Yeah well I mean the Germans had found
almost by accident
that the Sturmgeschütz was very good at
tank destruction as well as bunker
destruction and when they introduced a
long barrel gun into the Sturmgeschütz
the performance and the kill ratios went
way up.
So this Jagdpanzer IV was
meant to be the newer model of
the Sturmgeschütz and in time was meant
to replace the Sturmgeschütz. That program
actually was only used for a period of
time because they would have phased this
out along with all the Panzer IV
production, all of the Sturmgeschütz
production, and in 1945 they were already
manufacturing the Jagdpanzer 38d,
which is a
German design
based on some of the components of the
38 with German armor and
the long barrel L/70, and these were a
defensive weapon, whereas
Panther or Panzer IV or any tank is meant
to be an offensive weapon where you can
move into territory where you don't have
to have your line of shot pre
calculated, you can swing your turret to
deal with any threat that comes by, but
with something like this the correct use
of it is to survey the area,
do good reconnaissance and set up
the position so you could defend on a
line of sight because you only have
so many degrees either side but that's
it, a defensive weapon, the other is an attack weapon.
Okay so we're here on the outside of the
Panzer IV/70
and you can see this is absolutely
stanard Panzer IV running gear but it has
two different wheels, the steel tire
wheels which were introduced to save rubber.
These two these wheels with the tires
gave the best ride but these protect
those front wheels that took a heavy
beating because of the heavy load of the
extra weight on the front of the vehicle.
We now move around and look at why the
extra weight is in here. You have a brand
new front end on the Panzer IV/70 which is
sloped in comparison to the Panzer IV
one which is at ten degrees.
This one is sloped so 80 millimeter plates there plus the
weight of the long L/70 gun and that
whole combination puts a lot of strain
on the front of the vehicle, but it's a
very clever use of a standard chassis
that's being mass produced since the mid
1930s.
Okay now we're lucky also to have
alongside here what was in German
hands a Jagdpanzer 38. This one is the
post-war Swiss G13 which was an export
vehicle provided by the Skoda Factory
who had something like 500 of the hulls
already manufactured for the
Jagdpanzer 38 program. So we can see the
difference in the concepts,
this one has the straight sides on
the hull,
lots of space inside as we saw on the
interior, whereas on the Jagdpanzer 38
the sides of the hull are sloped inwards
to accommodate the leaf spring
suspension here which is in pairs along the side.
This is all stuff that was
invented during the war but a Swiss G13
is completely different vehicle because
it doesn't have a PaK 39,
a German gun, this gun is an adapted version
of the Sturmkanone 40,
because Skoda used to manufacture about
70% of those for the Sturmgeschütz program.
So after the war that had the facilities
and parts left over so that's a
Sturmkanone 40 and when you look inside one
of these vehicles the whole traverse and
elevation mechanism is completely
different,
the recoil cylinders are different, but
on the outside it looks more or less the
same. But it's important to know
this is
Panzer IV/70, a fully
German armored vehicle, but this is a
replacement for the towed anti-tank guns,
the PaK 40s so what you have here is
the industrial capacity in
Czechoslovakia being used to produce
this mobile anti-tank gun and the armor,
although it is 60mm
on the front, it's made from what's known
as Siemens Martin armor which is a less
costly procedure and the side armor is
only 20mm Siemens Martin
armor, and that's about equivalent to 14.5mm German armor.
The front they estimated the
60mm had a value
of approximately 30 millimeters of
the hard German armor.
So that's difference, we can never have a
G13 that's really a Jagdpanzer 38,
although in this case this has been
nicely done with the machine gun
put a back on top and other features and
a huge number of the swiss vehicles that
were delivered between 1947 and 1949 have
these Swiss Saurer diesel
engine in them.
