Elefant
Elefant was a heavy tank destroyer used by German Panzerjäger units during World War II. Ninety-one units were built in 1943 under the name Ferdinand using VK 45.01 tank hulls which had been produced for the Tiger I tank before the competing Henschel design had been selected.
Following their use at the battle of Kursk, in January to April 1944 the surviving Ferdinands received modifications and upgrades. They were renamed Elefant in May 1944. The official German designation was Panzerjäger Tiger and the ordnance inventory designation was Sd.Kfz. 184.
Development history
had manufactured about 100 chassis for their unsuccessful proposal for the Tiger tank, the "Porsche Tiger", in the Nibelungenwerk factory in Sankt Valentin, Austria. Both the successful Henschel proposal and the Porsche design used the same Krupp-designed turret—the Henschel design had its turret more-or-less centrally located on its hull, while the Porsche design placed the turret much closer to the front of the superstructure. Since the competing Henschel Tiger design was chosen for production, the Porsche chassis were no longer required for the Tiger tank project. It was therefore decided that the Porsche chassis were to be used as the basis of a new heavy panzerjäger, Ferdinand, mounting Krupp's newly developed Panzerjägerkanone 43/2 anti-tank gun. This precise long-range weapon was intended to destroy enemy tanks before they came within their own range of effective fire.The Ferdinand was intended to supplant previous light panzerjägers, such as the Marder II and Marder III, in the offensive role. A similar gun was used in the contemporary, but lightly armoured Hornisse tank destroyer, and in the Tiger II heavy tank, introduced in 1944.
Design
Chassis
The petrol–electric transmission made it much easier to relocate the engines than would be the case on a mechanical-transmission vehicle, so without the forward-mounted turret of the Porsche Tiger prototype, the twin engines were relocated to the front, where the turret had been, leaving room ahead of them for the now-isolated driver and assistant-driver only. The now empty rear half of the hull was covered with a heavily armored, full five-sided casemate with slightly sloped upper faces and armored solid roof, and turned into a crew compartment, mounting a single 8.8 cm Pak 43 cannon in the forward face of the casemate. The initial Ferdinand conversions were thus among the first physical examples of what became known as the dedicated Jagdpanzer tank destroyers, all of which had completely enclosed casemates, but most of which were designed with the casemate as an integral component of the vehicle's hull armor from the start; the Ferdinand was more of a cross between the earlier, thinly armored, high-profile, "three-side" Panzerjäger and the later, more heavily armored, lower-profile, rear-engined Jagdpanzer. The driver and assistant driver were in a separate compartment at the front. As the engines were placed in the middle, the assistant driver and the driver were isolated from the rest of the crew and could be addressed only by intercom.Add-on armor of 100 mm was bolted to the front plates, increasing the plate's thickness to 200 mm and adding another 5 tonnes of weight.
Drive
The two Porsche Type 101 15-litre gasoline V-10 air-cooled engines each developing 310 PS in each vehicle had considerable problems with cooling difficulties and excess oil consumption during testing. An improved type 101/2 engine with better cooling seems not to have been installed. The Porsche engines were replaced by two 300 PS Maybach HL120 TRM engines. The engines drove a single Siemens-Schuckert 500 kVA generator each, which powered two Siemens 230 kW individual-output electric motors, one each connected to each of the rear sprockets. The electric motors also acted as the vehicle's steering unit. This "petrol–electric" drive delivered 0.11 km/L off-road and 0.15 km/L on road at a maximum speed of 10 km/h off-road and 30 km/h on road. In addition to this high fuel consumption and poor performance, the vehicle was maintenance-intensive; the sprockets needed to be changed every 500–900 km. Furthermore, the radiators for the water-cooled Maybach engines took up extra space in the cramped engine compartment, and the engines often over-heated.Porsche had experience of this form of petrol–electric transmission extending back to 1901, when he designed a car that used it.
Suspension for the "slack track" equipped Ferdinand consisted of six twin bogies with longitudinal torsion bars, without any overlapping wheels or return rollers. There are sprockets at both ends of the vehicle. The drive sprockets are at the rear, while the front pair contain a drum brake system.
Armament
The vehicle was fitted with an 88 mm Panzerjägerkanone 43/2 gun. This 71 caliber-long gun had originally been developed as a replacement for the well-known 88 mm anti-aircraft gun that had been used against Allied tanks in the Western Desert Campaign and on the Eastern Front. It had a much longer barrel than the L/56 guns, which gave it a higher muzzle velocity, and fired a different, longer cartridge. These improvements gave the 88 mm L/71 significantly improved armor penetration ability over the earlier 88 mm. Although it lost the competition to the 8.8 cm Flak 41 and never became an anti-aircraft weapon, it was turned into the very successful Pak 43 anti-tank gun.As fitted, the gun was capable of 28° traverse and -8° and +14° depression/elevation.
Production
Ninety-one existing "Porsche Tiger" chassis were converted. The work was completed in just a few months from March to May 1943. Three Bergepanzer Ferdinands were produced at the Nibelungenwerke in summer 1943.Combat history
Kursk
Ferdinands first saw combat in the Battle of Kursk, where eighty-nine were committed, the largest deployment of the vehicle during its service.The Ferdinand was highly effective at engaging Soviet T-34 medium tanks and 76.2 mm anti-tank guns from behind the front line with its 88 mm gun at a range of over 3 kilometres. The most substantial problems during their operational usage at Kursk was mine damage and mechanical failure. Any damage to the tracks or suspension negated the protection of the armor, as crews were forced to dismount and attempt repairs. The immense weight of the Ferdinand made towing difficult: the standard armored recovery vehicle in German service at the time was the Bergepanzer IV, a variant of the Panzer IV tank. Although it could tow a single Panzer IV without assistance it was insufficient for larger vehicles; a Tiger I heavy tank required three Bergepanzer IVs to be towed, and the Ferdinand needed five linked together to pull the vehicle off the field.
In addition, the Ferdinand was hampered by flaws such as the lack of peripheral vision blocks. But contrary to popular belief, the lack of a mounted machine gun was not a problem for the Ferdinand during Operation Citadel. For example, a report by the commander of the 654th Heavy Tank Destroyer Unit stated that due to the noise of the Ferdinand firing and the Ferdinand's effect on Soviet troops, no Soviet infantry was capable of engaging the Ferdinand in close combat. Furthermore, a Red Army commission examined the Ferdinand tank destroyers abandoned at Ponyri and found that they had been set on fire with Molotov cocktails, not by Soviet infantry, but by German crews who had abandoned their tanks. On the other hand, Heinz Guderian himself complained in his autobiography that the Elefant, much as other failed designs, suffered from lack of close-range protection against infantry assaults.
In the initial stages of the Kursk battle, when the Germans were on the offensive, vehicles could be recovered and repaired with relative peace at night; this at first allowed the majority of knocked-out Ferdinands to be rescued, repaired and returned to duty. However, once the tide of battle had turned against the Germans and they fell back on the defensive, with fewer vehicles to spare, functional Ferdinands with minor damage to their tracks or suspensions had little hope of recovery, and crews were usually forced to destroy the vehicle to prevent a mostly intact Jagdpanzer from falling into the hands of the Soviets.
The units were deployed at a company level, sometimes sub-divided into platoons, with infantry or tanks in accompaniment to protect the flanks and rear of the vehicles. On the attack, this Jagdpanzer was a first-strike vehicle; while in defence, they often comprised a mobile reserve used to blunt enemy tank assaults.
Post-Kursk modifications
The surviving Ferdinands fought various rear-guard actions in 1943 until they were recalled to be modified and overhauled, partially based on battle experience gained at Kursk. Returned to the Nibelungenwerke factory in Austria, on 2 January 1944, upgrades commenced on 48 of the 50 surviving vehicles. The most visible exterior upgrades were 1) the addition of a ball-mounted MG 34 in the hull front, 2) a new commander's cupola re-designed armored engine grates the application of Zimmerit anti-magnetic mine paste.The first eleven complete and updated Ferdinands were ready in February 1944. They were issued to the 1st company of the 653rd Heavy Panzerjäger Battalion, which was immediately deployed in Italy in response to the Allied landing at Anzio-Nettuno. The remaining 37 vehicles were completed in April, issued to the 2nd and 3rd companies of sPzJgrAbt 653, and sent by train to the Tarnopol battles in Ukraine.
On 1 May 1944, the Oberkommando des Heeres issued an order to formally change the name from "Ferdinand" to "Elefant". This order forbade future use of Ferdinand and even directed units in the field to edit their records. Though there is a belief that the name change was linked to the January–April mechanical upgrades to the Ferdinand panzerjäger, the name change was purely administrative in nature.
Three Bergepanzer Elefant armoured recovery vehicles were converted from Ferdinand/Elefant hulls and issued with the 2nd and 3rd companies of sPzJgrAbt 653 to the Eastern Front in the summer of 1944.
Although the modifications improved the vehicles, some problems could never be fully fixed. In 1944, Elefants served on the Italian front, but were rather ineffective as their weight of nearly 70 tonnes did not allow them to use most Italian roads and bridges. As at Kursk, most losses were not as a direct result from combat, but resulted when mechanical breakdowns and lack of spare parts compelled their crews to destroy and abandon them. One company of Elefants saw action during the Soviets' January 1945 Vistula–Oder offensive in Poland, and the last surviving vehicles were in combat at Zossen during the Battle of Berlin.