Tiny Tanks: Italeri 1/72 Jagdtiger

I finished a new tiny tank recently: a Jagdtiger.

I picked up the kit for $10 a few years ago. In that time I built a Dragon 1/72 King Tiger and a 1/72 Panther, which I kept fairly clean. For the Jagdtiger, I wanted something more beat up and dirty. I was even going to try my hand simulating shell dents with my soldering iron, but forgot about it till after the kit was primed.

I used shading to give the illusion of weight, and I highlighted things with a lightened shade of the Panzer drab that was the base color. The lower bits got a through shellacking of pastel ground up into mud. The nice thing about making mud is that you just sort of mix it up without worrying about how much of X or Y color to add - if it's different from what you did before, it actually looks better.

 I also did for the first time - and I'm forgetting the proper name for this - a 'color dot' technique. Random dots in different colors are put on, and you take then almost all the way off with a brush and thinner. It makes for a less uniform look on metal surfaces. I'm not sure if I lost the effect entirely with the final dust layer I put over everything, but I thought the effect was nice.

The kit itself was good, though missing one or two details tank nerds might expect. There's no mudflaps, or jack at the back. It also is missing the saddle tanks on the back. The kit does come with one-piece tracks, which I kinda regret not using. It also comes with three crewmen, which I'd thought I'd use just for something different. Like other Italeri 1/72 armor kits, it goes together well, though without the fancy bits Dragon often has.

I also had to sand a fair bit off of the guy on top so he is pointing roughly forward.

My next project is the smallest tracked vehicle the Reich ever deployed.

A very dilute layer of Tamiya buff went over everything as the last step - in addition to blending colors, it also highlighted the tracks and the Panzer-men a bit.

It lost it's mudguards and fenders, no wonder it's a mess.

Heavy Metal Fatigue: the Very Short Story of the Jagdtiger

Some popular subjects for model kits are vehicles that were important: the P-51 Mustang, the  Spitfire, or the  Bf 109 are all good examples of these. Some subjects are popular because they look awesome and were completely mental, even if they had little to no real world impact: the Jagdtiger is firmly in the latter category.

World War 2 was a simpler time for tanks. Armor protection was simply how thick a gauge of steel you were prepared to use, and the method of punching through that armor was to build a bigger gun. So, a new class of vehicle arose: the tank destroyer. Tank destroyers used existing tank platforms and mounted bigger guns, often sacrificing the tank's turret to keep a lower profile, and to reduce weight and complexity. Some of Germany's tank destroyers really did use the tank's drivetrain almost literally as a platform, mounting a giant honking gun atop it and dispensing with armor and crew protection. As the war went on and German designers hoped to reign in some of the chaos of tank production, the tank destroyer became a planned-for variant in future designs. Tanks redesigned to be tank destroyers got a Jadg- prefix, making a Jadgpanzer IV a "hunting tank IV." The Panther series is reckoned by some to have had the best hunting variant: the Jadgpanther, a sinister armored wedge mounting the same long caliber 88mm gun used by the King Tiger.

The King Tiger, too, was to get a tank destroyer version. In 1942 and '43 when design work was underway on the King Tiger, the Jagdtiger was seen as a heavy tank killer and armored assault gun. (Tank destroyers when not engaged in the activity that gave them their name were often used as assault guns - ground forces found it handy having an artillery piece that could come up to the front line with them and target fortifications.) Hitler of course had personal input on the process, and directed that the Jagdtiger have a gun with a caliber of 150mm, which was a nice, round number. This gun didn't exist, so the engineers talked Hitler down to having a 'provisional' 128mm gun. The PaK 44 gun the Jagdtiger mounted was probably the nastiest anti-tank artillery piece developed in World War 2, capable of one-shot killing any tank used against Nazi Germany at a range of two kilometers. (Complete overkill against western Allied tanks, it had been developed to blow up Soviet heavy tanks.) The rest of the modifications were engineered around this enormous gun. As the gun alone weighed 11 tons and required two loaders (the shell itself and the explosive charge to drive it were separate) the Jagdtiger dropped the turret entirely, replacing it with a blocky castlemate structure. Annoyingly from a mass production perspective, the King Tiger Chassis had to be lengthened a bit to keep the vehicle balanced. The final vehicle weighed even more than a King Tiger: some 71 tons, making it the heaviest AFV ever to be deployed. It used the same gasoline V12 that the Panther and King Tiger used, and that was something of a problem. The engine's 23 litres of displacement made 600 hp, and that was barely adequate for the lighter King Tiger. The engine and transmission were perpetually overstressed in the Jagdtiger application, which would make for a less reliable vehicle. These issues were not helped by the lack of a turret: the Jagdtiger would have to rotate to engage targets that didn't appear in front of the gun's limited transverse. Maximum speed was 34 km/h, (admittedly, that must have been a hell of a speed to drive something with the mass of a small house.) The crew was six: commander, driver, radio operator/machine gunner, gunner, and two loaders. Defense against infantry was by a machine gun position in the front, and a grenade launcher in the roof. Firing S-mines, Jagdtiger crew could attack nearby infantry with sprays of grenade shrapnel.

A nice war-fresh Jagdtiger with its fenders intact.

So, the Nazis created an angry steel behemoth that attempted to compensate for inferior numbers with a superior design and firepower. So what went wrong?

Short answer: lots. Long answer: by 1944, the Jagdtiger entered production - by which I mean initial prototypes were used for training. These had the long 88mm used on the King Tiger, as the proper gun was as of yet unavailable. I was surprised to discover that the 128mm gun was not a re-purposed anti-aircraft gun; it was in fact a new design. (It was planned to be the main gun in the Maus, the E-100, and other future and ultimately nonexistent Nazi armor.) Anything entering production in 1944 Nazi Germany was bound to have production issues, and it seems the new gun especially faced delays due to short supplies and allied bombing. 150 was the initial order, but by the end of 1944, production by month had yet to exceed single digits. What Jagdtigers there were saw combat at the Battle of the Bulge. Two Jagdtigers also scored a notable victory: they held off an entire American tank platoon trying to reach Bastogne. Mushing through heavy drift during a snowstorm, a Sherman tank column came under fire by "heavy anti-tank artillery" that the tankers couldn't see the source of. They retreated, but only after 8 Shermans were blown up by the fire from the Jagdtigers.

An abandoned Jagdtiger on a fine spring day. It look like it lost its left tread.

Had the bugs been ironed out and production reached significant numbers, the Jagdtiger had the potential to be as big a problem as it was a big hunk of steel. Fortunately, by 1945, all the advantages were on the Allied side, and the Jagdtiger was doomed to be a late war oddity. Only two heavy anti-tank battalions were ever equipped with Jagdtigers. Casualties from combat were only 20% - 80% of Jagdtigers were lost due to mechanical breakdown or running out of fuel. Only three months saw production in the double digits: January to March 1945, so Jagdtigers were the brutes in units of mixed leftover armor. Total production was around 80, with about 50 of those getting the 128mm gun. One notable commander, Otto Carius, commanded a group of Jagdtigers (what is a group of tigers called, anyway? A stripe?) during the war's final phase. He reported that the firepower was excellent and the frontal armor protection nearly invulnerable - but that his raw recruits were so worried about air attacks they would refuse to move, or panic in combat and turn around to retreat, exposing the Jagdtiger's vulnerable hindquarters. His unit eventually surrendered to American troops, in a moment caught on film.

Another dead tiger - this one seems to have suffered an internal fire.

The impact of the Jagdtiger on the war was so negligible that some books specifically on German tanks omit them or classify them as experimental prototypes. Mechanically, the Jagtiger had no impact, either. While heavy tanks would linger in the 1950s, tank technology (partially in response to the heavy metal approach of the German Tigers) would make the use of lots of steel and giant guns obsolete. A tank killer nowadays could be a Hummer with a TOW missile rack, and the whole concept of 'tank killers' as specialized tanks faded into history. Three still exist, though none are still running - they can be found in the national AFV museums of America, Great Britain, and Russia.

So yeah, in the real world, they did not amount to much. But to the modeller, they have a kind of glamor about them. Crazy huge and with a distinctive profile, they've been popular in plastic ever since.