Greetings all! There are a number of misconceptions, commonly in people's minds about the Panther. And those of you paying attention, probably are now aware of them, I thought it would be handy to have a quick reference video that you can link to. The next time some lesser informed folks come up with the following statements. Panther was designed to counter T-34. To quote Hillary Doyle, there's a myth about that. Panther was developed more quickly because of T-34 but not because of T-34. The program to create a successor tank to the Panther 4, much like the program for Tiger predated 1940, if you go by the BW-40 program. And by February of 1941, M&N, who would eventually build Panther, was hard at work on its VK-20.02M, a medium tank with interleaved road wheel suspension on torsion bars with unsupported track and triple radius steering gear. Now, in fairness, I am spitting hairs a little bit. Encounters with T-34's and KV-1's set out a new basic requirement which the earlier designs, VK-20.02, VK-24.01, and VK-30.01, eventually evolved to meet, to include the stoked armor and a very high velocity cannon. Indeed, the M&N design was eventually chosen over the Daimler band's Tutonic T-34 because of the amount of work which was already done, which allowed the M&N design to end a production more quickly. Panther 2 was developed in order to simplify production with the Tiger series. Panther was actually surprisingly near-efficient, costing only a little bit more than Panther 4. If the factory had the physical capability to turn out Panthers, it could do so easily and cheaply enough. The real reason Panther 2 was developed was the thought that Panther would be unable to resist Soviet 14.5mm anti-tank rounds fired from the sides. The idea of sharing components with the Tiger 2 came about later. It turned out that, yes, Panther actually was vulnerable to the side, but it also turned out that if one-hung side skirts on the hull covering the gap between the upper hull and the road wheels, 14.5mm rounds heading for the hull side would be defeated. Since that solved the problem, there was no need to go to the hassle of developing yet another tank, and so Panther 2 was cancelled after just one hull was built. Panther was incredibly unreliable. This one requires a bit of nuance. Germany didn't spend anywhere near as much time during the war testing its equipment before fielding it, and TV troubles were dramatic. Its reliability for operation citadel, the battle occurs, was at frucious. However, like engineers everywhere, the guys at MAN talked to reports coming back on the consideration and started to implement improvements, later models being far better. Was the final Panther as reliable as Sherman? No, but really what else was. That's not to say that the weren't still problems or issues. When a Panther went down for maintenance, it often was down for more man hours in any other medium tank, be it for changing a road wheel or pulling the transmission. The increased capability in battle has to be paid for by lesser chance of the tank being ready for battle in the first place. On the other hand, though the final dries were notoriously unreliable, but replaced in them with not really any worse at task than on any other tank. A careful, well-trained driver could, indeed, extend the service life of the components. The problem was that Germany was starting to run out of experienced well-trained drivers, and telling crews not to use the capability, like neutral steer, in order to reduce stress on the system, is almost akin to not bothering the body into the tank at first place. By mid to late 1944, the units were often saddled with large numbers of non-operational Panthers, and this is not usually the fault of the lack of spare parts or the mechanic man hours to install them, more than the fact that the tank just broke down in the first place. Panther introduced night fighting equipment. This one also needs some nuance. It is true that Panther was the first tank to see battle with infrared equipment for engaging at night. This arguably is only because only the Germans were desperate enough to try it. The equipment in question is the FG-1250, a combination of spotlight and scope with an indicator related gunners position. It entered service for field trials in very late 1944. Now this wasn't any idea. The Americans had tried placing infrared on a Sherman in 1942, and the Soviets had fitted T-26s in BT7 for night driving trials even before the war. It just wasn't considered worth the effort. The German equipment was only ever used on the Eastern Front because it was well known that the Western Allies had equipment which could see infrared, and eventually Panthers which had the infrared equipment mounted started to have it dismounted and be reconverted back to the original configuration, restoring storage and ammo bins and so on, which had been removed to make room for the FG-1250 system. The idea then left the battlefield for almost two decades as technology started to catch up, so search lights in the Korean War were white light and it was pretty much the early 60s before tanks started commonly being fitted with active infrared again that was both rugged enough and capable enough to merit being fielded on tanks in the first place. The Germans should have never attempted to build Panthers and instead focused on panthers or force and stronger shots. This idea is based on the premise that the proven and now reliable Panzer IV would have been a better use of German resources and more Panzer IVs would have been better than the fewer Panthers. This makes little sense. Yes, an individual Panther takes up more resources in terms of fuel and metal than an individual Panzer IV, even if the Reichsmark costs are similar. However, there are some other matters to be concerned about. If we were to presume that a later model Panzer IV such as an H model is more or less equivalent to a Sherman or K-34, it isn't, but let's presume. You still have the issue of trying to match production volumes with two nations which are churning out tens of thousands of tanks a year. The Germans could not keep up with equal quality tanks. And even if they could build that many, where would they get the qualified crews to mend them all? Even when two Panzer IVs or three Stokes provides more overall capability than a single Panther, could the Germans provide fuel for them all? Only obviously could not win by attempting to match the Allies for quantity. Quality was the only solution that they had. Unfortunately, the quality overmatched that they needed was not within the realms of what German industry could produce. So there you go. The next time that somebody over the dinner table says one of the above things, just point them to this video and smile. I'm Nicholas Morin, the Chiefdom, and I will see you on the next one. Take care.