In the years since World War II, much mythmaking has mucked up history with various often incredible claims about the effectiveness of certain weapons. And no country’s wartime record is more muddled than Germany’s, whose arms and armies have attracted legions of devoted fans. From the battleship Bismarck to the V-2 rocket, Germany’s weapons have near a mythic hold on history like few others. But how effective were these weapons really?
A new video at the YouTube channel Military History Visualized breaks down actual data on the German Tiger tanks. The Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger tank was a German heavy tank that served on the Eastern Front, Western Front, and in North Africa during World War II. The final version of the tank weighed 54 tons, had a crew of five, and was equipped with a mobile version of the famous 88-millimeter anti-tank gun. First fielded in 1942, the Tiger was meant to forge breakthroughs on the battlefield, destroying enemy tanks at long range while shrugging off hits from lesser Allied anti-tank guns.
The Tiger is one of the most revered tanks of the war, if not in the entirety of tank history. And, as Military History Visualized reveals, an effective tank—though perhaps not as great as history tends to portray it. The channel charts the combat effectiveness of the various tank battalions equipped with Tiger, comparing wartime and total losses versus the number of enemy tanks destroyed. Unlike other tanks, Tigers were primarily assigned to independent heavy tank battalions of 45 tanks each that the high command parceled to help out in particularly tough battles.
