djebel Djaffa on 21 April 1943, disabled by Churchills of 48 RTR. Research published by Dale Oscroft puts it fifteen miles away at Gueriat el Atach (Point 174) on 24 April, during an attack by the 2nd Battalion, The Sherwood Foresters, with the decisive shot fired by a supporting Churchill. The two versions agree on the damage: a 6-pounder solid shot struck the gun barrel and ricocheted down into the turret ring, jamming the traverse, and the crew abandoned a tank that was otherwise intact. Shipped to England for examination, it survives at Bovington as Tiger 131, the only running Tiger I in the world.

Kursk is remembered as the Tiger’s battle, and the strength returns say something different. Germany committed roughly 2,451 tanks and assault guns to Operation Zitadelle on 5 July 1943, of which about 146 were Tigers — under six per cent. The weight of the offensive was carried by what had always carried it: 668 Panzer IIIs and the Panzer IV. The II SS-Panzerkorps crossed the start line with 35 Tigers running, and s.Pz.Abt. 503 had 42 of its 45 operational on 1 July.

Where they were present they did what they had been built to do. s.Pz.Abt. 503 lost three Tigers during the offensive itself and five more in the withdrawal that followed — a pattern repeated across the front, in which the tank was rarely beaten in a straight exchange and was then lost afterwards, to breakdown and to ground given up. Soviet daily returns during Zitadelle repeatedly claimed more Tigers destroyed than the German army had on that sector of the front.

Sicily showed what happened when the type was used without room. In July 1943 s.Pz.Abt. 504 landed on the island with seventeen Tigers, attached to the Hermann Göring division, and threw them at the American beachhead at Gela: ten were lost in two days, on 11–12 July, to anti-tank guns, naval gunfire and ground that gave a 57-tonne tank nowhere to go. The rest were expended or abandoned across July and August as the island was given up — a battalion consumed in six weeks without a single armoured battle of the kind the Tiger had been built to win.

The terrain chose the outcome as much as the enemy did. The approaches to Gela ran through terraced hillsides and narrow roads onto a plain covered by the guns of American cruisers and destroyers lying offshore, so the Tigers attacked in the open, at close range, against fire they could not reach. It was the second time in eleven months that the tank had been committed to ground its own officers could see was wrong for it, and the second time the loss return was written by the ground rather than by any opposing tank.

On the morning of 13 June 1944 the leading squadron of the 4th County of London Yeomanry and a column of the 1st Rifle Brigade halted on the RN175 between Villers-Bocage and Point 213. Michael Wittmann, of 2./s.SS-Pz.Abt. 101, attacked the stationary column in a single Tiger and inside about a quarter of an hour left its head and tail burning — on the fuller modern reconstructions, on the order of a dozen tanks and a dozen or more half-tracks, carriers and anti-tank guns. He then drove into the town, where a 6-pounder anti-tank gun disabled his Tiger at the Tilly-sur-Seulles junction and he and his crew left on foot.

What followed was a propaganda operation, and it is worth correcting the often-repeated claim that one Tiger crew defeated the 7th Armoured Division. German reports credited Wittmann personally with 20 to 27 tanks and a long tail of other vehicles, assigning to one commander everything destroyed in an action fought by his whole company and, later in the day, by Rolf Möbius’s 1st Company as well. That afternoon attack into the town failed: a Tiger was destroyed and two more knocked out or immobilised — one of them by a PIAT at street range — along with Panzer IVs lost to 6-pounders and to a Sherman Firefly. The historian John Buckley describes the single-crew version as a myth built on unquestioned German propaganda, and Stephen Badsey calls the engagement remarkable but massively over-written.

No tank of the war cast a longer shadow. So feared was the Tiger that Allied crews reported almost every German tank they met as one, whatever it actually was — a habit that hardened into a genuine tactical problem, sometimes called “Tiger fright”. Its reputation alone could stall an attack, and Allied doctrine and propaganda alike had to work hard to convince crews that the tank could, in fact, be killed.

In skilled hands the results could be extraordinary. On the Eastern Front the leading Tiger aces — Kurt Knispel, credited with the war’s highest tank-kill tally, and Otto Carius, who wrote of the fighting in Tigers in the Mud — ran up scores of well over a hundred kills apiece, at ranges and in circumstances no Allied crew could reproduce with the vehicles they were given. The tank won a psychological dominance out of all proportion to the number of them that existed.

For all the dread it inspired, the Tiger could be killed, and the Allies learned how. Its frontal armour was formidable, but its flanks and rear were far thinner, and its slow turret traverse and great weight left it open to being outmanoeuvred. The standard answer became to fix a Tiger’s attention from the front and destroy it with fire from the side — often at the cost of the Sherman crews sent in to bait it. Sheer numbers did the rest: a Tiger might knock out five tanks and still be overwhelmed by the sixth.

New weapons closed the gap. The British 17-pounder, mounted in the Sherman Firefly, could defeat a Tiger frontally at real combat range, while on the Eastern Front the Soviets fielded dedicated “beast-killers” — the 122 mm gun of the IS-2 and the massive 152 mm of the ISU-152, whose shells could blow a Tiger’s turret clean off. Allied fighter-bombers harried the Tigers whenever they moved by day, and their own mechanical frailty finished many more: a Tiger that threw a track or drank its tank dry in the wrong place was as good as lost, for it could rarely be towed clear.

The Tiger I is the most famous tank of the Second World War, and in pure fighting power it deserved the reputation: for a time in 1942–43 it could outgun and out-armour anything it met, and a single well-handled Tiger could dominate a battlefield. With only around 1,347 built, against some 8,500 Panzer IVs, it was always too rare and too costly to be decisive, and the steady, buildable Panzer IV did far more of Germany’s actual fighting.

The loss records compiled by Ron Klages account for 1,238 Tiger I written off — 859 on the Eastern Front, 187 in the West, 161 in Italy and 31 in Africa. Of those, 533 were combat losses and 447 were not: breakdowns, tanks left dry of fuel, and vehicles blown up by their own crews to keep them out of Allied hands, with a further 258 unattributed. That ledger corrects the usual verdict that the Tiger was simply swamped by numbers. Very nearly as many were lost to their own drivetrain, their fuel state and the decision to abandon them as were destroyed by an enemy weapon.

• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Germany’s Tiger Tanks: D.W. to Tiger I (Schiffer, 2000) — the definitive technical study.
• Wolfgang Schneider, Tigers in Combat I (Stackpole, 2004).
• Otto Carius, Tigers in the Mud (Stackpole) — the memoir of a leading Tiger ace.
• The Tank Museum, Bovington — Tiger 131, the world’s only running Tiger I.
• Ron Klages, Trail of the Tigers (Lyonsbrook Publishing, 2002) — the loss records by theatre.
• Daniel Taylor, Villers-Bocage Through the Lens of the German War Photographer (After the Battle, 1999).
• John Buckley, British Armour in the Normandy Campaign 1944 (Frank Cass) — on the Wittmann legend.