[Music] trend world war ii german tanks just got bigger and bigger in 1939 the German army went to war with Panzer ones and twos and panzer 38t s by 1945 Panthers tigers and then King Tigers roamed the battlefield it was an extraordinary evolution caused by the exigencies of war but also by a sort of armored megalomania even the 68 ton King Tiger would be surpassed by even more gargantuan and impractical vehicles chief among them the Panzer 8 or Maus a 188 ton mega tank of which only two were ever built do check out my film
on the Maus link in the description box below as Germany sped towards defeat the tank designs kept coming with an emphasis on super-heavy while Porsche was developing the mouse from June 1943 onwards the adler company of frankfurt submitted a design to the Puffin upped the german army weapons agency a competing design to the Maus known as the e100 lighter than the mouse at a hundred and thirty seven tons it was nonetheless a monstrous proposal slightly longer wider and taller than the Maus the e100 would be crewed by six men it was quite literally a king
tiger on steroids main armament would be either a 12 point 8 centimeter kwk 44 l55 gun or a 15 centimeter kwk 44 l38 gun the former also the main armament for the Maus the engine would be a 23 litre Maybach HL 230 developing 700 horsepower the same engine used in the King Tiger however production models would use a much more powerful 1,200 horsepower Maybach engine giving the e100 a top speed of 40 km/h the e100 turret was simpler and importantly lighter than that on the Maus armor protection was nonetheless immense 150 to 200 millimetres on
the front hull 20 to 150 millimeters on the sides and 200 on the turret front which was nonetheless less than that found on the mouse but the weight savings enabled almost double the speed manufacture the first he 100 was delayed by Hitler's July 1944 order to stop work on super-heavy tanks though work continued in assembling the prototype the time was running out and eventually abandoned when the hull was partially finished the rapidly approaching Allied armies killed the e100 development project members of the u.s. 740 first Field Artillery Battalion discovered the e100 on the factory floor
a bad lip springer in germany on the 22nd of april 1945 the turret was not fitted but the engine and transmission from a king tiger had been fitted the germans had planned three possible uses for the e 100 based on armament configuration either a heavy tank destroyer a heavy artillery platform or perhaps even a flak tank so was the e100 any good the problem was not its offensive capability clay immense tanks like the e100 and the mouse would have made mincemeat of allied tanks of the era he was rather their ludicrous size and weight transporting
these monsters by rail was envisioned by their designers and special narrow tracks were available but most bridges would not be able to support the weight of an e100 or a mouse such massive vehicles also made for juicy targets for Allied aircraft the British and the Americans stuck sensibly with the many variants of the Sherman tank to the German surrender outnumbering German vehicles many times over on the battlefield being easy to manufacture and field repair the Germans diluted their efforts into multiple tank types produced in relatively small numbers and often over engineered expensive and temperamental to
run though impressive to look at the e100 was at the end of the day an over engineered and very expensive block house that could not have been produced in numbers of to affect the Allied advance the Germans would probably have been better placed to have concentrated their efforts on producing the excellent Panther tank in serious numbers but fortunately for the Allies wiser heads did not make the decisions as for the only example of the e100 the vehicle was handed to the British for evaluation it was scrapped sometime in the 1950s I hope you found that
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