Submarines and their Weapons - Aircraft of World War II

TANKS AND ANTI-TANK WEAPONS
PANZER 'MAUS'
Length (overall): 10.08m (33.08ft)
Width: 3.67m (12.00ft)
Weight: 193,000kg (425,488lb)
Max road speed: 20km/h (12.5mph)
Max road range: 190km (119 miles)
the HWA turned, and even less of one to learn that the
E100, as the project was known, displayed more than
a passing resemblance to them, though it was certainly
on a grander scale. Its all-up weight was estimated
at 142.2 tonnes (140 tons) which would probably
have meant it going into battle at least 10.16 tonnes
(10 tons) heavier, and it, too, was to have had the
KwK 44 15cm gun and a co-axially mounted 7.5cm.
In all, it appears to have been a more realistic (though
the phrase is used loosely) proposition than the Maus.
One prototype was under construction at the war's
end, but had never run.
In all, the German tank development programme
during World War II was deeply flawed by the
assumption that a single vehicle, heavily armoured
and with a powerful gun, would be able to out-fight
(or at least out-range) any number of enemy tanks. By
the time the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, this
was certainly not true. American Sherman tanks,
which appeared on the battlefield around the same
time as the Tiger, had by then acquired very much
more powerful guns - the 76mm in Americanmanned
tanks, the 17pdr in British service - and had
a fighting chance which their numerical superiority
turned into a certainty. The same was true in the east
with the up-gunned T-34. It would have been very
much more sensible to have abandoned the Tiger (or
better still, never to have begun it) and to have concentrated
instead on the PzKpfw V Panther, which
many experts rate as the best tank of the entire war.
Certainly, Panthers were quicker (and much cheaper)
to produce, and were formidable opponents, with a
124
Crew: 6
Armament: 15cm KwK 44 gun, 7.5cm KwK 44
gun; 2 x 7.92mm MG 34 machine guns
Above: Even the King Tiger would have been dwarfed
beside the 'Maus'. Its secondary armament was to have
been the 7.5cm gun, the Panther tank's main armament.
KwK 42 7.5cm cannon, 70 calibres long, developed
by Rheinmetall-Borsig, which was capable of perforating
any Allied tank at virtually all ranges.
ANTI-TANK WEAPONS
If the German tank development programme was
fatally flawed, the same could not be said of the antitank
(AT) weapons development programme. At the
start of World War II, anti-tank weapons were simply
not up to the task, save in a few particulars. One was
the heavy German 8.8cm gun, which had started life
as an anti-aircraft weapon but which showed itself
during the Spanish Civil War as a very successful AT
weapon, once appropriate armour-piercing projectiles
had been developed. It soon acquired a practical and
practicable mobile mounting, and was issued as the
Panzerabwehrkanone (PaK) 36; it was also adopted as
the KwK 36 for the Tiger tank. It was very capable,
but entirely conventional; other German developments
in high-velocity guns intended for use against
armoured vehicles were not.
THE TAPERED-BORE GUNS
The earliest suggestion for a gun with a uniformly
tapering barrel seems to have originated in Germany
in about 1903 with a man named Karl Puff. He suggested
using a projectile with a sleeve, which was
compressed by the taper of the bore until it filled a