Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger II

Even as the Tiger I was entering service, the German Army was already looking for its successor. The lesson of the Eastern Front was clear: armour and firepower were everything, and the Soviets were certain to field new tanks and anti-tank guns capable of defeating the Tiger I in turn. What was wanted was a heavy tank that fused the Tiger's devastating gun with the sloped armour that made the T-34 and the new Panther so hard to penetrate.

As with the original Tiger, Henschel and Porsche submitted competing designs, and once again the more practical Henschel proposal won out — though the first fifty turrets had already been built to the rounded Porsche pattern before production switched to the simpler, flat-faced Henschel turret. The new tank entered service in 1944 as the Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger II, but to its crews and its enemies alike it was the Königstiger — the King Tiger.

The Tiger II carried its protection to an extreme no other operational tank of the war could match. Its glacis plate was 150 mm thick and steeply sloped, making the frontal armour effectively immune to virtually every Allied tank and anti-tank gun at normal combat ranges. Its long 8.8 cm KwK 43 L/71 gun was even more powerful than the Tiger I's weapon, able to destroy any Allied or Soviet tank at ranges well over two kilometres.

But these qualities were bought at a crippling cost in weight. At nearly 70 tonnes the King Tiger was the heaviest tank to see widespread service in the war, and its Maybach HL 230 engine — the same unit used in the far lighter Panther — was hopelessly overburdened. The result was poor mobility, a thirsty appetite for scarce fuel, a fragile drivetrain and a tank that could barely cross many bridges or be recovered when it broke down.

Production was slow, complex and constantly disrupted by Allied bombing, and only around 492 were completed. Like the Tiger I, the King Tiger was issued mainly to independent heavy tank battalions and treated as a special weapon committed at decisive points.

The Tiger II itself saw little variation beyond the early Porsche turret, with its curved front and a shot-trap below the mantlet, and the later simplified Henschel turret with a flat face and more internal ammunition stowage. Both rode on the same massive hull, and detail changes were largely matters of production simplification as German industry came under ever greater strain.

The chassis did, however, provide the basis for one of the most powerful armoured fighting vehicles of the war: the Jagdtiger. This turretless tank destroyer mounted an enormous 12.8 cm gun in a fixed casemate on a lengthened Tiger II hull and, at over 70 tonnes, was the heaviest armoured vehicle to enter service in the entire conflict — even more cumbersome than the tank it was based on, and built in still smaller numbers.

The King Tiger first saw action on the Eastern Front and in Normandy in 1944, and went on to fight in the major battles of the war’s final year, including the Ardennes offensive of December 1944. In a straight defensive duel it was almost unbeatable: its 150 mm sloped frontal armour shrugged off Allied shot at any normal range, while its long 8.8 cm KwK 43 L/71 destroyed opposing tanks at distances where they could not even hope to reply.

On good ground, in the hands of a veteran crew, a single King Tiger could hold up an entire attack. The best-known fought with the heavy tank battalions — s.SS-Pz.Abt. 501 spearheading Kampfgruppe Peiper in the Ardennes, and s.Pz.Abt. 503 in Normandy — where their frontal invulnerability forced the Allies to manoeuvre around them rather than meet them head-on.

Yet its operational record was dominated by its own weight and unreliability. Many King Tigers never reached the battlefield at all, breaking down on the approach march or running out of fuel, and a large proportion of total losses came not from enemy fire but from mechanical failure and abandonment — destroyed by their own crews when they could go no further. At nearly 70 tonnes it broke bridges and bogged in soft ground, and recovery was a nightmare, often needing several vehicles to tow a single casualty.

By 1945 the picture was one of a magnificent but immobile weapon overwhelmed by the war around it. With Germany’s fuel supplies in collapse and the Allies dominant in the air and overwhelming on the ground, the King Tiger’s near-invulnerability in a duel counted for little against an enemy that simply went around it, bombed it from the air, or waited for it to run dry. Only around 490 were ever built.

The Tiger II was the ultimate expression of the German philosophy of armoured power: protect and arm the tank so heavily that nothing could face it head-on. In that narrow aim it succeeded completely, and as a defensive weapon it was the most formidable tank of the war — a vehicle whose frontal armour and gun simply outclassed everything sent against it.

But it was also the reductio ad absurdum of that philosophy. Too heavy, too thirsty, too unreliable and far too few, the King Tiger consumed precious resources to produce a tank that spent much of its short career broken down or out of fuel. It is remembered, like the Tiger I before it, for what it could do in a single fight — while the war was decided by the cheaper, lighter, mass-produced tanks it could never defeat in numbers.

• Thomas L. Jentz & Hilary L. Doyle, Germany’s Tiger Tanks: VK45.02 to Tiger II (Schiffer).
• Wolfgang Schneider, Tigers in Combat II (Stackpole).
• Steven J. Zaloga, King Tiger Heavy Tank 1942–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).