If you were to run a poll about the best tanks of World War 2, the panzerkampfwagen V “Panther” would certainly make the top 5 if it doesn’t outright win. As a kid, I have fond memories of playing Close Combat: A Bridge Too Far and seeing nothing wrong with requisition 5 Panthers and only 2 poorly equipped reserve squads of infantry to protect them. It’d be fair to say that had you asked me to rank tanks of World War 2 a long time ago, the Panther would’ve also topped my list as well and probably would’ve put the M4 Sherman near the bottom. Over time, though, my opinion has dramatically changed on both tanks. My current is opinion on the Panther is that, not only is it not the best tank of World War 2, but it legitimately could be the worst. The Panther was, in reality, a bit of a dumpster fire.
Design History
For starters, the Panther got its name from Hitler himself. German tanks up that point had merely had Mk designations (the Mk IV being the most recent) and Hitler wanted a name that conjured an image of speed versus the heavier Mk VI tiger already in production. He actually disliked it being called the Mk V, so for the duration of this article, it will be the Mk V. You might’ve noticed earlier that I referenced the Mk VI already being in production. It would be fair to say the Mk V had a troubled development history. It started life in 1938 with a requirement for a new medium tank. The Germans were looking at about the 30 ton range (the final model ended up about 44 tons), but otherwise had non-specific requirements to make it better. All of this got thrown out the window after the Panzer Commission. Now, it’s important to understand the proper context for the so-called “Panzer commission” that happened shortly after the invasion of Russia kicked off. Up to that point, the Wehrmacht had been encountering tanks with better armor and guns in virtually every campaign (Polish 7TPs, French Char B1’s and Somua S35’s, British Matilda II’s and now the T-34 and KV-1). The Germans completely skipped over the fact that they were victorious against all these vehicles with higher raw stats on paper, one historian even noted “The Germans achieved all their greatest victories with the weakest tanks and suffered their worst defeats with the strongest”. In that regards, many credit the T-34 as the sole cause of this reexamination of tank design, but it should instead be viewed as the straw breaking the proverbial camel’s back.
Now, some people will just call the Mk V a German T-34. That’s not really accurate and may be based on one of the trial Panthers basically just being a T-34 although that wasn’t the final design selected for production. Indeed, even a cursory glance at the above image shows a much more direct lineage to the Mk VI and the SdKfz 251 (the latter of which was in service since the beginning of the war) than the T-34 and the similarities between the T-34 and Mk V are more cosmetic than functional. Significantly, the reason for going with the design they did was the German T-34 would’ve required retooling for too many parts and delayed production whereas many components of the final version had either already been developed or were already being produced allowing for the German industry to get started right away.
Mein Panzer ist flammen!
Kursk, in the summer of 1943 was the first operational deployment of the Mk V and problems started incredibly fast. While offloading the nearly 200 Mk V’s from rail cars, 2 of them caught fire. Now, the question “Can the tank be successfully offloaded from a rail car without catching fire?” is like asking “do you know your name?”; Everybody just assumes the answer is “yes” and it’s incredibly worrying when it’s not. The Panther’s propensity to catch fire, seemingly at random, derived partly from the closed engine compartment. The closed engine compartment was a requirement for fording which was also essential because German assault bridges couldn’t support 44 tons, but also increased heat buildup and, in turn increased the likelihood that essential fluids would splash around when the vehicle moved at high angles and hit a hot surface, catching fire. This also means that any enemy round penetrating the engine compartment is virtually guaranteed to set the tank on fire as well. One unit in Normandy, over a year after the introduction of the Mk V, noted that they were surprised that they kept catching fire, but after talking to other units, realized that was just what Mk V’s did. You probably thought that when I referred to these tanks as “a bit of a dumpster fire” that it was just an expression, but no, it was pretty literal.
A related problem to the whole “oops it’s on fire” thing was that the hatches on the early Panthers had some issues opening properly. They were somewhat heavy and not spring assisted, so they were prone to getting stuck. The problems with fire and the hatches were pronounced enough that more than a few crews took to battle with the driver and bow gunner’s hatches open. It should be at this point that any reasonable person would start to question the whole “best tank of World War 2” title, but wait, there’s more!
Teething Problems
The Mk V’s reliability was abysmal. A week into their first operational deployment at Kursk, about 90 of the 180ish Mk V’s deployed were “non combat losses” i.e. they broke down. One unit on another operation noted that in four days, 60 of their 90 Mk V’s had been lost to mechanical failure, averaging 15 tanks lost per day. In fact, the Americans did some trials with captured Mk V’s post war and noted the average miles between serious engine maintenance was only 96, less than the number of miles you could drive on average with a full tank of gas. Heinz Guderian himself, estimated between 60-70% loss rates for non-combat reasons. The transmission was also famously awful having to effectively be calibrated before use. A big part of these reliability issues was just the increase in weight up to 44 tons. Even though the engine had the horsepower to pull the weight, the components weren’t built to handle the stress of moving all those tons.
So, the tank had…problems…but did it work. Crews were complimentary of the front armor’s effectiveness and the flat trajectory and high penetration of the high velocity 7.5 cm gun, but even then the Mk V had a number of non-trivial problems:
---The turret was too small to allow effective handling on the large shells reducing the rate of fire
---it lacked a panoramic sight, so the gunner was stuck looking at the world through a drinking straw and was completely dependent on the commander for giving him targets
---the overlapping road wheels were a maintenance nightmare
---the transmission required removing almost the entire fron half of the tank for replacement and maintenance
---The engine problems required limiting the horsepower significantly, cutting it’s practical speed
---early versions had a half circle turret mantlet that, if hit on the bottom, would bounce the incoming round straight into the turret roof, which a number of allied tank and tank destroyer units were able to use to knock out the Mk V’s even from the front where they should’ve been invulnerable
---The side armor was so thin that even Soviet anti-tank rifles could penetrate it requiring the addition of side skirts
So I guess the answer to that would be…kind of. The Mk V was clearly built for very long range engagements against other tanks with the high velocity gun and emphasis on frontal armor, but notably, the Mk V was a medium tank. As a medium tank it would be issued in large numbers and, ideally should be the predominant tank in a Panzer Division. This means that many of its combat tasks will not involve directly engaging enemy tanks at all. In fact, the most important job of a medium tank is simply to show up to the battle (something that it failed at spectacularly), so in a lot of respects the gun and armor of the Mk V could be viewed as “superfluous to requirements”. It would’ve been a fine tank destroyer.
Conclusion
With all of this context, if you had a car that couldn’t go a full tank of gas without needing to stop by a mechanic, that randomly caught on fire and whose doors had a tendency to stick, could you in all seriousness refer to this as “the best car on the road” or would you use fun and interesting terms “absolute flaming deathtrap”? While there were worse designs than the Mk V, it’s important to note that those designs were generally one-off prototypes or involved limited production. Very few tank involved anywhere near the time or resources as the Mk V and were such an abysmal operational failure and, for that reason, the Mk V makes my list of “worst tanks of the war”.