The Biggest Tank Ever Made - The Nazi Mouse

  It's late 1945, and the Allies are pushing deep into Germany. All seems lost for the Wehrmacht, and Soviet soldiers closing in on Berlin settle in for a day's rest. They've been pushing non-stop for weeks, chasing the once formidable German army across the Soviet tundra and into the heart of Germany. 

Today will be a well-earned rest. Suddenly, the ground begins to shake. Faint at first, but growing in intensity. Some of the men laugh, “Earthquake!", they shout- but the rumbling continues on. Then, they can hear it- the unmistakable sound of belching engines and the rumbling of tank treads. Soviet T-34s roar to life and advance to meet the threat as the infantry scrambles to prepare for combat. 

The thick wooded line ahead of the Soviet advance forces suddenly parts, trees pushed aside like matchsticks, as massive armored behemoths emerge from the dark forest like primordial monsters. The Soviet tankers are too shocked to react-these German tanks, painted in green and brown camouflage, are over twice the size of their own tanks! Matter of fact, the top of their T-34 tanks can barely reach the bottom of the German tank's turrets! The Germans are the first to fire. 

The Biggest Tank Ever Made - The Nazi Mouse

A single round from the massive 128mm cannon strikes a T-34, creating a five foot long tear in the chassis armor half a foot wide band blowing the turret clean off. The tank, and the crew, are instantly dead. The T-34s return fire in a panic, but their76 millimeter guns bounce off the 150mm thick sloped armor of the German tanks. 

The T-34's own 47 millimeter armor is worthless under the onslaught of the German 128mm cannon, even full-frontal shots are guaranteed kill son the Soviet tanks. The Soviet lines break and the infantry retreating panic as they watch their armor decimated before their eyes. The tide of World War II has officially been turned, and leading Nazi Germany's revenge is the largest tank ever created, the Panzer VIII Maus. 

This is the dream Hitler envisioned for the German army even before the tide began to turn against him. A big fan of 'super weapons', Hitler was no stranger to moonshots- even when he should have been relying on more conservative, tried and tested weapons to maintain his grip on Europe. Some of these moonshots would achieve a level of success, the V-1 and V-2 rockets or the Messerschmitt 262 for example held the promise of achieving great military success... if they had been implemented earlier in the war. 

Other moonshots though, such as the Schewer Gustave super artillery achieved little and sucked up valuable funding and time that were better spent elsewhere. However, none of Hitler's failed super weapons held quite the potential to change the tide of the war like the Panzer VIII Maus. The Maus- or Mouse, because the Nazis had a flair for the ironic- was first pitched to Hitler in 1942, by Ferdinand Porsche- and yes, that Porsche. 

The Biggest Tank Ever Made - The Nazi Mouse

Hitler had made it clear that he wanted a tank that would dominate the battlefield against any Allied tank, and while the German army was fielding some of the best tanks in the world at that time, the Soviet T-34 had proven to be a major surprise for German units fighting in the Soviet Union. German tankers were vastly superior to their Soviet counterparts, but the T-34 itself as a tank was more than a match for German Panzers. 

If the Soviets learned to be better tankers, the German Wehrmacht was in serious trouble. Porsche had the answer to the Fuhrer's dreams of a super tank. It would be powered by an engine adapted from a design used to keep Germany's bombers in the air, and it would need all 1200 horsepower the engine produced to move the massive 200 ton tank. By comparison, both the King Tiger, Germany's premier heavy tank, and America's modern Abrams weigh in at around 68 tons. 

The Maus would end up being over twice as heavy as any tank on the battlefield- ever. With a 1.1 meter wide track- almost twice the size of a modern Abrams- the Maus would make its presence known on a battlefield long before the enemy ever saw it. But the massive tank required equally massive treads, because without them the ground pressure the vehicle exerted would make it impossible to drive almost anywhere without it sinking into the ground.  

As it was, the tank would never be able to cross a bridge, and would cause serious damage to paved roads. Instead, the tank would either be embarked to cross rivers on barges, or simply drive along the bottom with the aid of a snorkel for the crew. A second tank would remain on shore and provide electrical power to the fording tank via a connected cable. 

Thus special effort was made to help make the interior compartments watertight. To power such a massive beast of a tank would require oceans of fuel, and even with a 420 gallon tank the Maus could only travel 38miles in difficult terrain or 100 miles in relatively flat and easy terrain such as that of the western Soviet Union. 

The Biggest Tank Ever Made - The Nazi Mouse

An Abrams today holds 500 gallons of fuel and has a range of up to 262 miles. With so much weight, the massive tank would certainly take its time getting anywhere, as it had a maximum speed of just over 12miles an hour (19 kmh). The Maus would never need to run from a fight though, thanks to it being the most heavily armored vehicle in existence. The front of the hull was 220 millimeters of sloped steel armor, making it in essence completely invulnerable to enemy fire. 

The sides and rear, typically less well armored on any tank, were still 200mm thick, This made even the rear of the Maus better protected than the King Tiger's front, which Allied tanks already had great difficulty penetrating at anything but point-blank range. With the tank being so slow though, it only made sense that it would need such heavy protection all around it. 

Accompanied by supporting infantry, the Maus would in essence be impossible to defeat except via concentrated anti-tank gun fire or close air support. Infantry hand-held anti-tank weapons would be completely ineffective against such thick armor. The Maus would dish out even better than it could take though, with a 128mm main gun that absolutely dwarfed any tank cannon on the battlefield- it would even dwarf America's most modern Abrams, equipped with a 120mmgun. 

A 75mm co-axial secondary gun would also be equipped on the tank, doubling its lethality. A 7.92mm machine gun would help keep enemy infantry at bay, and if all this wasn't even enough firepower, the tank even had the option of equipping a full-blown anti-aircraft machine gun. This would allow it to defend itself from the only realistic threat on the battlefield for the Maus- enemy close air support. 

Even the massive 128mm gun however was deemed too small for the tank. After Hitler saw a wooden mockup of the tank in 1943, he commented that the main gun looked like a toy on the massive tank, and asked for the gun to be increased to an incredible 150mm cannon. Originally weighing in at 175 tons, Hitler's additional modifications would push the weight to an astounding 200 tons. 

The Biggest Tank Ever Made - The Nazi Mouse

These additions would include a mortar for close defense, and three additional ports in the turrets for submachine guns. Hitler was immediately in love with his super tank, and approval was given for production. It was estimated that German factories would be able to crank out 10 Maus a month, that figure later being revised to just 5. 

Even these incredibly low numbers however would be more than enough for Germany to turn the tide with tanks that were nearly un kill able. The first prototype was produced in December of 1943, though it lacked a functional turret. Instead, a 'dummy' turret the same weight and size as the real turret was installed, in order to help engineers test the tank in real-world conditions. 

The tank proved to be slow, but surprisingly agile, with about half the turning radius of an American M4 Sherman. Despite positive tests, Allied bombing raids were severely hampering production of the Maus. Limited production capacity had to be prioritized for conventional German tanks, tried and true platforms that were known to work well. 

Changing production over to the Maus would also require a massive retooling of German factories and a retraining of its workforce, further disincentivising the production of the Maus on a large scale. A second prototype was completed a few months after the first, in March 1944. This functional turret was fitted with a 128mmgun, a coaxial 75mm gun, and a 7.92 machine gun for air defense. 

However, by now the war was already turning against Hitler in every theater, and German industry simply could not afford to switch production over to the Maus. An additional four hulls under construction were ordered to be scrapped immediately, and the Maus would never leave the prototype phase. 

With the Soviet army closing in, the German military quickly moved to destroy their super tank prototypes. Explosive charges were placed in the engine and crew compartments, causing massive damage but leaving the turret relatively intact. The second Maus proved to be so formidable, that the attempt to destroy it would prove to be less than successful, leaving the Soviets with quite the prize as they advanced through Germany. 

The Maus prototypes were quickly taken dipinto the Soviet Union, where the scientists and engineers the tank was meant to defeat got a chance to study it in detail. The functional turret of the heavily damaged Maus was merged with the body of the other, largely undamaged Maus, requiring the use of six 18 ton half-tracks just to pull the 55 ton turret off the damaged tank. 

The Panzer VIII Maus would have been an unstoppable superweapon if it had ever rolled off the assembly lines in force. Luckily, allied bombing had created serious difficulties for German manufacturing, and Hitler's lack of focus on a single definitive weapon system doomed the effort even before it began. Had Hitler been more competent however, the history of World War II would have been rewritten by the largest tank ever created.