Sturmgeschütze: Assault Guns & Tank Destroyers

The enduring images of the Panzer formations of World War II are the famous battle tanks, the legendary Panthers and Tigers, which have become synonymous with the Wehrmacht. While they are undoubtedly the best known, they were by no means the most numerous fighting vehicles in the Panzer divisions. Every bit as important as these true tanks were their less celebrated cousins of the assault gun and tank destroyer formations. In many respects, they were similar machines to true tanks and frequently did the same job, but they sacrificed the benefits of the turret for the ability to mount a bigger gun, which was carried on a fixed mounting, pointing straight ahead at the enemy. In 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge, the captured this powerful monster, the Sturmtiger. The troops who knocked out this giant adversary must have breathed a huge sigh of relief, because this devastating machine was so powerfully armed, it had outgrown mere artillery power and was equipped with a rocket launcher of ferocious attacking force. It was designed to attack even the strongest fortification. Due to the range limitations of its rocket launcher, the Sturmtiger had to get very close to its target to fire its payload, but it was so heavily armored that it was nearly impervious to any anti-tank gun on the battlefield. The Sturmtiger's role was to rumble right up to infantry bunkers or strongpoints and fire the rocket at almost point-blank range. Obviously, the chances of survival for its target were slim indeed. The enormous rockets it carried were so heavy, the vehicle needed its own crane to be able to load the shells. Once loaded, the inside of the tank was so cramped, it carried enough rounds for only 13 shots, but when it did fire, the results were devastating. The Sturmtiger was the last in a line of turretless tanks, which the German army had produced in increasing quantities since the outbreak of World War II. But this highly specialized vehicle was produced so late in the war that only 19 were manufactured before Germany finally surrendered. The idea was to fire an enormous shell with a sort of plunging round that would come whistling down out of heaven and whop whatever was underneath it good and hard. But really, a thing like that is a very specialist weapon and was probably, again like many of the German developments of this time, more trouble than it was actually worth. The number of Sturmtigers may have been very limited, but other turretless tanks were used in huge numbers by the Germans. Like all successful inventions, they had been adapted and improved over the nine years since their introduction. In that time, their numbers had grown so that by 1945, they were among the most numerous fighting vehicles in the German army, and with good reason. Many German crews didn't like some of their own vehicles, which were too heavy, too slow, difficult to handle, had bad accommodation problems, had too low ammunition storages. You can have lists and lists of this kind of thing. It's almost a Darwinian process, you know, the survival of the fittest as it were, the survival of the most suitable for the battlefield, the survival of that equipment which is workable and handleable and can be profitably and successfully used by the crews. Unfortunately, the first attempts to produce a specialist tank hunter favored the simple expedient of mounting a 4.7 centimeter anti-tank gun on the chassis of the tiny Panzer I. It was a failure. Although the 4.7 was more effective than the puny 3.7, which originally equipped the Panzer III, it was still feeble compared to the 75 millimeter gun of a Russian T-34. In addition, the open fighting compartment gave only limited protection to the crew. Another problem was the instability of the top heavy assembly. Frequently, these tank hunters simply toppled over. During 1942, frustrating attempts were made to improve upon the Panzer I in the form of the Marder II and III tank destroyers. These strange hybrids used the Panzer II chassis, the Czech 38T chassis, and sometimes even mounted a captured Russian 76 millimeter anti-tank gun. They proved to be little more than an improvised stopgap in a steadily worsening situation on the Eastern Front. But they did go some way towards holding the advancing tide of Russian armor while real tank killers could be developed. They discovered very early in 1941 that they didn't have anti-tank capability. They just didn't. So what they did, they improvised and they took, as you know, the Czech 38T tank, it was a Czech tank built by Škoda, and stuck captured Russian anti-tank guns on top of it. That became, you know, the Marder, the Marder III. The first Marder was actually an anti-tank gun stuck on a French Lorraine chassis. Well, that wasn't much good. But you really had to do something very quick. And the strange thing is that whole series of German vehicles produced on the chassis of the Czech 38T and the 38D became really very successful. Partly because the chassis and the suspension was very good, and partly because they put the right guns on it. And so when you've got machines like that, which in fact perform very well, whatever their hybrid origins, if they work in the field, that's fine. But that's an extraordinary story, I think, of the marriage between Czech tank design, Russian anti-tank guns, and if I may put it this way, German adaptive engineering. And you get virtually a different weapon system, and a very successful one, and which in fact even outlasted the end of the Second World War. The first two specialized tank-hunting machines proved to be almost as disappointing as the Marders. The massive Elephant looked good on paper. It was based on the 80 Porsche chassis, which had been built for a proposed rival to the Tiger. This gave the five-man crew the same all-round protection as the Sturmgeschütz. In addition, the Elephant was massively armored and sported the deadly 88-millimeter gun. It made a much-heralded debut at the Battle of Kursk. Despite all the portents, the Elephant proved to be an unmitigated disaster. They needed vehicles to get out to the eastern front, and so what the German army did was they welded on the back end of this big chassis a Citadel, armored it, and put a big 88-millimeter gun. What they failed to do, however, was put a machine gun on it, and so you had Russian infantry climbing aboard and burning the crews. Soviet tank-hunting teams had a field day. The hapless crews inside the Elephant had no means of effective resistance against infantry, and 40 of the 80 Elephants deployed at Kursk were destroyed in the first two days of fighting. It wasn't everybody's favorite. It was very difficult to handle. It was a huge target itself. I mean, who wanted to be burned alive or blown to pieces in one of these things? So very rapidly, the German Ordnance Corps develops a machine gun that all you had to do was pop the hatch, stick this thing out, and it had a curved barrel, and you could hose the vehicle off with this curved barrel weapon. So a very innovative way to do things. The remaining machines were ignominiously withdrawn to be refitted with machine guns before being sent to Italy, where the survivors were destroyed in the battles following the Anzio landings. More effective in battle than the Elephant was the Nashorn, or Rhinoceros. It also featured the fearsome 88-millimeter gun, but inexplicably left the crew unprotected in an open fighting compartment. The high silhouette of the Nashorn made it an easy target, but nonetheless, nearly 500 were issued between 1943 and 1944. The Nashorn was the chassis of the Panzer IV that they took the turret off of and put not so well armored, but a citadel on the back of that, and they also put an 88-millimeter gun on that, and the idea was, of course, to pick off the Russian tanks at long ranges so that they couldn't close down on your position. The Nashorn was phased out with the introduction of the first really successful purpose-designed German tank hunter, the Jagdpanzer IV. Manufactured by Vomag, this sleek machine boasted low silhouette, a machine gun for close defense, and gave its crew the all-round protection of thick, well-sloped armor. The first really effective purpose-designed tank killer had arrived, but in 1944 it had arrived too late to tip the balance. This is the Jagdpanzer IV Long. It carries the L70 gun, the same as the Panther, 75 millimeter. This is an early 1944 model. It was abandoned in late 1944, captured by the Allies, brought back to this country for a test and evaluation. It's stayed here ever since. It had a five-man crew, very cramped, very noisy, very dirty. The Allied bombing campaigns, now paralyzing Germany's industry, limited the numbers produced to just under 1,800. By this stage of the war, that was never going to be enough to stem the tide of armor flooding in against Germany from every side. To complement the Panzerjäger IV in these last-ditch battles, the Czech manufacturers Praga finally managed to produce a first-class tank destroyer. This was the Hetzer. Much smaller than the Panzerjäger IV, it nonetheless packed a highly effective 76 millimeter gun. Coupled with very good sloping armor, excellent mobility, and a very low silhouette, this small vehicle, which resembled a miniature Panzerjäger, was deceptively powerful and was much loved by its crews. Fortunately for the hard-pressed Germans, the Czech tank works were reasonably efficient manufacturers, and some 2,500 machines reached the hard-pressed front lines. This is the Hetzer, and one of the things about it is it's a marked improvement over some of the earlier German anti-tank guns. A lot of the earlier German anti-tank guns were open, and as you can see, this vehicle is completely enclosed. It has a very high-velocity 75 millimeter gun. It's made in Czechoslovakia. Very good suspension system, a very good engine, and the crews like it very, very, very much. These knocked-out Hetzers from the archives of the Tank Museum at Bovington show just how common they were in the Normandy battles. Supplied in even more limited numbers was the next machine to emerge from the German armament industry, the Jagdpanther. Based on the successful chassis tank design for the Panther tank, by following the principle of dispensing with the turret, the Jagdpanther could carry a high-velocity 88 millimeter gun, as opposed to the 76 millimeter gun of the ordinary Panther. Its superb sloped armor gave the Jagdpanther enormous defensive advantages, a relatively low silhouette, and a fearsome attacking power. However, production difficulties meant only 350 of this, the best tank destroyer of the war, ever reached the front. This rare footage shows a transporter train moving these precious machines to the hard-pressed Russian front. This is the Jagdpanther. It's been called the best tank destroyer of World War II, and that's probably the case. It has a very, very good gun. It's an 88 millimeter gun. The Panther itself had a 75 millimeter gun, but by doing away with the turret, you can lower the profile of the vehicle, you can armor up the front of this very, very well, and it became a very, very effective anti-tank weapon. The crews liked it, but it does have some deficiencies, not the least of which is the running gear. Now, if you notice, the running gear here is shaped very oddly. You have a single wheel here, but two road wheels here, a single here, two here, and so on and so forth. Well, one of the things that happens with this vehicle is mud gets up in here, and it would freeze, so you get up the next morning, you have a pillbox. That's one fault. The other problem, though, is notice that if this road wheel back in here, the one back in here, fails, and you need to replace it, you need to take off five road wheels, this one, that one, this one, this one, and this one to get to it. So there's a lot of maintenance involved in this vehicle. And two, back up here on the back deck, if you have to work on this thing, if it broke down, there are a lot of places where you have to work upside down and blind on it, and if you drop your tools, they're gone. In even shorter supply than the Jagdpanther, was the cumbersome Jagdtiger, a veritable fortress on tracks. In keeping with the German practice of mounting larger guns into turretless tanks, the Jagdtiger mounted a massive high-velocity 128 millimeter gun, which was so powerful, it could destroy any Allied tank on the battlefield at almost any range. Fortunately for the Allies, only 48 were produced, and these so late in the war, that even their massive firepower could not hope to thwart the inevitable tide of defeat. Most were destroyed by their own crews when they ran out of fuel, broke down, or had fired the last of their ammunition. This is the Jagdtiger, and this is a really bad idea. It's the chassis of the Tiger II tank, it has a 128 millimeter gun in it, it's the largest anti-tank gun mounted on a chassis in World War II, but the vehicle is just huge. Combat loaded weight of about 85 tons, so no bridge could support it in Europe. There's a major river, what, every 50 miles in Europe, so no bridge could take it. You had to raft it across rivers, and two, it gets about eight gallons to the mile. This, when the German army had very little fuel, when you fill this thing up with a fuel browser, you're looking around for another one right away. These are the field tracks, and when this thing moved by railroad track, you had to put on smaller tracks so the two trains could pass each other on parallel tracks. So the crews did not like this vehicle. It was sort of meat on the table for rocket firing typhoon and G-51 aircraft. The stalemate of the trenches during the Great War had a lasting effect on all the participants in that appalling conflict. Germany had suffered more than any other nation from the grim years of the Great War, but it was the British who had found the potential means to unlock the stalemate. The introduction of the tank in 1916 could well have revolutionized the course of the Great War and broken the deadlock. But the potential of this new innovation was stifled by a lack of strategic vision in the British high command, and the possibility of an early return to open warfare was thrown away by poor British tactics. By 1917, the first British tanks had fallen into German hands, and these captured British machines were soon copied and adapted to produce the first German machines. This is an A7V Sturmpanzerwagen, the first German tank to go into battle. It was knocked out by the British in 1918. These early tanks were produced too late to make an impact in the First World War, but the lessons were not forgotten by the German military men. In 1939, the scars which came from long years of attritional warfare during the Great War were still fresh for the defeated Wehrmacht. In consequence, Germany's new breed of commanders were determined not to repeat the mistakes of 1918. They saw the tank as a key element in that vision, and they embraced the new tactical doctrine of blitzkrieg, or lightning. Blitzkrieg tactics relied upon the possibility of fast mobile operations, spearheaded by large concentrations of fast, well-armoured battle tanks. Under blitzkrieg tactics, all of the tanks of the army were concentrated into the fast-moving panzer divisions, which would thrust deep into the rear positions of an enemy force, spreading panic and confusion as they advanced from the narrow point of penetration. The shock of the advance required a high level of artillery support at the point of attack, and also harnessed the extra power of air interdiction. But in the 1930s, the bulk of Germany's heavy artillery forces was still horse-drawn. What this meant was that the advancing tanks and motorised infantry would rapidly outstrip the artillery support. Even mechanised prime movers like these half-tracks had their disadvantages. Time taken to move into position and deploy the guns for action under battlefield conditions meant vital time was lost. In battle, split seconds literally meant the difference between life and death. The blitzkrieg depended on several elements working in conjunction with each other. One was air support given by the Luftwaffe in the form of things like dive bombers, and the other thing was artillery support. But one of the things about artillery in the German army during the blitzkrieg era was that that was mainly direct-fire artillery. They were going after point targets because the air force was taking out also point targets. So they didn't have the communications equipment down on the lower levels to bring in massive amounts of artillery. In fact the Germans never do develop that during World War II, nor do any other armies except for the American army. If artillery was to play a real role in the new mobile warfare, it needed to be able to operate as close to the battle zone as possible. But the closer artillery pieces got to the action, the more vulnerable the gunners were to enemy fire. What was needed was an assault gun, a mobile artillery piece which could keep pace with the mechanized infantry, afford the gunners a measure of protection, and provide support on the battlefield at short notice, where it really mattered, in the very front line. A fully armored and fully tracked mobile gun platform therefore had great appeal from the point of view of both mobility and crew protection. It also provided a means of providing close artillery support fire right in the very front line. Orders were dispatched for prototype vehicles. The successful prototype was produced in 1936 by the Olcott company. The final vehicle was actually constructed from two separate elements and it mounted a heavy 75 millimeter gun on a Panzer III tank chassis. The 75 millimeter was a heavier weapon than could normally be carried on a Panzer III, but the extra space for the heavier gun was achieved by dispensing with the turret and setting the gun on a fixed mount with a limited traverse. The Sturmgeschütz was born. These are vehicles called Stug. They're the chassis of the Panzer Kampfwagen Mark III, and when the Germans realized that the Panzer III was obsolete on the battlefield, they took the turrets off and installed these weapons up on the chassis. The one here in the foreground has a 105 millimeter gun and is mobile artillery in effect, and the one in the background has a 75 millimeter gun and is an anti-tank weapon. Both of them were very effective vehicles on the battlefield. Naturally, the grenadiers fighting in the front lines welcomed this development with open arms. Here was an artillery piece which could fight with the inventory at the crucial point of the battlefield and move at their pace. Throughout the long years of World War II, the Sturmgeschütz crews never came to regard themselves as tank men. They wore different uniforms and still considered themselves to be artillerymen who happened to man mobile assault guns, but they were still gunners at heart. Who commands them? The tank crews, the tank chap said there are guns, and the artillery said no, there are guns. And I think, and I'd rather know, that each side in each army, each one had their favorites as it were, but it depended what the tactical task was. The Wehrmacht had to discover the relationship between their self-propelled anti-tank artillery, their armor, and then specialized self-propelled artillery doing various kinds of jobs. From the gunner's point of view, they quickly grew to love the Sturmgeschütz. After all, they were now protected against direct inventory fire and felt themselves impervious to anything but direct artillery fire. The powerful 75-millimeter gun meant they packed a real punch in the attack. The Sturmgeschütz had a crew of four, the commander, driver, loader, and gunner. It soon became the proud boast of the Sturmgeschütz crews that their men were all volunteers, always ready to answer the infantryman's call to bring up the guns. The new assault gunners took to the role with great enthusiasm. Although the cramped interior of each Geschütz officially had room for only 44 rounds, the crews soon found that they could carry 90 rounds of ammunition by stacking extra rounds in layers on the floor of the vehicle. This meant the guns could stay in action for longer and continue to give their support to the infantry for longer periods. In the coming years, that will be a great advantage. One of the things about the German army in World War II is that they're elastic in their tactics and they're elastic in their doctrine as to how they do things. For instance, in the Stug, I forget how many rounds the thing carries right now, but they would stick as many rounds as they could get into the thing and they would be awash in rounds inside that vehicle. And the vehicle is not very roomy to start with, but they found very, very innovative ways to stick rounds into the vehicle. Despite the early signs of promise, these first machines were produced in small numbers and only 30 Geschützes were available for the French campaign of 1940. But they acquitted themselves well in their first actions. Orders were immediately given for the production of a further 500 machines. These machines equipped the first Sturmgeschütz batteries which served in the Blitzkrieg campaigns through the Balkans and into Russia. It's not going to fight like a tank in the normal sense. It's not going to get into direct assault action. It's going to support the tank by bringing in wider natures of firepower, more high explosive and that kind of thing. The great advantage of a self-propelled gun is that you can get a larger gun onto a given chassis than you could if it was in a turret. And you do that, as in the case of the machine behind me, by putting a 75 millimeter gun into a fixed superstructure on the tank, where in a gun tank you'd probably get no more than a 50 millimeter gun onto the same chassis. Initially, Sturmgeschützes were organized into independent battalions. Each battalion was composed of three troops, which originally had six guns each. The commander of the battalion also had his own vehicle. In later years, the number of vehicles in each troop was raised to 10, and the battalions were renamed as brigades, which in theory fielded 31 Sturmgeschütz. In practice, these ideals were hardly ever achieved, and then only highly favored formations received the full compliment. In battle, these independent brigades were then allocated to support inventory formations for a specific action, and came under the command of the inventory they were ordered to support. As the war grew, the Sturmgeschütz commanders naturally gained a wealth of battle experience, gained from almost constant exposure to action. So in practice, it was frequently the inventory commanders who took the lead from the more experienced assault gun leaders. The official regulations stressed that the Sturmgeschütz should be employed en masse, but the constant demands of a terrible war meant that they were more often employed as single battalions or even single machines. One shortcoming of the early Sturmgeschütz was the lack of a machine gun for close support against enemy inventory. A number of Sturmgeschütz had been lost to Russian inventory, which could have been avoided if the crew had had the means to fire back at close range. One of the things that both tanks and assault guns need is a machine gun. And in fact, one of the big mistakes the Germans make in World War II, they don't put a machine gun on it. Now, if you think about that for a little bit, Russian infantry learns real quick that they can climb on top of this vehicle, pour gasoline into the top and towards the crew, detrimental to health and morale. But a machine gun is vital for the close defense of your vehicle and to protect other vehicles. The lack of close defense capability was rectified in 1941 with the introduction of the machine gun mounted on the Model E, of which a further 272 were produced. The Sturmgeschütz made a valuable contribution to the success of Operation Barbarossa, but despite the initial successes, by late 1941 it was apparent that the German armored force as a whole was seriously undergunned. The armored forces of the Wehrmacht were in danger of being swamped by the new Russian T-34 tanks. The waves of Russian tanks armed with the high-velocity 76mm gun were far more deadly at longer ranges than the 50mm gun which equipped most of the Panzer IIIs, which was then Germany's main battle tank. The short 75mm gun of the Sturmgeschütz was really designed to fire low-velocity, high-explosive shells in support of infantry formations. And although it used the relatively small chassis of the Panzer III, the fact that it had no turret allowed the Stug to be upgunned to incorporate the deadly long-barreled 75mm gun, which could not be fitted to a Panzer III. With this gun, the Sturmgeschütz was more than a match for the T-34. The addition of such a powerful L43 anti-tank gun made the Sturmgeschütz much more than an infantry support weapon. It was now apparent that with its low silhouette, the Stug was a much harder target to hit than the Russian T-34. The sloped armor also helped to deflect shots away from the vehicle, and the scales gradually began to tip back in Germany's favor during the fierce tank battles of 1942. This much-needed upgrade was first incorporated into the Sturmgeschütz Model F in 1942. The long-barreled L43 gun gave the armor-piercing shells fired by the Geschütz a much higher muzzle velocity, and therefore a far greater tank-killing capability than the 50mm gun of the Panzer III. It was now obvious that the Panzer III had evolved as far as it could, and the model was phased out. From 1943, the Panzer III chassis were used exclusively for the manufacture of Sturmgeschütz, production of which continued right up to the last days of the war. The pressure of battle on the Eastern Front meant that almost by accident, the German forces had evolved a very successful example of a new breed of fighting vehicles, which were to emerge in World War II, the Panzerjäger or tank hunters. It was in this role that most Sturmgeschütz were to be employed for the rest of the war. It was a role for which they were eminently suitable. 20,000 enemy tank kills were claimed by assault gun crews up to the early months of 1944. The only major disadvantage of the Geschütz was the lack of a turret. This meant that instead of simply swinging the motorized turret round to face an enemy threat to the side or rear, the whole vehicle had to be moved round on its tracks. The Sturmgeschütz manual stressed time and time again the need for the gun to be stationary when firing. In this way, the highest level of accuracy was achieved. When the commanders heeded this request, the results were devastating. In a mobile battle where every second counts, the lack of a turret was a very real disadvantage. But Sturmgeschütz crews learned to adopt defensive tactics designed to lure Russian tanks into carefully constructed killing grounds. With an assault gun, such as, say, the Jagdpanther or Sturmgeschütz, one of the problems with it is that it has no turret and the gun is fixed into the hull. Now, they have a certain amount of deflection that you can get with that gun, but not a lot. Now, if you're fighting in a defensive fight, that's not altogether a bad thing, because you can lower the profile of the vehicle by not having a turret, and you can get into these defensive positions, and you can then, in effect, aim the vehicle down armored avenues of approach into your position. So, while you're fighting a defensive fight, that's not altogether a bad thing. However, if you go over to the offensive, where you do not know where the enemy is going to pop up, the lack of a turret is a very, very serious drawback. The new tactics certainly worked, and in early 1943, there was another increase in gun power, with the introduction of the long .48 gun, which gave extra velocity, and hence, extra killing power. It was this new gun which equipped the definitive Sturmgeschütz, the Model G, of which 7,720 were eventually manufactured. The sheer numbers produced is a reflection of just how effective and popular the Sturmgeschütz was in battle. By comparison to the 11,500 Sturmgeschütz manufactured, only 4,500 Panzer IIIs, 6,800 Panzer IVs, and 6,000 Panthers were manufactured in the same period. While the turreted tanks took on the role of the battlefield rovers, designed to forge ahead of the infantry in wide-ranging strategic advances, it was the Sturmgeschütz who accompanied the grenadiers during the dogged fighting on the ground. As the war dragged on, they became the infantry's rock in defense and his armored fist in attack. By 1943, the Sturmgeschütz was an indispensable part of both the Panzer Division and the Ordinary Infantry Division. The infantry soon came to know that as long as the Geschütz were in the line, things were in control. Extraordinary results were achieved by skilled crews in Russia, who sometimes accounted for dozens of Russian machines in a single action. In those actions, a major issue for the Sturmgeschütz commanders was the limited fuel and ammunition capacity of their cramped vehicles. This produced a constant need to leave the battlefield, to refuel the vehicles and reload with ammunition. As the war progressed, the soldiers in the front line increasingly took strength from the presence of the Geschütz, so the tactical manual for their employment went to great lengths to stress the importance of the Sturmgeschütz commander in keeping his infantry commanders informed that his guns were leaving the line only to rearm and refuel. It was a standard rule of Sturmgeschütz tactical doctrine that if possible, not all machines would be withdrawn from the line at the same time, but that they should leave the field in relays. Otherwise, there was a real danger that the morale of the infantry might collapse if they saw their beloved Geschütz withdrawing from the field. Despite its undoubted success as a tank killer, there was still an infantry support role for the Sturmgeschütz. The low-trajectory 7.5-meter gun was an excellent anti-tank gun, but to reach infantry hiding behind obstacles or other terrain features, a high-trajectory howitzer was still required. A further 1100 Sturmgeschütz were therefore manufactured with the 10.5 howitzer, which packed a deadly, high-explosive punch, which could be used in support of the infantry. Either in attack or, more usually, desperate defense. The theory was that for every two troops of 75-millimeter armoured Geschütz to deal with enemy tanks, there would be one troop of howitzer-armed Geschütz to deal with the infantry. Problems with supplies of vehicles meant that this situation was very rarely achieved in practice. The tactics set down for cooperation between the two types of assault guns was that the guns armed with 7.5 guns would target any enemy armour, while the howitzer-armoured vehicles would concentrate on the infantry who accompanied the tanks. In this way, countless Russian attacks came to grief on the bull provided by the Sturmgeschütz battalions. By 1943, the obvious success of the Sturmgeschütz in the field led the Allies to target the Alkhet factory, responsible for the production of Stug IIIs, for priority bombing. The resultant saturation bombing severely damaged the production factories. During the period of rebuilding, production was switched from Alkhet to Krupp's tank works. But Krupp's made Panzer IVs, not Panzer IIIs. During 1943, the 1500 Sturmgeschütz, which were manufactured by Krupp's, used the Panzer IV tank chassis, combined with the highly successful L48 gun. These machines were known as Sturmgeschütz IVs, but were no less successful than the old Stug III. The welded steel skirt were added to all Stug IIIs and IVs from 1943 onwards as a protection against the new, hollow-charge infantry weapons which had wreaked so much damage since their introduction in late 1943. Well, each tank had its own characteristics and for particular operational tasks, and you can see in the German, evolutionary German Sturmgeschütze, you know, the German assault guns, some had very long wartime lives, which was astonishing. They proved to be sturdy, they proved to be reliable, and they proved to do their job quite well, and they were to the satisfaction both of their crews, and they fitted well into the tactical scene. By the end of the war, no less than 30,000 enemy tanks had been destroyed by the Geschütz crews, a ratio of approximately three enemy vehicles to every Stug deployed. It was a mark of the achievement of the guns and the crews that Russian orders forbade their tank commanders from entering into artillery duels with the Geschütz, ordering them instead to maneuver to find the One famous variant of the Stug IV was a real heavyweight, the forerunner of the Sturmtiger. This was the mighty Brumbar, the grizzly bear or grumbler, which carried a powerful 15cm howitzer. The Brumbar had sloping frontal armour, 100mm thick, and it was designed to rumble up to infantry fortifications before firing its massive shell at point-blank range. The Brumbar was originally developed to cope with the close-quarter street fighting at Stalingrad, but delays in production meant that they did not see active service until the Battle of Kursk in 1943. After Kursk, Germany was largely fighting a defensive war, but on the few occasions when the Brumbar saw action, they acquitted themselves well, and over 300 were produced by the end of the war. The Brumbar that you see behind me is nothing more than the chassis of the Panzerkampfwagen Mark IV with a big gun on it, mounted in the citadel as you can see. And the reason this vehicle came about was the Germans learned very quickly in the Battle of Stalingrad that they had problems of taking out defensive positions in towns, and also defensive positions one and all. So this came about as to take out those type of positions. So you have a 150mm gun, a very short little barrelled gun, but it was very good for firing like plastic charges up against fortifications and knocking them out. The eventual production of Sturmgeschütze totaled some 11,500, more than any other mark of German fighting vehicle. There were sound reasons for this, as not only was Sturmgeschütze successful on the battlefield, they were also far less expensive, quicker and easier to manufacture than fully turreted tanks built on the same chassis. This was a vital consideration for Germany's hard-pressed manufacturing industry. German armies on all fronts were desperate for armoured fighting vehicles, to stem the flood of Russian and Allied armour. So production resources were increasingly switched to the production of Sturmgeschütze, which were well suited to fighting a defensive role. In 1943, the role of Sturmgeschütze as protectors of the infantry was reversed, when each increasingly precious gun was given its own dedicated squad of grenadiers, to protect these valuable machines against the increasingly sophisticated weapons carried by Allied tank hunting teams. Although it was not purpose-designed as a tank killer, the StuG had provided a solid solution to the tank destroyer role, almost by accident. German attempts to produce a dedicated tank killer by design were far more troubled. The Sturmgeschütze experience had shown that by dispensing with a tank turret, it was possible to mount a much heavier gun on the existing tank chassis. Despite the inevitability of the final defeat, the men of the Sturmgeschütze and Panzerjäger formations fought like lions to the bitter end. Losses grew to frightening proportions, and many Panzer divisions fought until literally the last machine rumbled into its final battle. Even by the last day of fighting, the ranks of the Sturmgeschütze crews were still filled mainly with volunteers, who did their duty in the face of almost certain death. In later years, it was to become the proud boast, that when the cry went up from the hard-pressed grenadiers, they were always there to answer their call to bring back the guns.