The Panther's Front Stopped The Red Army's Best Medium Gun — NINE Gear Teeth Stopped The Panther!

In March 1944, at the southern end of the Eastern Front, a German tank battalion blew up eight of its own Panthers in two days. Two of them had been hit by Soviet anti-tank guns. No enemy weapon had ever touched the other six. The engine had not finished them, and neither had the gearbox. The culprit was a small cluster of gears in a steel case, about the size of a barrel, sitting at each front corner of the hull: the final drive. About three months earlier, at a proving ground west of Moscow, Soviet gunners had fired an 85-millimeter gun at the sloping front plate of a captured Panther from 100 meters. The round did not get through, and neither did the second. The front of the Panther could stop the Red Army's best medium gun at point-blank range. Its final drive, though, had been sized in the winter of 1941 for a 32.5-ton tank that existed only on paper. The Panthers in the mud weighed 45 tons. The weakest link in the Panther was not a blunder. It was picked deliberately, by capable people. A planetary reduction gear needs inner-toothed wheels, and German industry said it plainly: "Inner-toothed gear wheels could not be produced because the machinery did not exist in sufficient quantity." MAN's engineers had built a planetary reduction gear, and post-war reports describe it running in tests flawlessly, yet no production Panther ever received one. The tank got a two-stage spur-gear reduction instead, and the driving pinion that starts the chain has just nine teeth. On 28 June 1944 Heinz Guderian, the Inspector General of Armored Troops, reported that the Panther's engines now lasted 1,400 to 1,500 kilometers, far longer than its final drives: "A solution to the final drive problem is urgently needed." Germany put up prize money for a better final drive. On 23 January 1945 the minutes of the Panzer Commission still recorded "serious complaints regarding final drive breakdowns in all vehicle types." In 1947 the French army's report Le Panther gave the final drive "an average fatigue life of only 150 kilometers." About six thousand Panthers were built, and every one of them left the factory with reduction gearing sized for that 32.5-ton paper tank. This is the story of that gear and of the people who chose it. CHAPTERS 00:00 Eight Panthers in the Mud 03:50 One Page in Berlin 13:06 The Machine Behind the Gear 21:59 Loud Problems 31:57 Counting the Wrecks 41:09 The Minutes of January 1945 The mechanics and recovery crews of every army are among the least written-about soldiers of the war. If one of them was in your family, tell their story in the comments. SOURCES AND CREDITS Archival film and photographs, all in the public domain unless noted: U.S. National Archives (U.S. Army Signal Corps photographs, series 111-SC, and Army Signal Corps film; U.S. Army Air Forces photographs, series 342-FH), Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe (Polish National Digital Archives), Imperial War Museum (British official photographs, series B, C and STT, Crown copyright expired), Soviet wartime photographs by Israel Ozersky (RIA Novosti archive), Kazimir Lishko and Pavel Troshkin, State Archives of Mykolaiv Oblast, Archives Normandie, Maciej Swierczynski, and Mil.ru (CC BY 4.0), via Wikimedia Commons. Documents and drawings: War Department, TM-E 30-451 Handbook on German Military Forces (1945) and TM 9-1750 Ordnance Maintenance: Power Train Unit (1942); Vestnik tankovoy promyshlennosti (1944); Fellows Gear Shaper Company (1897); Rankin Kennedy, Modern Engines (1905); Pearson Scott Foresman, via Wikimedia Commons. Museum and other photographs via Wikimedia Commons: AlfvanBeem, 先従隗始 and Parchaco (CC0); AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gift of Michaele Thurgood Haynes and Terry Thurgood (CC0); Andgy, Vladimir Galin, Markbruinekreeft and Alf van Beem (public domain). Thumbnail portrait: Heinz Guderian, 1940, Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe. Technical drawings and animation: Design Under Fire. The appearance of U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) visual information does not imply or constitute DoD endorsement. #WW2 #PantherTank #Documentary