Jagdtiger

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

"That such a monstrosity had to be constructed in the final phase of the war - at all times!"

– Tiger Ace Otto Carius on the Jagdtiger

The Siberian to the Tiger II's Bengal.

The Panzerjäger Tiger Ausf. B, more commonly known as the Jagdtiger, was the heaviest and most powerful Tank Destroyer of WWII. It was also an even bigger pile of fail than the Elefant, taking everything wrong with the Elefant and dialing them up to 11.

IRL

I IDENTIFY AS SKINNY!

The Jagdtiger was a design meant to emulate successful tank destroyer designs that had been used throughout the war: Take the base chassis of an existing tank, shove a fuckoff hueg gun into it, add extra armor, and proceed to let it utterly rape anything that got within 2 kilometers of it, with mostly great success.

In 1942, German high command and old Adolf very much wanted a 128 mm cannon that could function mainly as artillery but also as direct-firing bunker-buster gun should the need arise, and that was 'light enough' to be motorized. This was... pretty darn ambitious for the technology at the time, but eventually Krupp delivered a workable design. At that point, the rest of the designers were faced with a damn problem: sure, it was 'light enough', but the Sturmkanöne 12.8cm was still so big and so heavy the only chassis that reasonably could take it onboard was the Tiger II chassis. And even then, the idea of having it elevate as an artillery gun was dropped pretty quickly for being too complex, leaving only the direct-fire option. Now, an astute reader may remember that the Tiger II was, for all its many other faults, pretty much impossible to kill efficiently and quite capable of dishing out copious amounts of hurt with its acht-acht. Therefore, it stands to reason that the Jagdtiger would be pretty epic, right?

Good one.

In reality, the 128mm cannon added an absurd amount of weight to a chassis that was already straining the engine to a breaking point, decreasing the mechanical reliability of the already dubiously reliable Tiger II. Worse than that, it was reported by Otto Carius that the gun would often have to be recalibrated after driving on rough terrain, and just to fire the gun in combat, some poor dude had to get out of the tank and unlock the gun. Combine this with the fact that it kept the absurd complexity of Tigers and very poorly trained late war German tank crews, and you have a perfect way to lose valuable assets pointlessly.

Even though the gun was reported to have shot through a house and killed an American tank, this is not an accomplishment due to the fact that the Sherman chassis didn't really stand a chance against most late war German tanks. Combined with its high muzzle flash and the cannon being so powerful that it blinded the loaders (yes, loader, but PLURAL), it could fire exactly once, then maybe breakdown trying to move 2 feet before being abandoned. Even the much-maligned Elefant was a more effective weapon than the Jagdtiger.

Two other facts stand out as utter hilarity: More Jagdtigers were lost to breakdown and mechanical issues than they were combat losses, and one Jagdtiger was attacked, and killed, by Volkssturm with Panzerfausts because they had no idea what the fuck it was.