By Brandt Heatherington
As early as 1941, the German high command had visions of military technology that was far ahead of its time, and many innovative technological concepts were becoming reality. Had some of them been produced in a more expeditious fashion or in greater numbers, most historians agree that they would have doubtless prolonged World War II, if not altered its outcome entirely. Many of these “wonder weapons” were highly practical concepts and have as their progeny the cornerstones of modern military arsenals— the world’s first assault rifle, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and jet fighters to name a few. And then there were some bizarre concepts, which appear on the surface to be nothing more than an extension of their inventor’s ego. The Panzer VIII Maus (German for “Mouse”) super-tank certainly falls into the latter category.
The Maus was a 188-ton behemoth developed by Porsche at the behest of Hitler himself. Impractical does not begin to describe it, and the timing of its introduction was stupefying. Why, when Nazi Germany had lost the oil fields in Africa and was starting to run short of fuel for the vehicles they had, would they introduce a gas guzzling monster that would obviously be very costly and time consuming to produce? This kind of decision making was one of the great intangibles about Hitler, which confounded his staff as much as it does modern observers. Hitler jumped from one fad and crazy idea to another. The Maus was probably influenced by a trend toward producing heavy tanks that many Allied armor developers were experimenting with during the middle years of World War II. Of course Hitler had to go them one better.
The Americans were developing the 45-ton M-26 Pershing tank, and, of more personal concern to Hitler, the Russians debuted the 45-ton JS-2 Stalin. While most military planners would have been more focused on the thousands of Soviet T-34 medium tanks the Russians were churning out that would eventually be rolling toward the Fatherland, Hitler obsessed with outweighing and outgunning the handful of Allied heavy tanks that were going into production. After the D-Day invasion and the Allied experience of being bogged down in the hedgerows of Normandy, heavy tanks were a subject of major controversy among military planners on both sides. Were they worth their weight? Did they gain more in protection and firepower than they sacrificed in mobility and fuel economy? Hitler had presumably already made up his mind several years before this defining incident and ordered Porsche to get to work. (Read more about these and other “wonder weapons” of the Second World War inside WWII History magazine.)
Porsche’s Quest to Create an “Indestructible” Tank
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ANOTHER of HITLER’S BIG MISTAKES – Wunderwaffen
[extract from LUCKY HITLER’S BIG MISTAKES]
The Porsche-built Panzer VIII Maus (Mouse) was huge at over 10 metres in length and made of 170 tons of thick steel. But even more outrageous was the Landkreuzer P-100 Ratte (Rat). Hitler was most excited by this design and truly believed that the Ratte would win the war for him.
In reality, the proposed 1,000 ton, 35-metre-long goliath was to be five times heavier than the Meus which was already twice the size of a Soviet T-34. Few generals supported Hitler’s dream ‘tank’ – Guderian, said, disparagingly, ‘Hitler’s fantasies sometimes shift into the gigantic’ [149].
Not content with the Ratte notion, Hitler proved Guderian’s observation accurate when he backed the idea for the appropriately named Landkreuzer P.1500 Monster. This was to be a self-propelled gun weighing more than 1,500 tons – 500 tons bigger than the Ratte. The Maus and the Ratte had already revealed the many problems of these gigantic steel machines – transportation was the first.
They could not be moved on rail or on road as they would be destroyed by the sheer weight, as would any bridges. If that could be overcome then they would also be so slow moving that they would be easy targets for enemy aircraft attack. After wasting so much time and money on Hitler’s outrageous fantasies, his brilliant armaments minister, Albert Speer, (Ch.8) finally convinced Hitler to cancel the Maus, Ratte and Monster with not even a prototype of the latter being built.
All these ideas, projects and fantasies – and the resulting waste of vast sums of money, resources and production time – were wholly Hitler’s responsibility. If he had focused on perfecting the Jagdtiger, then he might have had a super-weapon to improve his prospects of winning, or at least extending, the war.
,,,lots more BIG MISTAKES at
http://www.luckyhitler.com