Mark Urban

So they're equipped with a gun that fires a high-exposive shell that goes bang and is good for taking out things like machine gun nests and basically helping your infantry to get forward.

The Tiger, pretty much as soon as it hits the battlefield, it is sort of self-consciously deployed

with this doctrine that it's only for use at the decisive point and that its primary mission is to destroy other armor and create a sort of panic effect.

And of course, you get these reports from the Eastern Front when they go into action with these extraordinary rates of exchange of, you know, 20, 25 T-34s knocked out for each Tiger in sections of the battlefield there.

And I think

They are probably reliable.

I mean, there's many over claims in the Second World War.

But it is undoubtedly true that T-34s up against a Tiger had a grossly disproportionate loss rate.

But yes, as you say, I mean, in the whole history of its production, the first version of the Tiger, what we think of as the Tiger, about 1,400 made.

with the T-34, 23,000 of the initial version.

And when you add in the later version with the 85mm gun, you're talking about over 50,000 made in the war.

So as an exercise in sort of outproducing your enemy.

And the other thing which you've sort of hinted at there, I mean, the Tiger is an incredibly sophisticated and temperamental machine.

They always used to say it needed 11 man-hours of maintenance for each hour in battle.

And some of the commanders who get them, you know, they write reports to Berlin saying, this is basically like a fighter plane in the Luftwaffe in terms of the sophistication and the care we have to take of maintaining it correctly and all that sort of thing.

The T-34 is such a sort of rudimentary aircraft.

piece of kit by comparison.

And the Red Army has this system which is unique, I think, which is that each of the big tank factories they have, and by the time of the Kursk battle, the key ones are all in the Ural Mountains.

They've been moved out of European Russia or built in places like Chelyabinsk and Nizhny Tagil.

Each of them has a training regiment co-located with the factory.