A
Panzer ( ) is a German
tank. Attributively, the term also refers to armoured
military forces, as in
panzer
divisions or
panzer battles.
Etymology
Panzer is a
loanword from the
German ( ), meaning "
armour". It is also used in the compounds , ‘
panzer division’ and dated , ‘tank’ or
literally ‘armoured combat vehicle’ (the modern synonym is , or
just ).
German also refers to an animal's protective shell or thick hide,
as in , ‘turtle shell’. Historically, the word referred to body
armour, as in , ‘
plate mail’, , ‘
chain mail’, or , ‘armoured’.
It derives through the
French ,
‘
breastplate’, from
Latin , ‘belly, paunch’, and possibly related
to , ‘swelling’. The word has been
calqued in
many other languages, such as Swedish or Finnish , ‘tracked
armoured fighting vehicle’, Danish , ‘armoured vehicle’, but means
‘tank’.
Panzers in World War II
Although the post-World War I
Treaty of Versailles greatly restricted
its military development, Germany started to secretly develop
armoured tactics in the 1920s,
in cooperation with
the Soviet Union (while assisting in the establishment of a
Soviet tank-building industry). In the 1930s, the light
Panzer I and
Panzer II
tanks were built primarily for training, and tested in battle
during the
Spanish Civil
War.
At the beginning of the
Second World
War, German forces gained notoriety for the rapid and
successful invasions of
Poland, the
Netherlands, Belgium and France, and the
Soviet Union, in 1939–41.
Although the early-war Panzer II,
III,
and
IV were clearly inferior to some of
their French and Soviet counterparts, this
blitzkrieg (‘lightning warfare’) was made
possible by several factors: the German military experience in
World War I, their excellent training, integrated communications,
coordinated use of airpower, and, perhaps most famously, by the
combined-arms employment of integrated
infantry and armoured forces, the panzer divisions
of the
Germany Army and
Waffen-SS.
As the blitzkrieg began to stall on the
Eastern Front, and a mobile war
pushed back and forth across
North Africa, Germany was quickly
forced into an arms race in armour and
antitank weapons.
88 mm
antiaircraft guns were used as antitank weapons, thousands of
captured antitank guns were marshaled into German service as the
7.62 cm PaK 36, new inexpensive
tank destroyers such as the
Marder series
were put into production, while Panzer III & IV tanks & the
Sturmgeschütz were hastily up-armoured and up-gunned.
A new generation of big tanks, the heavy
Tiger,
Panther, and
King Tiger tanks were developed and rushed
into the battlefield. During the war, the mass of a panzer
increased from the 5.4 tonnes of a pre-war
Panzer I light tank, to the whopping 68.5 tonnes of
the Tiger II. In the meantime, the Soviets continued to produce the
T-34 by the tens of thousands, and U.S.
industry nearly matched them in the number of
M4 Sherman tanks built and deployed in Europe
after
D-Day.
Throughout the war, the panzer was a key piece of the combined arms
doctrines supporting the German blitzkrieg. The tanks were used in
almost every theatre of German involvement.
Their largest
engagement occurred at The Battle of Prokhorovka
, which saw about three hundred panzers pitted
against five hundred Soviet tanks.
See also
Notes
- “ Panzer” at Dictionary.com.
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