Let me just preface this post with an apology: I apologize for this wall-of-text I’ve written and are about to subject you to. I’m also sorry for not proofreading this post as I’m already quite tired of looking at it.
How tanks with interleaved road wheels got into combat only dead germans can explain, but it was a maintance nightmare and a stupid way to set up the suspension. All three of Germay’s "great" tanks had this horrid flaw.
The Germans never even considered repairing a wheel or maintaining the suspension on the battle field. What you seem to lack is a general understanding of the difference between German and Allied/Soviet doctrine. The Soviets, Britons and Americans designed their tanks so that a farm boy could fix them in the field, often compromising quality and weight in the process. The Germans designed their tanks to be as good as they could make them, obviously negating the “farm boy” factor, but made them so they could easily be repaired and maintained at a field shop.
The Tigers and Panthers were all built with maintenance access hatches; mind you, they were not meant to be used to fix the machinery while it was still in the tank like you see on Discovey or THC where they criticize the poor access with comments like “you have to work blind and upside-down, and if you dropped your tools they were lost”. No. The access hatches on German tanks were designed so the German field shop mechanics could pull the whole engine or transmission unit out and replace them with working/refurbishes ones.
The Germans invariably designed their machines with
Motoranlage or
Triebwerksanlage commonly called
Kraftei or “power egg”. The engine and transmission were designed as easily replaced units that took 30 minutes to an hour to replace at the shops.
Here are some guys restoring a Panther trying to get the complete front transmission back into the hull:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2LP5V-QGIII’m sure the German mechanics were a bit more efficient though.
However I digress, let’s get back to the suspension. The interlocking road wheels did not only give the Panther/Tiger a superior smooth ride, but was also a part of the tank’s armor defense. The wheels themselves were made from armor grade steel and covered the tank’s lower hull, acting like shields allowing the engineers to reduce the armor on the lower hull to only 40mm thus saving weight. The Panther's ride cross-country was second to none.
By comparison the T-34, while its suspension was highly terrain capable the ride was poor compared to the Panther. The springs did not offer the degree of supple compliance of the Panther’s twin torsion bars and the damping was effectively nonexistent; shock absorbers not being fitted. This gave sort of a roller coaster ride over bumpy ground. In other words, moving rapidly over terrain the Soviet crew would get bounced and shaken around quite a lot more. After a while, in prolonged action this would tend to exhaust and debilitate the Soviet crew more, while the German crew would remain relatively unstressed under similar conditions. For the drivers, the T-34 was more tiring to operate anyway and this difference would be aggravated further when maneuvering over terrain for prolonged periods.
From a maintenance point of view the interlocking wheels are often criticized for being to time consuming in that you might have to remove up to five wheels to get to the one that needs replacing. This is an argument only used by people who don’t really think about
why the wheel needs replacing in the first place. Battle damage in the form of a mine or a hit from an AT gun would not only damage the inner wheel, but the outer wheels as well. In most cases there would be no more than two extra wheels that had to be removed to get to the damaged ones. Another often quoted criticism is that mud would often jam the wheels. This
was a problem with the Tigers on the Russian front, however on the Panther the wheels had sufficient clearance.
Let’s take a closer look at the M4 Sherman’s volute spring suspension:
While the M4’s suspension looks simple enough to work on it simply was not the case with battle damage. If one of the wheels were hit by an AT gun or mine you would in most cases have to replace the entire suspension bogie and spring. Not a job even the hardiest of farm boys could do in the field.
I’m always amazed that people are so willing to believe some of these outlandish criticisms and actually believe that the German army would not have demanded a redesign of the suspension if it was that problematic. To think that the ever so perfection-minded Germans would have accepted a deficient suspension system on some of their most important weapons of war from 1942 to the end of the war is simply silly. This myth is as silly as the “one third of the 109’s were lost in landing accidents” myth.
The Panther was WAY too big, compare it to the heavier Tiger one and it is BIGGER, this is why its side armor is so weak.
No it just wasn’t. While the Panther’s hull is an inch or two longer (because of the sloping front armor plate), it is not as wide or tall as the Tiger. Some of the early reliability problems that the Tiger suffered from were due to the cramped engineering spaces; so if anything the Panther wasn’t too big, but the Tiger too small.
This is also why it’s so unreliable. The Maybach engine was an aircraft engine made to be light, it was not a good tank motor. Yet they used versions of this motor in the Tiger 1 and 2 and Panther. Why didn’t the fantastic amazing super Germans come up with a motor half as good as the Ford V8 used in the M4A3(also an aircraft engine I believe, or was designed for it but hey it was reliable so it’s not as good as german stuff right?)
Why no replacement for the crappy maybach?
The Maybach HL 210/230 engine was not an aircraft engine or based on one, nor was it “crappy”. Maybach-Motorenbau GmbH was in fact a tank and heavy vehicle manufacturer that during the interwar years made cars, and hadn’t made an aero engine since WWI some 20 years earlier. The Maybach 210/230 was a purpose built tank engine that while being advanced in terms of design and production quality was rather mechanically simple; it was a naturally aspirated, carbureted large displacement engine.
After the underpowered HL 210 was redesigned into the HL 230 and the bugs worked out the Maybach became one of the most reliable tank engines of the war. The often lauded reliability of the T-34 was more a case of it being easy to repair, not that it didn’t break down. The Maybach “power egg” was never designed to be repaired in the field, but in a field shop.
Here’s a restored Maybach HL 230 P30 started up for the first time since the war:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VZQVLQAk94Early in the war the Germans used half-tracked prime movers to tow immobilized tanks off the battlefield back to the field shops. Later in the war they adapted Tigers and Pathers to do the job.
It is interesting that while the Russians continued with their tradition of making their tanks simple and repairable in the field, the western allies chose to adopt the German doctrine. Postwar American and British tanks grew more and more complex, right up to the hi-tech monsters of today. The American Abrams and the British Challenger I/II both share the German philosophy of quality over quantity, and also share the same design characteristics with regard to maintenance. The Leo 2 is a prime example of this “modular” approach.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxdEtyxa7Ao These days even the Russians have abandoned the “simple and producible” philosophy of old.
