9/7/2023 0 Comments Crazy tanks in battlefield 1“What are you after?” the Führer had asked Albert Speer, his minister of Armaments and War Production, in the spring of 1942 during their discussion on how to meet the threat posed by the superior Soviet T-34 medium tank. Wehrmacht doctrine called for smaller, faster tanks-the ones that put the blitz into blitzkrieg-but Hitler believed that, as with warships, the bigger the better. Never mind the enormous gun took hours to load and fire.Įdward Grotte, too, had a friend in Berlin, for Hitler was-dare we say- crazy about large tanks. Two were actually built one was used in the siege of Sevastopol in the summer of 1942. Named Schwerer Gustav-“Heavy Gustav,” after company chairman Gustav Krupp-it had a bore of 800mm (31.5 inches) and could hurl a nearly eight-ton shell 30 miles. In 1934 Hitler had embraced Krupp’s scheme for a massive railway gun to be used to bombard the heaviest of fixed fortifications, such as France’s Maginot Line. When Germany rearmed, Krupp had a friend in the Reich Chancellery-a very good friend. He reportedly even found a place on its board of directors. He found a home in Essen, at the Krupp industrial conglomerate that built everything from warships to artillery to tanks. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 and repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, Grotte returned to Germany. In the meantime, he designed the multiturret, 112-ton T-42-never produced because the Soviets lacked an engine large enough. He spent several years designing tanks at Bolshevik Plant 232 in Leningrad while dreaming of his thousand-tonne monster. Grotte also migrated east, in 1930 (some sources say as early as 1928) at the invitation of the Soviet government. The man whose name would later be famous for some of the Luftwaffe’s most important aircraft-the Ju 52 transport the Ju 87 Stuka dive-bomber the Ju 88 multirole warplane-moved his factory to suburban Moscow in 1922. Aircraft manufacturer Hugo Junkers, for example, had designed some of the world’s first practical all-metal aircraft during World War I, but found himself unable to build airplanes in Germany. That left a void the Soviet government wanted to fill to jump-start their industrial future so, taking advantage of the situation the treaty created, they invited Germans to come east. ![]() Most Russian engineers and industrialists had ties to the former Tsarist government and had fled when the Bolsheviks took power. In the interwar period, the newly formed Soviet Union provided a refuge for many German engineers and manufacturers. An imaginative and ambitious weapons inventor, Grotte had become interested in large tanks during World War I, but was part of a generation of German armament designers frustrated in their postwar ambitions by the dictates of the Treaty of Versailles, which denied their fatherland an arms industry. Grotte really had designed this behemoth weighing a thousand metric tonnes-about 1,100 tons-that our hypothetical GI saw on that hypothetical day in 1944. WERE THIS SCENARIO NOT FICTITIOUS, it would have marked a dream come true for an engineer-you might call him a mad scientist-named Edward Grotte. A split second later, the sound hits them like a freight train. As the GIs stare at the guns, one jerks violently. It has two guns in its turret that look bigger than the guns on that battleship their troop transport passed last summer. ![]() It appears as tall as a four-story apartment building and wider than a boxcar is long. It looks like a tank, but the German infantrymen next to it give it scale. It takes the men more than a moment to wrap their heads around this thing that is definitely not a Tiger. ![]() Then it breaks into the clearing and the GIs realize that it’s not closer-it’s bigger. As they do, a dark shape appears and someone says, “That Tiger is a lot closer than I thought!” German troops emerge from the forest, so the Americans take cover. Somewhere in the woods beyond the meadow the grinding din grows so loud it nearly drowns out the noise of breaking tree trunks. The sight of a Tiger tank is unforgettable-a 60-ton monster twice as big as a Sherman and 10 times more frightening. Then they hear the clamor of heavy machinery growing ever louder. The ground is trembling, but there is no sound of artillery. The shaking grows stronger and the men look at each other in confusion. No one can ever forget his first artillery barrage all our young GI can do is mutter “Here we go again.” Coming warily down a hill toward a small meadow, the men in the squad feel a faint tremor in the ground. ![]() His regiment had faced scant resistance as it worked its way eastward the past few weeks now the enemy is starting to put up a fight. The leaves are starting to change and there’s a chill in the air. Imagine a young American GI on the front in Europe in late September 1944. The Maus that roared and other exercises in megalomania
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