German Tank Development.

I think so because the Valentine and Stuart were also 1930's tech and had overhaul lives of 2500 miles (twice the Panzer III/IV) and 3500 miles (thrice the Panzer III/IV) respectively.

They had to continually send Crusaders back to the Delta, but not Stuarts - one six week overhaul and it was job done. Battle casualties were another matter, of course.

1500 miles (with 1200 miles overhaul) was the default engine life regardless of the air cleaner type. The oil bath cleaners maybe gave the German tanks another 300 miles at most, but that would only have brought them up to the aforementioned figures. The air cleaners were in the clean air of the fighting compartment so changing the type should not have made a major difference.

Note that when the MEE at Abbassia experimented with putting concertina air filters (NOT oil bath) in the fighting compartment of the Crusader the Liberty engine endured a full 3000 miles. That shows how much location trumps air cleaner type.

 

Another way of looking at this is to surmise that the British armoured brigade workshops and recovery facilities were probably totally adequate for operating Stuarts and Valentines, but inadequate for operating Crusaders and (to an extent) Matildas, which were much more like German tanks in that they needed constant TLC.

 

I will try to look through my archive material at the weekend. I hadn't noticed the interesting story about the relatively low mileage before.
Until then, an article worth reading by practitioners about the constructive peculiarities and weaknesses of the Panther motor:
https://en.topwar.ru/171818-tankovyj-motor-maybach-hl-230-sovetskie-otzyvy-i-remont-na-zile.html

 

I find Don Juan's comments really interesting and did some digging

"The report confirms the view that the service life of the Pz.Kpfw. `Panther` has increased due to further improvements of the units. The average service life of a Panther can now be assumed to be approximately in the order of a Panzer IV with about 1500-2000km between two major overhauls. The high mileage and associated rare failures are mostly the merit of good drivers and commanders."
I./Panzer-Regiment 2: Field report on Pz.Kpfw. V. Abt.Gef.Std. 22.4.44

As far as the final drives are concerned: According to Ralf Rahts (Munster tank museum) the wear limit was given as 150km.

Mr. v Poop:
The French report is printed in Spielberger, Doyle, Panzer V und seine Abarten p. 161.

 

From David Stahel's book "Operation Typhoon", some extracts that demonstrate that Germany's supply problems were not just logistical, but went back to industrial capacity and how it was allocated. Also, these extracts show how British incompetence was comparatively tame and small-time:

 

Only too true.....

In 1943, MAN pointed out in a letter that it would be impossible to deliver the required number of units (gearbox housings) if the steel quotas needed for this were not provided by the Ministry of Armaments.
In this respect, it was hardly comprehensible for MAN when this very ministry now demanded the missing housings with great urgency.

I know this from other areas of armament as well. It was exceptionally worse in the field of air armament.
Sometimes you wonder what kind of unsorted waste they were smoking in the responsible departments.

 

Much appreciated, but I think this is too general to allow anyone to conclude something about the prioritisation of tanks over engines.

Going back to source figures:

Maybach Motor Works, Friedrichshafen, Germany

https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Waffen/panzer4-R.htm

https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Waffen/panzer3-R.htm

https://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Waffen/sturmgeschutze.htm

I make this 5,300 HL120 (I presume this includes HL108) engines produced by the end of 1941 at the Maybachwerke, and over the same time 3,729 Panzer III and Panzer IV and 732 Sturmgeschütze were produced. Thus only 16% of the tank stock equivalent was produced in additional engines, assuming that no other factories produced the HL120/HL108. I have no idea whether this kind of a reserve is sufficient, but it doesn't appear to be unless there is a pretty sophisticated rebuilding operation going on in parallel that brings conked out engines back to life.

All the best

Andreas

 

Right, so 1500 to 2000km equates to roughly 930 to 1240 miles. This is less than the 1200 to 1500 miles (2000 to 2500 km) of the earlier models of Panzer IV, which you would expect due to the heavier armour basis of the later models.

Let's do a quick paperwork exercise here. The final drives of the Cromwell tank were developed to endure for 3000 miles (5000 km) at constant maximum power or maximum torque. As the Cromwell was benchmarked against the Sherman, the final drives on the Sherman were also almost certainly capable of enduring for at least 3000 miles with reasonable margin to spare.

Now IIRC, a British armoured division in mid-1944 included 251 Cruiser or medium tanks. If we times the number of tanks by the number of replacement final drive sets they needed over 3000 miles (5000 km) for wear and tear only, then the full divisional requirement for replacement drive sets would have been 251 x 0 = 0. As every drive set consisted of two drive units, then this resulted in a total requirement of 2 x 0 = 0.

From what I can gather, a German Panzer division in the same period included a panzer regiment nominally consisting of a battalion of 76 Panthers and a battalion consisting of 76 Panzer IV's. If the final drives had to be replaced every 150 km, then over a span of 3000 miles (5000 km) each Panther would have needed 33.3 sets of final drives (i.e. 5000/150). For all 76 Panthers, you would therefore have required 33.3 x 76 final drive sets to keep the entire battalion functional over the full 3000 miles, which would come to a total of 2533 final drive sets. As each drive set consisted of a pair of drive units, the number of individual final drive units needed would be 5066.

So if we go purely by the paper numbers, then you theoretically needed over 5000 final drive units just to keep the Panther element of a Panzer division in business over a distance in which a British armoured division, with much more tanks, did not need a single replacement unit.

Of course, I'm sure the difference was not quite so marked in real life, but it does make you think, doesn't it?

 

I'm pretty sure he goes into engines in one of the five books of his that I've got, but I basically come on here to procrastinate, so you may have to wait a bit before I come across the money quote (if it exists and I didn't just imagine it).

IIRC of the 177 tanks that 10 Panzer-Division began Barbarossa with, by the end of July 1941 they had 9 still running, and the majority of these were due to engine wear. But again I'll have to see if I can dig up where I got that info from.

 

The complete parts weighed a total of 395 kg, and MAN only produced about 60 units per month in 1943.
So when the opportunity arose, only the gears were replaced. (see attachment)
I can't find anything else about this in service regulation D 655/1b, so it must have taken place "further back".
Nevertheless, the effort is grotesquely high....

As Andreas already noted, in planning the tanks should always be accompanied by the workshop companies. In this respect, an engine change after relatively low mileage was not a problem:
old engine out, new engine in, old engine gets a thorough maintenance, then the game starts all over again.
In the case of the Mk III and IV, this also worked to a certain extent; it was precisely their engines that were the reason for the crews' great confidence in their engines.

I will try to dig up more about this in my archives when the time comes.

 

How do you replace Panther final drive(s)?
Disconnect the track(s), unbolt the drive sprocket(s) and unbolt the final drive unit(s) from the side of the tank?
Don't tell me it's a remove-the-hull-top-plate-and-lift-out-the-complete-transmission job? Not with a life expectancy of that brevity?

 

Hahaha...admittedly, that sounds VERY German
But the housings were mounted on the outside of the hull at the front

 

I know that a lot of maintenance job on the Panther required lifting the turret off, but did that include transmission replacement?

 

Another quote from Stahel's book on Operation Typhoon:

The overwhelming majority of the losses recorded above would have been non-combat losses, as the Red Army were not destroying many German tanks at this time. I think the idea of rapid engine replacement just didn't work when you had thousands of tanks in the field at the same time. The apparent solution to the mass of expended tanks seems to have been to supply brand new tanks to replace the losses - this is pretty much the same attempted solution the British tried with the Crusader in 1942, when they were choking the Middle East with new Crusaders while the overhaul backlog grew at the Base Workshops in the Delta.

The Panzer III and IV were somewhat better than the Crusader in this respect in that the latter's engine took six days to replace, which was too long, but when you've got enormous tank forces on the end of extended logistics chains, the only solution as far as I can tell is to develop the tanks to be as durable as possible.

 

I wonder what vehicle that crane is attached to.

 

One candinate Sd.Kfz. 9/1
Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-235-0996-02A, Russland, Reparatur Panzer III mit Sd.Kfz. 9-1 - Sd.Kfz. 9 - Wikipedia
or its later version Sd.Kfz. 9/2
"A larger, gasoline-electric, 10 t (9.8 long tons; 11 short tons) crane was fitted on the later Sd.Kfz. 9/2," Sd.Kfz. 9 - Wikipedia

 

Sd.Kfz 9/2
Source and the page

 

If this thread is about German tanks, then with German thoroughness:
The cranes were manufactured by the Bilstein company. They were available as 3t and 6t slewing cranes and as a rigid version with 9t lifting capacity.
There was also the rare 10t Demag crane mentioned by Juha.

THE standard work on this subject:
Lukas Friedli : "Die Panzerinstandsetzung der Wehrmacht".
(Unsurprisingly quite expensive and rare).