Tiger I in Tunisia - the Right Color?

Modeling Subjects Armor
21

Actually - and this is just me, making a point just to make a point - the Tiger’s flaws were well-known, even by then.

The reason why Tiger didn’t absolutely rule wherever it served (Africa, Russia, Italy, Western Europe, etc) was two-fold, if I understand correctly. One was that it was virtually guaranteed to break down. Now, we understand, of course, that all tanks will have their mechanical and automotive issues, but Tiger was worse than others, even for its time. I think the other drawback was production. Tiger required over 300,000 man-hours to build (I think this is according to TIC1, but I’m not sure). So, the US could produce and field half a dozen Shermies in the time it took Germany to produce one or two Tigers, so their casualties were slow to be replaced.

Its armor capacities, on the other hand, were legendary from day one. Tiger had the heaviest armor and the biggest, most powerful main gun of any of the major combat tanks of its day. It was eventually outclassed, but not by much, and not for a long time. In North Africa, nothing could touch it but the desert - and the desert ate it up. It took the Russians in 1943 to begin fielding tanks that could give Tiger crews reason to camoflage their vehicles (except that Tiger crews, like everyone else, would have camoflaged against air attack most of the time).

I don’t guess much of this means anything if you’re just trying to figure out the right colors to use. But still, food for thought.

22

I will just add some comments about the Tunisian campaign. One environmental factor that was big in the campaign was -MUD! Tunisia has a Mediterrean environment which tends to have only two seasons, dry summers with wet winters. It is not as moist as it was during the Roman times when it was the bread basket for Rome, but it is not desert. A green camouflage would not be out of place here. Below is a comment about the Kasserine Pass.

PassArea.tif (654486 bytes)"Kasserine Pass was a miserable place to be on Friday morning, the 19th of February, 1943. A cold wind blew sheets of rain onto the soldiers of Task Force Stark. The desert floor was so saturated from weeks of rain that even tracked vehicle movement was restricted to improved roads."

To echo some of jthurston’s comments, both the Tiger and the Panther were know to breakdown every 10 to 15 miles. The Sherman on the other hand could go 100 miles without a problem. After the war, France who had a good number of Panthers in their stocks, shifted over to Shermans because of their reliablity.

If you read “Brazen Chariots” by Crisp he notes when they first got the M3 Stuarts that they drove one in a manner to quarantee to loose a track on a British tank, but it wouldn’t shed one. Supposedly this is one of the reasons why the nickname “Honey” was given to the Stuart.

Mike T.

23

Not true if you ask me. If it was true and don’t think people like Otto Carius, Alfred Rubbel, Richard Freiherr Von Rosen and other Tiger commanders would have been so fund of their tanks.

What the problem was, was that the crew needed special training to avoid break downs, and the tank didn’t have that extra power that you need to escape when you’re in a tight spot. During road marches the Tiger could cover great dsitances … if they halted every 10 - 20 miles to perform maintenance, which ofcourse is a problem. I believe it was s.Pz.Abt 506 that lost about 90 % of it’s tanks to mechanical breakdowns in less than 2 months. The german high command was so convinced that sabortage was to blaim and sent a special Gestapo unit to the front to investigate, they concluded that the large number of failures was due to poor training of the crews who were inexperienced on heavy tanks.

So the Tiger was only guaranteed to break down if the crews were poorly trained or made bad decisions, this is ofcourse a problem, it is better of any farm boy can just jump into the drivers seat and drive the damned thing wihtout training.

There are plenty of examples in books like “Das Reich Tigers”, “The combat history of s.Pz.Abt 503”, “Tigers in the mud” and others of Tigers performing long road marches without problems, there are ofcourse also examples of the opposit.

As far as green tigers go. I have yet to find in my 40 or so books about Tiger tanks a piece of solid evidence that this infact happened, there are plenty of speculations in some of them, so it is possible.

24

Hey Steve Crockett: the info about the Bovington Tiger being captured having a camo scheme was news to me as well. Photos of it during capture appear in several books I had owned – and nothing stood out to me. Back at the 2001 AMPS Nationals, T Jentz’ seminar that year was German camo patterns (it was VERY well attended).

The three most memorable ideas he conveyed that day were:

  1. from unhandled items of original German manufacture of different types and different eras and different factories, Jentz concluded that dunkelgelb was formulated uniformly. He also stated that the base pigment for dunkelgelb is a natural earth compound, not susceptible to fading. Therefore, dunkelgelb should be uniform throughout the war (since it wasn’t a synthetically made pigment)

  2. the little understood 1/3 dk brown cloud patterns given to prewar tanks – and their near invisibility in b/w period photos. He then passed out some pristine factory fresh photos of a Pz III – and one could barely discern the dk brown paint – but it was there!

  3. further showing us the inadequacies of b/w photography, he showed us well-known photos of the just captured Bovington Tiger (like the ones in my books). No camo was apparent. Then he whipped out another set of photos of the same tank, taken during an inspection of the Tiger by King George VI. And sure enough, a faint cloud pattern could be seen!

Using those photos and careful layer by layer paint removal by the Bovington restoration staff, Jentz assisted the museum in recreating the camo scheme as it appeared at the time of capture. Jentz said that about 1/3 of the tank’s scheme couldn’t be discovered by the paint removal nor were seen in the King George inspection pics. Those areas just had camo applied extrapolating from other areas of the tank that were documented. The Bovington Tiger, therefore, could be one of the best restored camo schemes of German WW2 vehicles extant today.

Manstein Revenge: Check out AMPS here:

http://www.amps-armor.org/ampssite/default.aspx

Info on our National Convention can be seen here:

http://www.amps-armor.org/ampssite/conventions/showInfo.aspx?Page=Annouce&ShowID=21

It portends to be the single biggest Armor show in North America, ever. Have a look at the speaker line-up! A hearty invitation to all!!!

25

I agree with TMN1’s point here, if one reads the unit histories from the Eastern front, it is quite apparent that Tigers were “plugged in” to trouble along a vast front which required roadmarches across long distances. Sure there were “breakdowns”, but outside of the training issues encountered with crews, the vehicle aquitted itself pretty well. The “guaranteed breakdown” statement is exaggerated IMHO.

If you get a chance, watch the video that was posted on this board a few months ago of a Tiger 1 manuevering at speed…the agility will surprise you.

It is also noteworthy to understand that most German tanker recruits had never driven even a car. At this time in Germany, private vehicle ownership was not a norm. To train truck drivers to supply the Eastern front was a challenge. Training and developing crack crews for these tanks was no easy chore.

Steve

26

Hey Roy…

Fascinating information. I have my CH Tunisian on deck so I am watching this discussion with much interest. I was very careful in my post not to draw any conclusions from those pics. As you point out…never assume anything on this subject…

regards,

Steve

27

Roy hit upon one of the problems with black and white photography. Certain types of B&W film has color bias. The most common is a red bias. In this case reds, including red browns, seem to disappear from the pictures. This was a long time problem in looking at pictures of Itailan aircraft in the three color pattern. The CR 42 that was captured in England, the picture showing it crashed has red biased B&W film and the red brown markings are bleached out. A later B&W picture taken during flight testing clearly shows the three color pattern on the same aircraft. This airplane is preserved at Hendon, but has an incorrect camo pattern on it, not showing the red brown component. On the pictures are below look at the upper wing patterns.

D:\myfiles\Misc\Håkans Flygsida - The Falco and Regia Aeronautica in the Battle of Britain.htm

http://surfcity.kund.dalnet.se/falco.htm

Mike T.

28

I didnt mean to stir up a controversy on the Tiger and its flaws - but Im glad it happened. This sort of discussion is why a forum like this is tops. Thanks to everyone for adding in.

Not the least of the Tigers flaws, when it was running that is, was its voracious appetite for gasoline. Not diesel fuel, mind you, like it’s Russian counterparts, but highly refined, hi-octane gasoline. Mechanical breakdowns and crew training notwithstanding, it seems you had to have an unending fuel line attached to the beast, wherever it went. Many a wartime resistance effort was directed at that resource alone. The Germans only too late learned what the Russians knew - simple is far better adapted to war than complex.

But not all German planners were “trotzkopfsen.” Study indicates that there were those who wise;y preferred the diesel alternative, in fact, for strategic simplicity and power delivered per gallon. Some within the Reich’s production cadre went so far as to propose copying as much of the eye-opening T-34 as possible, just to stay in the game as it had developed with Germany’s foes. But no Russian influence would be felt in German arms “werkes,” regardless of how good it was. So diesel was out and gasoline was in. It was reputed that it took 150 gallons of the stuff to go 50 miles in the Tiger I.

The Tiger, for its size, was well suited to most decent tank terrain… much to the surprise of it’s detractors and enemies. While not real speedy (30-35mph tops), it had good maneuverability, armament and armor protection - all carried on a wide track footprint that helped to distribute it’s great weight over the earth. There are good reasons why it was renowned and even by war’s end, few Allied tanks could challenge it on even terms.

The problem was that to transport the thing any distance required removing the outer set of roadwheels and the battle tracks for the then-common rail tranport mode. Once that was done, a special, narrow track was threaded on so the monster could fit on the average rail car without overhanging the sides! This meant you had to dismount the battle tracks and remount a new set every time you tranported the things overland; and then do it all over again at your destination. These ersatz transport tracks didn’t spread out the vehicle’s weight over terrain and couldn’t take the strain of operation, so had no other use - except to be stored until they were needed again. Strikes me as a flaw for a highly mobile, mechanized fighting force.

Green as a Tiger color in Tunisien? I can only say that it’s invisible - meaning I can’t see it from my workbench. I know that N. Africa isn’t just a barren wasteland, especially along the coasts. I thought the reference to Rome was a sound one and a great interjection on that score. Many, many pics of Tunisian Tigers show a backing landscape that is scrubby, flush with olive groves and orchards. More than a few Mediterranean countries to this day incorporate the color in their armor schemes.

But, if you’ll recall, I plan a Tiger I that is obviously “deserty” at first glance, focused around the captured tank now displayed at Bodington. After reviewing as much as I have up til now, I think the RAL8020 / RAL7008 combination is sound.

I, too, have my ideas and hopefully, lucid comments. But, I am amazed at the volume of historical knowledge represented by a group like this. While most Avearge Joes could care less about such things, it shows that this group is anything but average. Well done, folks!

29

Very true, gasolin engine was not the best option for such a large vehicle. However if you read the book “Tiger, Kingtiger and their variants” by Walter Spielberger you will find a good explanation. The germans did develop diesel engines, but didn’t feel they could produce enough diesel fuel to fill the demand, not until they were able to make synthetic diesel fuel did they persue this path. In his book he has pictures and discriptions of a 16 cylinder diesel engine with the cylinders in an X configuration that produced 1500 bhp, it was fitted in a Tiger II for testing and performed well. However it required a lot of reconstruction of the engine compartment and it was decided not to mass produce the engine.

The transport tracks and combat tracks derives from the development of the tiger. The original design program for a heavy tank for the german army started even before the war, the culmination for Henschel was the vehicle known as Vk3601. This was a vehicle orginally intended to be in the 36 ton class, but was slightly heavier than that, it was also designed to fit the maximum loading width of rail cars. When the decision was taken to increase the weight of the final design in light of the heavier russian tank encountered on the eastern front and with a very short dead line, Henschel had no chioce but to use what they already had and just enlarge it. Many design elements were carried over from the VK3601, the transport tracks were actually the combat tracks of the VK3601, but the increased weight meant they had to install wider tracks.

How ever try and compare this with one of the original design ideas for the heavy tanks, which was to have a chassis in several parts that would be shipped by rail and then assembled at the offloading point … i think it’s easier to “just” change tracks. According to several books experienced crews could do this in less than 30 minutes, but agreed, it would have been better if they didn’t have to change them at all.