Read a story about tankers in Italy. Chose to sleep under the tank… it settled in soft ground overnight while they slept. Sounds like a terrifying way to die. Not much worse than the usual tanker death. Brave men.
@witoldschwenke9492 the tank crushed them while they were sleeping, they didn't even have the chance to understand what was going on let alone dig themselfs out
@@ImagineIHaveACoolUsername you crawl under a tank in a patch of grass and you wake up with a 30 ton tank on top of you and you don't understand what's happening? You're being squished
Most tiger sights from the US were just panzer 4 but, the US crews couldn't see the difference in the heat of action. The main shape is pretty much the same.
US tank commanders actually heavily discouraged crews from sleeping under their tanks for the very reason that the French soil was soft and used for farming so tanks would settle down in dirt easily.
This was a problem during the Great War also, all the flooding in the trenches. They had to figure out how to build them and several times, the rivers overflowed.
I slept in my Bradley every chance I got when I was a driver and gunner. It might be a little cramped, but I’d rather sleep curled up in a ball and dry than out in the mud with room to stretch.
@romasolovei3405 we all share similar alphabets and serbian isn't my first language so I got confused, the skull looks different that's what tipped me off
We were never allowed back there, no matter how cold. One guy would be on watch all the time, on every tank, and turret had to be immediately mobile. Loader got his sponson box, TC got the blowout panels, gunner got the TC sponson, and driver got his drivers hole. That never changed in all the years I was a tanker. Maybe in garrison they would allow you on the back deck, but we trained as we fought. All these years later, and I can still imagine that sponson box latch digging into the middle of my back. Sleeping on the solid, flat metal blowout panels was the tanker's dream.
Had a teacher who had been in the nz army told us that the tank crews were forbidden from sleeping under the tank because of the risk of sinking. One tank crew did it and the tank sunk on them. Said they died slowly and screaming as they desperately tried to winch the tank off the crew. For those wondering the reason they didn’t drive the tank off them is they thought that might kill them since they were already wedged under though in hindsight sight he said he wished they had as they may have survived
Turn the turret around and use the barrel as a tent top and sleep on the back over the engine. The heat keeps you warm at night. I used to do that, but that was on a more modern tank.
@@MrKeserianAbrahams crew you've spoken to said that? Or was it someone in this comment section saying the same thing word for word 2 days before you wrote this?
@@na8291 It was still plenty long enough (3m, iirc) to act as a tent pole sufficient to provide a space for your head, and drape the rest of the tent over your lower body. The real issue on a sherman would be more the incline of the rear deck of it. It's not flat, and the gun doesn't elevate at the kind of altitude needed to provide solid clearance on the rear deck.
@@RedAndYellacuddlyFellawtf? it is a reasonable assumption to make regardless of who he’s spoken to that the radiator of a fucking gas turbine would be warm for a long time. If the 4.3l v6 in my truck stays at operating temp for several hours after shutting off then a big ass fucking turbine would definitely stay warmer longer too. you must just be rage baiting dude.
I met a WW II vet years ago. He told a story to me: during the winter to stay warm one of the other tank crews in his unit (with his best friend in that tank crew), slept under their tank. He said he was freezing and shaking that night sleeping beside his tank. When he went to wake up his buddy in the next tank crew, they couldn't find any of them. They had crawled under the tank to get warm and get out of the wind, and the tank settled in the night and pushed them down into the ground underneath them. He said it took him years to stop wondering every day if his buddy had been crushed to death, or suffocated in the dirt/mud. He was choked up, remembering it 60 years later.
@sethmullins8346 which was due to large spring loaded hatches that necessitated weak spots in the armour due to their size, it was a tradeoff that payed off mainly due to the low lethality of anti tank munitions of the time, especially compared to the danger of the materials stored within the tank. This has little to do with reliability.
My Grandpa told me a story that when he was in the service, two people in his group slept under a tank. The soil was damp and the tank sank overnight slowly crushing them to death. Maybe the only story he ever told me.
My father was an MP with British forces in West Germany in the 1950's. I remember him telling me about Conqueror tank crews being killed by their tanks sinking into the ground while they slept under them. I don't know how often it happened but it made an impression on him.
When i did a school project i had the pleasure of interviewing a tank crew from ww2, they were forbidden from sleeping under it but the thing that stuck with me was how after the war they found it difficult to adjust to sleeping in "spacious conditions". So for some of them they had to sleep in cramped positions or places just to keep their minds at ease.
Yea, applies to me. 4 yrs Marine infantry, slept on cots, Navy ship berthing, small sleeping mats in the field, in vehicles sitting upright, etc. When I sleep on my queen mattress, I sleep on the side, practically falling off lol idk. Weird.
Armored crews in the 80’s were told to stop trying to sleep under the Abrams even with the trench dug due to the Abrams sinking or collapsing the dug in and killing the crews. Pattons had the same difficulties but they didn’t destroy dug ins often enough to raise concern for the Armored Board.
As a tank crewman from the mid 80’s, I can quote my 1st Sergeant on the issue. “To sleep on the ground in an assembly area is a request for death.” - 1SG James Littau, C Co, 3/68 Armor Ft Carson, Co Now, he specifically referred to being on the ground NEXT to the tank, the risk, of course, being run over by another vehicle. But tankers ain’t tankers ‘less’n they sleep on their vehicles.
My grandfather told me a story from his national service days. He was a tank loader and radio operator serving in Germany after the war. He said that he was out on exercise and some lads decided to camp under one of the Centurions. It rained heavily that night, and the ground got wet and the two guys were crushed to death as the ground moved. The story always stuck with me.
As an American tanker, I can confirm we just sleep on/in the tank. Driver especially. It’s not as uncomfortable as you’d imagine and keeps you ready to go Edit- At gunnery rn at range 66 Ft Bliss, on my back deck after table 5 night. Just last night I decided to bust out the summer bag from the burrito instead of clocking out in the gunner station.
True! I slept through the first few hours of Prague Spring in 1968, while our tanks were dispersed in our alert hides in the woods. I am 6'2" and it was very comfortable for me in the drivers compartment.
Heard of a dude during a gunnery live fire when he drove he got in the drivers seat w a sleeping bag and just stayed like that the entire time,and played on his phone until it was time to move again
Never slept on the ground, always in the vehicle, whether it was a truck, car or an apc. After a long day it didn't even matter, we would fall asleep even during the day sometimes.
Not in WW2 but in Korea, my dad was in 101st Airborne attached to an platoon of Shermans. After a full days march, they stopped for the night and made camp. The next morning, all 5 Shermans were gone. Turns out the Shermans parked near a rice field and sank in the mud overnight. Luckily the tank crews were sleeping away from their tanks.
A Sherman is about 9 1/2 feet tall, rice fields are 5 to 20 inches deep. Even at 20 inches that wouldn't create enough mud to fully submerge almost 10 feet.
Do none of yall know how to read? "Near a rice field". The water from rice fields seeps into the surrounding dirt making soft mud. They weren't IN the rice field, just near one.
I worked with a man that had been a Sherman crewman in France. He said they were shipped to Normandy directly from the US, but landed days after the first wave. They had been told in training that the Sherman was the best tank on the battlefield. The first time they met a Tiger, osmore likely, a Panther, the first few Shermans were destroyed before they could get within range to shoot. They pulled back and called in artillery on the Germans. That became their SOP from that moment on.
Fun fact: The myth that the Tiger Tank was frontally invulnerable is most likely a result of misinformed Sherman crews labeling every German tank as a Tiger. The most likely candidate for these rumors is the much more common but no less fearsome Panther tank, which for the most part was frontally invulnerable to the short-barreled 75mm cannon.
@@exceptionalanimations1508 When you are an American soldier and can't speak German, all you know is that there's this 'Legendary' wonder weapon the Germans have invented called the 'Tiger tank'. You don't know the names of any other tanks, so when you come across a tank with a design you've never seen before, obliterating your entire Sherman column from half a mile away, and every time you land a shot it bounces, you'll start to think that whatever just knocked out your tanks has to be this legendary Tiger Tank, and rumors start to spread that the Tiger is frontally invincible.
@@exceptionalanimations1508 You are correct! Nobody ever mistook the Panther for a Tiger. They have very different silhouette. But a Panzer 4 with side-skirts and extra turret armour DOES look like a Tiger from a distance ... not to mention if it also had some tree branches stuck to it as camouflage. The scale is completely off, but the silhouettes are remarkably alike.
Dad was a tank commander in WWII. His first night in France was parked in a church yard, as a German mortar crew probed the armor as allied troops searched for the Germans. The crew took turns sleeping under the tank, a one manned the turret, and chain gun.
In peacetime, my grandpa was stationed in Germany during the Vietnam war as an m60 crewman and he liked sleeping on the engine deck because it was warm.
My great great grandfather fought in world war 2 like many others, and he was in a tank crew during the winter. Since it was extremely cold sleeping in snow underneath a tank they would leave the engine running to keep them warm, my great great grandfather was the only one to survive.
@@thatladfromthe40s82 no, the Japanese type 10 modern main battle tank. he means its "convertible " because of its adjustable suspension that can make the tank a lowrider
@@AtfgameboyConvertable in English means the roof can open and close. Like a sports car. Hydraulic suspensions are referred to as "Hydraulics" in American English.
My father was in 2nd Grenadiers 1939 to 1946. In 1944 he was in Guards Armoured Division on exercise on Salisbury Plain. A crew slept under their tank to be out of the weather and it sank during the night killing them. The lesson was hard learned.
My football coach Ale Globe was a gunner in a Sherman tank he said he was thankfull for the motor keeping him warm in the winter. Thank you coach Globe.
You guys are both wrong because your assuming this King Tiger had even made it to the front. But I submit to you that this King tiger is still stuck at the depot because it’s crew of child conscripts couldn’t reach the controls to operate it.
When I went to Infantry OSUT at Ft. Benning in 1982 we had a confidence building exercise where a M60A1 rolled over us while in a piece of concrete tube placed upright in the ground. To feel the weight as it approached was terrifying. As it passed we stood up and extended a LAW and simulated firing into engine compartment
There weren't many Tigers on the Western Front, so while tankers were definitely scared of the encounter, the likelihood of encountering one was actually near zero.
You’re talking about the Americans. The British faced numerous Tiger 1 and Tiger 2 which first saw action in the Western front. The Germans pulled all their best Tankers from the Eastern front to stop the British in Caen. During that time the British were facing 11 German Divisions while the whole Eastern front only left with 7 German Divisions fighting the Soviets.
Not on the East side of the Normandy salient. US forces did not encounter Tiger Tanks in Normandy but there were plenty on the British and Canadian front.
@@inisipisTV Yeah, the Germans didn't want to lose Caen so they committed considerable armored reserves like Tiger 1s to the battle, which the Commonwealth promptly dumpstered. The Americans mostly faced Panthers and Panzer 4s, which were also promptly dumpstered. People who think these German tanks were unbeatable need to look into battles like Arracourt or the entire history of the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battallion, who got sent with 45 Tigers to the west and lost all of them in 4 months.
@@inisipisTV this isnt entirely true either, as the americans did face king tigers on a few occasions. however the tigers involvement on the western front is way over played. the fear of tigers is also way overplayed. there are numerous accounts of american crew man being at most respecting of the power of the tiger. but not actually being afraid of it, no more than any other tank. most tiger "encounters" and most of the fear of tigers actually came from infantry.
Was it fairly common for people to sleep under the tanks? My dad was a Para in the 70s/80s and told me of some tankies who were killed on an exercise he was on when they slept under their tanks, but looking at this comment section it's either the most common cause of death for tankers or an old wives tale
Running into a tiger 2 was much less likely than running into stationary 88 flak guns. Since only around 500 were built and less than 200 left the factory.
And the vast majority of then were sent to the Eastern Front, because the Russians actually fielded heavy tanks somewhat commonly, same with regular tigers. there were only a handful of German heavy tanks on the western front.
@@erraldstyler because German tanks looked very similar under stress. We already know the later variants of the panzer IV were mistaken for tigers constantly.
@@charliebasar9068 Did you reply to the wrong thing? Anyways, while Shermans were indeed abandoned because they ran out of fuel, but the extensive American logistics network allowed for consistent refueling.
@princemapping9123 No, I don't think I did. I was responding to the pillbox statement by saying that a Tiger with no fuel would be useless as a pillbox, because the turret would have to be hand cranked and on a tiger that would be abysmally slow.
My dad was a tanker and at Fort Erwin they do these “war games” out in the desert with full scale tanks and air etc. So you practice actually fighting a war in region… but because you are out there for like an entire weekend doing it, a lot of people sleep on the ground, and they tell them, WHATEVER YOU DO DONT SLEEP ON THE GROUND, and to sleep atop a tank. But inevitably people do sleep on the ground and get run over by tanks. Supposedly happens fairly often
They were probably part of a detachment assisted by infantry who would be the ones taking up watches, looking for things *outside* the perimeter they have setup, it's just an unfortunate choice of ground where the crew had chosen to dig their sleeping trench at
No, the King Tiger tank, as you call it, did NOT live up to it's reputation. Any historian that actually knows something about armored warfare from '39-'45 will absolutely agree that King Tiger was garbage. Too heavy, broke down way too often and impossible to tow from firefights or swamps if got properly stuck. The crew did not like them either. Whole wermaht preferred PZ IV, which in H variant could stand up against M4.
And any historian, who's not your average us american video essay slop youtuber, will tell you that this was the case with basically any tank of the time period
To the people above me, no, every tank was not like this. While all had some problems, the Tiger II was an extreme example of this. It would break down more than most tanks of it time, since most tanks would weigh 20-50 tons, and the Tiger II about 70 tons, and was severly underpowered. And the fuel concumption of it was immense, 200m per liter of fuel.
@@amppari_234 it was more reliable thank you actually think, mechanical failures in the Tiger II were common only due to rookie crews. It is proven that expert crews rarely had any problems with that tank.
Im a vet and although i never worked on tanks as I was in the Royal Navy, I would always chose to sleep inside the aircraft carrier in my bed rather than outside of the aircraft carrier in the water
I remember watching an interview where a Sherman tank crewman was talking about how they slept inside the tank and one time when they were waking up, they saw a bunch of Germans marching down the road so they lowered their gun to pretend to be knocked out.
There were only ~1400 Tiger 1s ever made so they were relatively rare overall, but yeah, iirc in the west it was at much bigger risk of being destroyed by the US and UK Air forces so a larfer number were sent to the Eastern front were it could do more work without being bombed
Yeah, they were only encountered by American tankers a total of four times, according to the Chieftan, and three of those 4 times, the Shermans won pretty decisively
@@dragon12234 all the airraids on tanks in the western front killed around 14 tiger tanks. 8of which in a mass bombing raid on a french city. air attacks werent a threat. most where knocked out by regular anti-tank ground weapons or given up by the crew due to lack of fuel, ammo, or mechanical problems. like any tank during that time
My father was in one in ww2, he was in the second armored. He did talk about being afraid of the 88mm german guns. He didnt say a lot about the horrors but started to replay them not long before he passed in 2017 He was 92 He went out of his way to hire just returned from Vietnam vets. He would go to Santa Rosa JC and post notices for vets who needed work while going to school. I just missed Vietnam. I was born in 1955. 54 would have been the cutoff for the draft. I worked in the gas station after school after school and weekends with those just returned vets. A lot of them had emotional problems, most. They went through hell. My father was in the shooting war for about 8 months. The Vietnam vets were normally in country for one year or 2 if they volunteered. The vets who went to Afghanistan and Iraq were in country for more time than i will say because i never served a day of my life. I do remember working with the Vietnam vets when i was 13 to 18. It was plain to see how badly damaged those guys were at that stage of my life. Now it seems we have vets who were in wars for years and years. Again i wont pretend to put a number on it because i dont know shit. I dont deserve to eat the camel shit off the bottom of their boots. So many were basicly ruined by what they did. We need to do something. I dont think the veterans should have to work another day. All their medical should be paid 100%. If they are addicted they should be rehabbed or given all the heroin or whatever they ended up hooked on. Because its all our fault. We owe them. A roof at minimum. Safe place to live and whatever it takes to work out their PTSD. I'll never forget when my father was in the last months of his life, how he was drifting back to germany and Belgium. He was there 75 years later living through the hell. What have we done to the vets we sent to the middle east wars? How do we fix it?
People need some kind of structure and purpose. Absolving them of any responsibility to fend for themselves would probably be a very, very bad thing for veterans.
My grandpa did this on Iwo Jima. One night, after being awake for 5 days, he was sleeping under the tank when they were attacked with mortars. One of them landed right behind the tank and blew off all the antennas. He slept through the whole thing.
Imagine being a sherman crewman on a cold night in the outskirts of France, 1944. Engine breakdown, artillery shells whizz around, a bomber raid in the distance and heavy sounds of tracks roaming around, uncertain if friend or foe. Just having a time of life with the greatest generation to have ever lived.
@@caseco4979yeah, they really are, but that is also the US school system in action, the last 8 or so years have been romanticizing WW2 the Korean war, Vietnam, and desert storm as tho they weren't each horrific wars...
Never heard of anyone sleeping on the ground. You do not want to be laying down anywhere near a tank if they have to move quickly. What you do, is take your antenna's and bend them forward, raise your 50 cal to max elevation and then drape your tarp over these. You now have a water proof 'hooch' to sleep under. Can still traverse the turret if you need to scan for the enemy if you have the gunner position used for watch. In the late 80's, early nighties, they invented a hammock like contraption to string up inside the turret. It was actually pretty nice to have.
same with the sherman tho. the british had a hell of a time with it, having more shermans breakdown than the notoriously unreliable churchills and even valentine mk1's
@@SebmundoI don’t really think that’s true. No tank during that time period was truly reliable. The thing that made shermans good was that they were pretty cheap to make in comparison with the bulky british tanks so losing tanks due to reliability wasn’t as bad as with other tanks.
I'm not entirely certain but I believe the Americans & French had a habit of misidentifying Panzer IVs & Panthers as Tigers while the British/Commonwealth & Polish had the misfortune of actually encountering Tigers. Though some crews were more successful against them than others (a Firefly won't have a problem with a Tiger so long as it fires first). Also as the war dragged on the German crew quality decreased which is why we have Canadian Sherman commanders who have an absurd amount of confirmed Panther 'knock-outs' with the 75mm (turns out a high fire-rate really scares the shit out of a poorly trained and near-blind Panther crew)
@@Max_basilthat's true, most American tankers has been told about the general shape of a tiger, most had never seen one. So when they saw a boxy tank with a fairly long cannon a good distance away, they would call in a report of a tiger tank, when it was only a panzer 4.
In a Marine LAR BN… there were often times where you were fighting the vehicle 24/7… there was no stopping to sleep. You rotated out the driver and let him sleep while a scout drove. Same with the VC. Those are the only two that need to be awake and sometimes in extremis… it’s just the driver awake…but under no circumstances will the pig ever stop moving except for fuel.
If the crew set up on any kind of hill a tiger couldn’t reach them. They’d be as safe as the folks back home because of the tiger’s incapable transmission. Find a hill, dig a sleeping trench, heat K-Rats and sleep like a baby
Tiger did live up to its reputation until its ureliable engine broke down and got abandoned since gernans didnt build spare parts for them for some reason.
The reason for them to not build spare parts (among others) was cooking the production numbers. Imagine you have the capability to build 100 tank engines per month. That means that you can build 50 new tanks per months and can deliver spare parts for 50 tanks to the battlefield. If you want to impove your stand with the Führer, you gradually change that ratio. Next month you build 60 tanks and only deliver 40 spare engines, next month 70 tanks and so on. Still with the same production capacity. And after a few months you can report that you have increased tank production by 100% to your Führer, get a medal and are his new best buddy. Ok, there will be no spare parts delivered to the battlefield, but that information gets smothered somewhere in the command line.
@@shahraiyan2519 Actually not. The production of tanks and planes in Germany was at its highest level during 1944 and 1945. The strategic bombings had an actual inpact on the productions which was far less than the public impression.
Thought the Tigers used the engine and transmission of PzKw4? Underpowered and overstressed lead to mechanical unreliability. As someone who works alot with German equipment, not much has changed.
Yeah, Tigers were alright... when they weren't breaking down because the Maybach engine wasn't strong enough for the size of the tank... or running out of fuel... or spontaneously catching fire...
Most Tigers were destroyed by their own crews when the transmissions or engines failed. They were 90% less reliable than the Sherman and took ten times as long to fix. Tigers also lacked a belly escape hatch - there are records of entire crews being trapped inside when they were flipped upside down by bombs or naval artillery near misses.
Destroyed by their own crews? I doubt that. They might have been logistical nightmares but they were highly valuable to the Germans, and would have been recovered.
@@anon9469 Tigers couldn’t be towed. They were too heavy. They could only be repaired if the Germans advanced and secured the ground for a field repair operation and the Germans rarely advanced after 1943. Half the Tigers on a road march suffered a mechanical failure with every 100km covered compared to less than 1% of Sherman tanks.
@@anon9469you couldnt recover a tiger 2, the only thing thay could tow a tiger 2, was another tiger 2, but the transmission would shit itself if you tried it, so then you had two disabled tiger 2s
Me I wouldn’t sleep under the tank because ground is soft unless you’re on a mountain and it’s nothing but rocks. As for Tiger tanks, on the western front you were more likely to come across other panzers like a Stug or a Panzer 4. My worry would be infantry or artillery.
My friend's father was part of a tank crew. Snowy night, the crew bedded down in the track imprints behind the tank. He slept off to the side. Break gave way on slight slope. He woke up to dead mates.
@@datcheesecakeboi6745the Americans didn't fight any tigers until they entered Germany. What little tigers that were in France ended up around Cean. Most tigers were on the eastern front.
@@the_coveted_one2163 Only around 500~ King Tigers were ever built, a very small number compared to other tanks. For example, the soviets built 84.000 T-34 tanks and a loooooooot of them did broke down, way more than any other tank in the world and there are many more tanks that surpass the King Tiger by just the numbers.
My british colleague's grandfather was a tank driver. Everyone slept under the tank but there wasn't enough space for him, so he slept inside. One night it started raining, the ground became soft and the tankn smashed the crew. The grandfather had to drive alone back and he was crazy terrified as you can't teally defend yourself , being the only person in the tanm.
Seems like common practice for tankers in generally. I read about Soviet tank crews that also sleept under their tanks, even in winter, they used small stoves to keep warm and heat up their tanks.
Soviet tankers did just that, especially often during winter. They even made a fireplace under the tank belly. Hot metal kept them warm and didn't let the engine freeze over cold night.
So does the tank slowly crush you as it's lowering more and more closer to the ground. And you get woken up during that and get to slowly enjoy it? Damn.
It's funny, the later German tanks were renowned for being better then the Sherman. But they were in such low production due the declining resources of Germany that the Sherman tanks rarely faced a better vehicle.
My uncle served as a tank commander in the Korean War on Heartbreak Ridge winter of 1951-1952. He said that he survived because he would sleep in the tank completely buttoned up.
U.S. tankers had the highest life expectancy of any combat MOS - mainly because artillery was the biggest cause of death, and then if a Sherman was knocked out, only 1 crewman would typically be killed.
Ya. And while German tanks were actually very good at anti-tank. (Not amazing mind you) German anti-tank teams where either on the eastern front or actually kind of bad at there jobs.
Fun fact Sherman’s didn’t always fight tigers until they were in France Belgium and Germany but most of the time they had to worry about panthers instead
My Grandma's uncle was a tanker in the Korean war and he got stabbed in the back while sleeping outside, he lived afaik but from what I remember he drew the short straw on sleeping outside and everyone else stayed in the tank
My grandpa told me that when he was in the Pacific, the Japanese took out a bunch of tank crews by tossing grenades under the tanks when the crews were sleeping. He was infantry at that time, but after that, he was tasked as a tank driver since he had experience driving tractors. His crew all slept in the tank.
By the end of the war there were about 50,000 shermans and over the entire time it existed less than 2,000 tiger tanks of all types. How formidable they must have been if their entire population is effectively a rounding error for the amount of tanks the US and Soviet Union fielded. I would sleep very comfortably knowing that next friday I'd be having ice cream while Hanz is using his last bullet on himself.
As a tank crewman from the mid 80’s, I can quote my 1st Sergeant on the issue. “To sleep on the ground in an assembly area is a request for death.” - 1SG James Littau, C Co, 3/68 Armor Ft Carson, Co Now, he specifically referred to being on the ground NEXT to the tank, the risk, of course, being run over by another vehicle. But tankers ain’t tankers ‘less’n they sleep on their vehicles.
My dad fought in Korea and one of the supporting tank crews slept under their tank. It rained in the night and the tank sunk in the mud, killing all the crew. I've heard about it happening in ww2 as well. You'd think this would be something tank school would warn you against doing.
Being completely covered by a sinking tank is a true nightmare. If I ever decided to do this i'd place a stick down into the ground with a marker on it. If the tank ever bent the stick from sinking down, the person on watch would be forced to alert everyone to get out.
Read a story about tankers in Italy. Chose to sleep under the tank… it settled in soft ground overnight while they slept. Sounds like a terrifying way to die. Not much worse than the usual tanker death. Brave men.
Eh just bring your shovel so you can dig your way out.
@witoldschwenke9492 the tank crushed them while they were sleeping, they didn't even have the chance to understand what was going on let alone dig themselfs out
@@ImagineIHaveACoolUsername you crawl under a tank in a patch of grass and you wake up with a 30 ton tank on top of you and you don't understand what's happening? You're being squished
@DarrinDarwinacious you are stupid
if it was italian crew, their tank was probably too light to crush them
Always be aware of Tigers when you sleep outside.
Americans didn't face Tigers in Normandy (only the British and Canadians did).
@@HO-bndki think you missed the joke
Good advice for 1944 BC or AD 1944 !
Or of course inside the also
Most tiger sights from the US were just panzer 4 but, the US crews couldn't see the difference in the heat of action.
The main shape is pretty much the same.
US tank commanders actually heavily discouraged crews from sleeping under their tanks for the very reason that the French soil was soft and used for farming so tanks would settle down in dirt easily.
Aye I heard about those stories too.
The Soviets had a blanket order prohibiting it after they lost too many crews to the practice
I believe the British Army had the same standing orders for crews for the same reason. They called it “Settling”.
😂
This was a problem during the Great War also, all the flooding in the trenches. They had to figure out how to build them and several times, the rivers overflowed.
I slept in my Bradley every chance I got when I was a driver and gunner. It might be a little cramped, but I’d rather sleep curled up in a ball and dry than out in the mud with room to stretch.
Makhno's anarchists, eh? Your pfp
@@matterhon-ua I thought četnik
@@SerbianMoss The words on the flag are in Ukrainian, so Makhno
@romasolovei3405 we all share similar alphabets and serbian isn't my first language so I got confused, the skull looks different that's what tipped me off
@@SerbianMoss Ok, got it. Although serbian has some different letters
Back deck of an Abrams is surprisingly comfortable in the winter. Engine compartment radiated heat for hours!
We were never allowed back there, no matter how cold. One guy would be on watch all the time, on every tank, and turret had to be immediately mobile. Loader got his sponson box, TC got the blowout panels, gunner got the TC sponson, and driver got his drivers hole. That never changed in all the years I was a tanker. Maybe in garrison they would allow you on the back deck, but we trained as we fought.
All these years later, and I can still imagine that sponson box latch digging into the middle of my back. Sleeping on the solid, flat metal blowout panels was the tanker's dream.
"Your cancer is not service related"
@@troopertrampstamp
radiated heat =/= radiation, tf are you on about? 💀
@@25husky yeah but the diesel exhaust isn't very good to be breathing in. Nor is any of the other air coming from an engine compartment.
it's not a diesel and the engine would be off @@troopertrampstamp
Had a teacher who had been in the nz army told us that the tank crews were forbidden from sleeping under the tank because of the risk of sinking. One tank crew did it and the tank sunk on them. Said they died slowly and screaming as they desperately tried to winch the tank off the crew. For those wondering the reason they didn’t drive the tank off them is they thought that might kill them since they were already wedged under though in hindsight sight he said he wished they had as they may have survived
new Zealand?, or what rhymes with yahtzee
@@ld2048New Zealand who the hell uses NZ for the party of the Austrian painter anyways
@@ld2048
That 'd be NS
Your teacher was lying bro
@@claremontcowboy7409 Nothing Ever Happens.
Turn the turret around and use the barrel as a tent top and sleep on the back over the engine. The heat keeps you warm at night. I used to do that, but that was on a more modern tank.
Abrams crewmen I've talked to say that the back deck would be warm for hours. Makes sense when there's a damn turboshaft engine under there.
alas the 75mm m3 gun isnt as long as the 120mm on the abrams
@@MrKeserianAbrahams crew you've spoken to said that? Or was it someone in this comment section saying the same thing word for word 2 days before you wrote this?
@@na8291 It was still plenty long enough (3m, iirc) to act as a tent pole sufficient to provide a space for your head, and drape the rest of the tent over your lower body. The real issue on a sherman would be more the incline of the rear deck of it. It's not flat, and the gun doesn't elevate at the kind of altitude needed to provide solid clearance on the rear deck.
@@RedAndYellacuddlyFellawtf? it is a reasonable assumption to make regardless of who he’s spoken to that the radiator of a fucking gas turbine would be warm for a long time. If the 4.3l v6 in my truck stays at operating temp for several hours after shutting off then a big ass fucking turbine would definitely stay warmer longer too. you must just be rage baiting dude.
I met a WW II vet years ago. He told a story to me: during the winter to stay warm one of the other tank crews in his unit (with his best friend in that tank crew), slept under their tank. He said he was freezing and shaking that night sleeping beside his tank. When he went to wake up his buddy in the next tank crew, they couldn't find any of them. They had crawled under the tank to get warm and get out of the wind, and the tank settled in the night and pushed them down into the ground underneath them. He said it took him years to stop wondering every day if his buddy had been crushed to death, or suffocated in the dirt/mud.
He was choked up, remembering it 60 years later.
I’ll sleep around the engine if it’s cold. Not chancing my own tank killing me
You would be surprised, although the Sherman was the most reliable tank in ww2 It was still dangerous af
@plusxz821 the sherman was not as much reliable as it was always in a situation where it was easy to fix.
Never far from spare parts and repair crew.
@@plusxz821the Sherman was also the most survivable tank of ww2 when destroyed
@@Spider-gg3pjhighest crew survival rate begs to differ
@sethmullins8346 which was due to large spring loaded hatches that necessitated weak spots in the armour due to their size, it was a tradeoff that payed off mainly due to the low lethality of anti tank munitions of the time, especially compared to the danger of the materials stored within the tank.
This has little to do with reliability.
My Grandpa told me a story that when he was in the service, two people in his group slept under a tank. The soil was damp and the tank sank overnight slowly crushing them to death. Maybe the only story he ever told me.
Couldn’t they enter the tank through the secret hatch on the bottom? I saw there was a hatch in Fury.
@@bigmanbigman2544 they were asleep. They never woke up
Same here. My Grandad told a similar story to my dad. Happened in Egypt :(
@bigmanbigman2544 while sleeping? Brilliant idea
Guess it was pretty common, my grandfather told me similar happened in the pacific
My father was an MP with British forces in West Germany in the 1950's. I remember him telling me about Conqueror tank crews being killed by their tanks sinking into the ground while they slept under them. I don't know how often it happened but it made an impression on him.
It made an impression on the unfortunate tank crews, too.
@@matthewk6731 They made impressions _in_ the mud 😭🤭
When i did a school project i had the pleasure of interviewing a tank crew from ww2, they were forbidden from sleeping under it but the thing that stuck with me was how after the war they found it difficult to adjust to sleeping in "spacious conditions". So for some of them they had to sleep in cramped positions or places just to keep their minds at ease.
Yea, applies to me. 4 yrs Marine infantry, slept on cots, Navy ship berthing, small sleeping mats in the field, in vehicles sitting upright, etc. When I sleep on my queen mattress, I sleep on the side, practically falling off lol idk. Weird.
Armored crews in the 80’s were told to stop trying to sleep under the Abrams even with the trench dug due to the Abrams sinking or collapsing the dug in and killing the crews. Pattons had the same difficulties but they didn’t destroy dug ins often enough to raise concern for the Armored Board.
Who thought sleeping under a 70ton monster was a good idea?
which patton tho?
@@sillymilly-1all of em
This advice is as old as the tank itself. Many crews have been lost under their own tanks.
As a tank crewman from the mid 80’s, I can quote my 1st Sergeant on the issue. “To sleep on the ground in an assembly area is a request for death.”
- 1SG James Littau, C Co, 3/68 Armor
Ft Carson, Co
Now, he specifically referred to being on the ground NEXT to the tank, the risk, of course, being run over by another vehicle. But tankers ain’t tankers ‘less’n they sleep on their vehicles.
My grandfather told me a story from his national service days. He was a tank loader and radio operator serving in Germany after the war. He said that he was out on exercise and some lads decided to camp under one of the Centurions. It rained heavily that night, and the ground got wet and the two guys were crushed to death as the ground moved. The story always stuck with me.
As an American tanker, I can confirm we just sleep on/in the tank. Driver especially. It’s not as uncomfortable as you’d imagine and keeps you ready to go
Edit-
At gunnery rn at range 66 Ft Bliss, on my back deck after table 5 night. Just last night I decided to bust out the summer bag from the burrito instead of clocking out in the gunner station.
Yep.
We stayed buttoned up for nearly three months once.
True! I slept through the first few hours of Prague Spring in 1968, while our tanks were dispersed in our alert hides in the woods. I am 6'2" and it was very comfortable for me in the drivers compartment.
to be fair modern tanks seats are much comfier. the driver seat in a Sherman is a stool. while an Abrams tank seat is shaped like a beach chair
Heard of a dude during a gunnery live fire when he drove he got in the drivers seat w a sleeping bag and just stayed like that the entire time,and played on his phone until it was time to move again
@@captainseyepatch3879That sounds like quite an experience.
“Come on guys it’s time to wake up”
*Everyone’s dead*
Never slept on the ground, always in the vehicle, whether it was a truck, car or an apc. After a long day it didn't even matter, we would fall asleep even during the day sometimes.
We stayed buttoned up for nearly three months...
Not in WW2 but in Korea, my dad was in 101st Airborne attached to an platoon of Shermans. After a full days march, they stopped for the night and made camp. The next morning, all 5 Shermans were gone. Turns out the Shermans parked near a rice field and sank in the mud overnight. Luckily the tank crews were sleeping away from their tanks.
I think your Dad may have been lying or exaggerating when he told you this story
@@claremontcowboy7409 Nah, he's got pics of the incident. Also, fuck you for calling my dad a liar.
Yea that didn’t happen. Rice fields are not that deep 😂
A Sherman is about 9 1/2 feet tall, rice fields are 5 to 20 inches deep. Even at 20 inches that wouldn't create enough mud to fully submerge almost 10 feet.
Do none of yall know how to read? "Near a rice field". The water from rice fields seeps into the surrounding dirt making soft mud. They weren't IN the rice field, just near one.
I worked with a man that had been a Sherman crewman in France. He said they were shipped to Normandy directly from the US, but landed days after the first wave.
They had been told in training that the Sherman was the best tank on the battlefield.
The first time they met a Tiger, osmore likely, a Panther, the first few Shermans were destroyed before they could get within range to shoot. They pulled back and called in artillery on the Germans. That became their SOP from that moment on.
Fun fact: The myth that the Tiger Tank was frontally invulnerable is most likely a result of misinformed Sherman crews labeling every German tank as a Tiger. The most likely candidate for these rumors is the much more common but no less fearsome Panther tank, which for the most part was frontally invulnerable to the short-barreled 75mm cannon.
I saw a photo a few weeks back ,on day 2 of DDay where they knocked out 2 old French Tanks. There was a lot of Pz4's
They must've been using paper tubes for optics because mistaking a panther for a tiger is honestly mind boggling
@@exceptionalanimations1508 When you are an American soldier and can't speak German, all you know is that there's this 'Legendary' wonder weapon the Germans have invented called the 'Tiger tank'. You don't know the names of any other tanks, so when you come across a tank with a design you've never seen before, obliterating your entire Sherman column from half a mile away, and every time you land a shot it bounces, you'll start to think that whatever just knocked out your tanks has to be this legendary Tiger Tank, and rumors start to spread that the Tiger is frontally invincible.
Yes i have also read random people on youtube comments and reddit who said this a million times.
@@exceptionalanimations1508 You are correct!
Nobody ever mistook the Panther for a Tiger. They have very different silhouette.
But a Panzer 4 with side-skirts and extra turret armour DOES look like a Tiger from a distance ... not to mention if it also had some tree branches stuck to it as camouflage.
The scale is completely off, but the silhouettes are remarkably alike.
Dad was a tank commander in WWII. His first night in France was parked in a church yard, as a German mortar crew probed the armor as allied troops searched for the Germans. The crew took turns sleeping under the tank, a one manned the turret, and chain gun.
In peacetime, my grandpa was stationed in Germany during the Vietnam war as an m60 crewman and he liked sleeping on the engine deck because it was warm.
My great great grandfather fought in world war 2 like many others, and he was in a tank crew during the winter. Since it was extremely cold sleeping in snow underneath a tank they would leave the engine running to keep them warm, my great great grandfather was the only one to survive.
*Starts to rain*
“Oh, it’s raining”
*Remembers that they’re under a 30 ton tank*
“OH IT’S RAINING!!”
Imagine a convertible tank
There is! Some modern tank done that, like Type 10
An M10 tank destroyer you mean?
@@thatladfromthe40s82 no, the Japanese type 10 modern main battle tank. he means its "convertible " because of its adjustable suspension that can make the tank a lowrider
@@AtfgameboyThat’s not what a convertible is
@@AtfgameboyConvertable in English means the roof can open and close. Like a sports car.
Hydraulic suspensions are referred to as "Hydraulics" in American English.
My father was in 2nd Grenadiers 1939 to 1946. In 1944 he was in Guards Armoured Division on exercise on Salisbury Plain. A crew slept under their tank to be out of the weather and it sank during the night killing them. The lesson was hard learned.
Given tanks do that so predictably and always have it was a lesson they missed earlier
My football coach
Ale Globe was a gunner in a Sherman tank he said he was thankfull for the motor keeping him warm in the winter. Thank you coach Globe.
or you could drive 30 metres back down the road, and the koningstiger will break down chasing after you
Its shell would go in the front of your Sherman, turn you into cooked hamburger on the way past and explode in your engine. 😂
@@HO-bndk…assuming it’s own engine hasn’t caught fire after driving 2 minutes
@@HO-bndkor they’d miss trying to fire while moving
You guys are both wrong because your assuming this King Tiger had even made it to the front. But I submit to you that this King tiger is still stuck at the depot because it’s crew of child conscripts couldn’t reach the controls to operate it.
@@tristandunn4761 what, they would never force children to drive a Tiger! that’s what Stugs are for.
When I went to Infantry OSUT at Ft. Benning in 1982 we had a confidence building exercise where a M60A1 rolled over us while in a piece of concrete tube placed upright in the ground.
To feel the weight as it approached was terrifying. As it passed we stood up and extended a LAW and simulated firing into engine compartment
There weren't many Tigers on the Western Front, so while tankers were definitely scared of the encounter, the likelihood of encountering one was actually near zero.
You’re talking about the Americans. The British faced numerous Tiger 1 and Tiger 2 which first saw action in the Western front. The Germans pulled all their best Tankers from the Eastern front to stop the British in Caen. During that time the British were facing 11 German Divisions while the whole Eastern front only left with 7 German Divisions fighting the Soviets.
Commonwealth forces* the canadians helped us in the Caen, they deserve to be acknowledged @@inisipisTV
Not on the East side of the Normandy salient. US forces did not encounter Tiger Tanks in Normandy but there were plenty on the British and Canadian front.
@@inisipisTV Yeah, the Germans didn't want to lose Caen so they committed considerable armored reserves like Tiger 1s to the battle, which the Commonwealth promptly dumpstered. The Americans mostly faced Panthers and Panzer 4s, which were also promptly dumpstered. People who think these German tanks were unbeatable need to look into battles like Arracourt or the entire history of the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battallion, who got sent with 45 Tigers to the west and lost all of them in 4 months.
@@inisipisTV this isnt entirely true either, as the americans did face king tigers on a few occasions. however the tigers involvement on the western front is way over played. the fear of tigers is also way overplayed. there are numerous accounts of american crew man being at most respecting of the power of the tiger. but not actually being afraid of it, no more than any other tank. most tiger "encounters" and most of the fear of tigers actually came from infantry.
As a Chieftain driver I would just sleep in the reclined drivers seat. On a Centurion we would sleep on the engine and gearbox decks.
Was it fairly common for people to sleep under the tanks? My dad was a Para in the 70s/80s and told me of some tankies who were killed on an exercise he was on when they slept under their tanks, but looking at this comment section it's either the most common cause of death for tankers or an old wives tale
The Tiger B commander in the archive film is Richard Freiherr von Rosen (nothing to do with US Army Shermans in Normandy, though).
Tiger in Sicht - upvote Pflicht
The second he mentioned soft ground I got chills
Running into a tiger 2 was much less likely than running into stationary 88 flak guns. Since only around 500 were built and less than 200 left the factory.
And the vast majority of then were sent to the Eastern Front, because the Russians actually fielded heavy tanks somewhat commonly, same with regular tigers. there were only a handful of German heavy tanks on the western front.
@@CrazyDutchguys yeah but the yanks will swear that there were gazillions of Tigers
@@erraldstyler because German tanks looked very similar under stress. We already know the later variants of the panzer IV were mistaken for tigers constantly.
and built more U-boats then Tigers
What's it gonna do, run out of gas at me?
You laugh now, but you won't be laughing a hundred miles down the road when you run into a pillbox equipped with a high-powered tank cannon.
@anon9469 Oooh so scary, counterpoint, artillery and/or not driving directly in front of a pillbox
@anon9469 ...What are they gonna do, hand crank the turret? There's a reason most tanks that ran out of fuel were abandoned.
@@charliebasar9068 Did you reply to the wrong thing? Anyways, while Shermans were indeed abandoned because they ran out of fuel, but the extensive American logistics network allowed for consistent refueling.
@princemapping9123 No, I don't think I did. I was responding to the pillbox statement by saying that a Tiger with no fuel would be useless as a pillbox, because the turret would have to be hand cranked and on a tiger that would be abysmally slow.
My dad was a tanker and at Fort Erwin they do these “war games” out in the desert with full scale tanks and air etc. So you practice actually fighting a war in region… but because you are out there for like an entire weekend doing it, a lot of people sleep on the ground, and they tell them, WHATEVER YOU DO DONT SLEEP ON THE GROUND, and to sleep atop a tank. But inevitably people do sleep on the ground and get run over by tanks. Supposedly happens fairly often
Very true. My dad saw the same thing when he was posted to Germany on maneuvers. Two guys got crushed by a tank. Said he never forgot it
Sinking tank on top of crew means tank commander was a POS that didn't have the common sense to have rotating watch
They were probably part of a detachment assisted by infantry who would be the ones taking up watches, looking for things *outside* the perimeter they have setup, it's just an unfortunate choice of ground where the crew had chosen to dig their sleeping trench at
Tiger tank is the perfect example of the fact that "just enough" can beat perfection in a lot of situations.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
No, the King Tiger tank, as you call it, did NOT live up to it's reputation. Any historian that actually knows something about armored warfare from '39-'45 will absolutely agree that King Tiger was garbage. Too heavy, broke down way too often and impossible to tow from firefights or swamps if got properly stuck. The crew did not like them either. Whole wermaht preferred PZ IV, which in H variant could stand up against M4.
And any historian, who's not your average us american video essay slop youtuber, will tell you that this was the case with basically any tank of the time period
You're describing the operation of basically any fucking tank at the time...
To the people above me, no, every tank was not like this.
While all had some problems, the Tiger II was an extreme example of this. It would break down more than most tanks of it time, since most tanks would weigh 20-50 tons, and the Tiger II about 70 tons, and was severly underpowered. And the fuel concumption of it was immense, 200m per liter of fuel.
@@amppari_234 it was more reliable thank you actually think, mechanical failures in the Tiger II were common only due to rookie crews. It is proven that expert crews rarely had any problems with that tank.
Im a vet and although i never worked on tanks as I was in the Royal Navy, I would always chose to sleep inside the aircraft carrier in my bed rather than outside of the aircraft carrier in the water
Amphetamines did a great job of keeping them awake too
I remember watching an interview where a Sherman tank crewman was talking about how they slept inside the tank and one time when they were waking up, they saw a bunch of Germans marching down the road so they lowered their gun to pretend to be knocked out.
Weren't tiger tanks like exceedingly rare on the western front?
There were only ~1400 Tiger 1s ever made so they were relatively rare overall, but yeah, iirc in the west it was at much bigger risk of being destroyed by the US and UK Air forces so a larfer number were sent to the Eastern front were it could do more work without being bombed
Panthers were more of a threat than Tigers.
Yeah, they were only encountered by American tankers a total of four times, according to the Chieftan, and three of those 4 times, the Shermans won pretty decisively
@@TheSteam02they were more connom
@@dragon12234 all the airraids on tanks in the western front killed around 14 tiger tanks. 8of which in a mass bombing raid on a french city.
air attacks werent a threat. most where knocked out by regular anti-tank ground weapons or given up by the crew due to lack of fuel, ammo, or mechanical problems. like any tank during that time
My father was in one in ww2, he was in the second armored. He did talk about being afraid of the 88mm german guns.
He didnt say a lot about the horrors but started to replay them not long before he passed in 2017
He was 92
He went out of his way to hire just returned from Vietnam vets. He would go to Santa Rosa JC and post notices for vets who needed work while going to school.
I just missed Vietnam. I was born in 1955. 54 would have been the cutoff for the draft.
I worked in the gas station after school after school and weekends with those just returned vets. A lot of them had emotional problems, most. They went through hell.
My father was in the shooting war for about 8 months. The Vietnam vets were normally in country for one year or 2 if they volunteered.
The vets who went to Afghanistan and Iraq were in country for more time than i will say because i never served a day of my life. I do remember working with the Vietnam vets when i was 13 to 18. It was plain to see how badly damaged those guys were at that stage of my life.
Now it seems we have vets who were in wars for years and years. Again i wont pretend to put a number on it because i dont know shit. I dont deserve to eat the camel shit off the bottom of their boots.
So many were basicly ruined by what they did. We need to do something.
I dont think the veterans should have to work another day. All their medical should be paid 100%. If they are addicted they should be rehabbed or given all the heroin or whatever they ended up hooked on. Because its all our fault. We owe them. A roof at minimum. Safe place to live and whatever it takes to work out their PTSD.
I'll never forget when my father was in the last months of his life, how he was drifting back to germany and Belgium. He was there 75 years later living through the hell. What have we done to the vets we sent to the middle east wars?
How do we fix it?
People need some kind of structure and purpose. Absolving them of any responsibility to fend for themselves would probably be a very, very bad thing for veterans.
Finding sleeping crewman under a tank is a fpv drone wet dreams
they didn’t have fpv drones in the 1940’s lmao
@@wannabe_drifterThey just had Terry
My grandpa did this on Iwo Jima. One night, after being awake for 5 days, he was sleeping under the tank when they were attacked with mortars. One of them landed right behind the tank and blew off all the antennas. He slept through the whole thing.
⚡ Great content! I love how you bring the organic vibe to how it would be sleeping under a tank.
Imagine being a sherman crewman on a cold night in the outskirts of France, 1944. Engine breakdown, artillery shells whizz around, a bomber raid in the distance and heavy sounds of tracks roaming around, uncertain if friend or foe. Just having a time of life with the greatest generation to have ever lived.
Sorry, the outskirts of France? You do realise that France isn't a town?
Maybe he meant near Belgium border or German border? But that's still odd@@michaelbaker7499
Having the time of your life... in the most horrific conflict the world has ever seen? You're over romanticizing
@@caseco4979yeah, they really are, but that is also the US school system in action, the last 8 or so years have been romanticizing WW2 the Korean war, Vietnam, and desert storm as tho they weren't each horrific wars...
@@caseco4979Violence during WW2? Every one knows that when the troops engaged the enemy it was via card games, best of 3 won.
Never heard of anyone sleeping on the ground. You do not want to be laying down anywhere near a tank if they have to move quickly. What you do, is take your antenna's and bend them forward, raise your 50 cal to max elevation and then drape your tarp over these. You now have a water proof 'hooch' to sleep under. Can still traverse the turret if you need to scan for the enemy if you have the gunner position used for watch. In the late 80's, early nighties, they invented a hammock like contraption to string up inside the turret. It was actually pretty nice to have.
If that tiger could make it to the battlefield before it broke down.
same with the sherman tho. the british had a hell of a time with it, having more shermans breakdown than the notoriously unreliable churchills and even valentine mk1's
@@drache444444isn’t the whole thing about the Sherman is that it was reliable?
Tiger I wasn't bad tank at all. König tiger might be another story
@@SebmundoI don’t really think that’s true. No tank during that time period was truly reliable. The thing that made shermans good was that they were pretty cheap to make in comparison with the bulky british tanks so losing tanks due to reliability wasn’t as bad as with other tanks.
@@mateiduma646 the Sherman had rebliability problems at the beginning of the war, but once the m4a3 was built the Sherman was a pretty reliable tank
Never ever sleep under any vehicle, especially armoured vehicles, for the obvious reason of it settling on top of you.
The chances of facing a Tiger on the Western front were astronomically small.
Even lower were the chances of that Tiger having oil and not having just been abandoned.
I'm not entirely certain but I believe the Americans & French had a habit of misidentifying Panzer IVs & Panthers as Tigers while the British/Commonwealth & Polish had the misfortune of actually encountering Tigers. Though some crews were more successful against them than others (a Firefly won't have a problem with a Tiger so long as it fires first). Also as the war dragged on the German crew quality decreased which is why we have Canadian Sherman commanders who have an absurd amount of confirmed Panther 'knock-outs' with the 75mm (turns out a high fire-rate really scares the shit out of a poorly trained and near-blind Panther crew)
@@Max_basilthat's true, most American tankers has been told about the general shape of a tiger, most had never seen one. So when they saw a boxy tank with a fairly long cannon a good distance away, they would call in a report of a tiger tank, when it was only a panzer 4.
@@ethanedwards422 To be fair the Tiger 1 does look pretty much like a bigger Panzer IV
In a Marine LAR BN… there were often times where you were fighting the vehicle 24/7… there was no stopping to sleep. You rotated out the driver and let him sleep while a scout drove. Same with the VC. Those are the only two that need to be awake and sometimes in extremis… it’s just the driver awake…but under no circumstances will the pig ever stop moving except for fuel.
The thing is, the tiger ll was decent, but it was more of a horror story than an actual threat
And americans rarely saw tigers anyway, most tiger encountered were with the British and french
American crew: "sees a panther"
ITS A FUCKING KING TIGER
@@adanakebap2731 Context: this happened twice in the war
@@Alucard-gt1zf real
@@Alucard-gt1zf They encountered a fairly large amount of them during the battle of the bulge, but they were pretty ineffective
I love how the video is talking about the Pz 6 Tiger 1, yet uses a news reel displaying the Tiger 2 which is an entirely different machine
The Tiger II was still a Pzkpfw VI
If the crew set up on any kind of hill a tiger couldn’t reach them. They’d be as safe as the folks back home because of the tiger’s incapable transmission. Find a hill, dig a sleeping trench, heat K-Rats and sleep like a baby
You made that up entirely, didn't you
@N.Eismann no tje transmission in German heavy tanks for.most variations was over taxed and notorious tricky to operate.
If it was that bad it wouldn't be used
@@maxsemeniuk3521don’t forget by the time these tanks where in common use most trained German crews had been killed in the battle of Kursk
@@picollojr9009the germans would use whatever they could muster at that stage of the war
All like 5 of them they managed to produce with the time and resources it took certainly were fearsome.
Tiger did live up to its reputation until its ureliable engine broke down and got abandoned since gernans didnt build spare parts for them for some reason.
The reason for them to not build spare parts (among others) was cooking the production numbers. Imagine you have the capability to build 100 tank engines per month. That means that you can build 50 new tanks per months and can deliver spare parts for 50 tanks to the battlefield. If you want to impove your stand with the Führer, you gradually change that ratio. Next month you build 60 tanks and only deliver 40 spare engines, next month 70 tanks and so on. Still with the same production capacity. And after a few months you can report that you have increased tank production by 100% to your Führer, get a medal and are his new best buddy. Ok, there will be no spare parts delivered to the battlefield, but that information gets smothered somewhere in the command line.
Germany was on its last legs due to allied strategic bombing which made production and quality extremely low
@@shahraiyan2519 Actually not. The production of tanks and planes in Germany was at its highest level during 1944 and 1945. The strategic bombings had an actual inpact on the productions which was far less than the public impression.
Thought the Tigers used the engine and transmission of PzKw4? Underpowered and overstressed lead to mechanical unreliability.
As someone who works alot with German equipment, not much has changed.
@@shahraiyan2519 allied bombing had barely any effect on production. tanks didnt get produced in medieval city centres
Yeah, Tigers were alright... when they weren't breaking down because the Maybach engine wasn't strong enough for the size of the tank... or running out of fuel... or spontaneously catching fire...
Most Tigers were destroyed by their own crews when the transmissions or engines failed. They were 90% less reliable than the Sherman and took ten times as long to fix. Tigers also lacked a belly escape hatch - there are records of entire crews being trapped inside when they were flipped upside down by bombs or naval artillery near misses.
Destroyed by their own crews? I doubt that. They might have been logistical nightmares but they were highly valuable to the Germans, and would have been recovered.
@@anon9469 Tigers couldn’t be towed. They were too heavy. They could only be repaired if the Germans advanced and secured the ground for a field repair operation and the Germans rarely advanced after 1943. Half the Tigers on a road march suffered a mechanical failure with every 100km covered compared to less than 1% of Sherman tanks.
@@anon9469you couldnt recover a tiger 2, the only thing thay could tow a tiger 2, was another tiger 2, but the transmission would shit itself if you tried it, so then you had two disabled tiger 2s
Me when i lie
This channel is gold if your a history buff
Technically, not a Tiger is shown at the end but rather a upgraded model, the Pz.Kpfw VI Ausf. B. Nickname "Kingtiger".
Yes. And it did NOT "live up to it's reputation". That is just missinformation.
Me I wouldn’t sleep under the tank because ground is soft unless you’re on a mountain and it’s nothing but rocks. As for Tiger tanks, on the western front you were more likely to come across other panzers like a Stug or a Panzer 4. My worry would be infantry or artillery.
Not to mention your trench under the tank filling with water
Any tanker who hasn’t bonked his nugget when he woke up hasn’t spent a night in the field 😉
Those tigers still strike fear into the enemy even on battlefield 5, everytime i see one im like "oh fuck thats a tiger be careful"
People don't understand how rare it is to see a tiger tank in a war setting back then they were far and few in between
Hi
My friend's father was part of a tank crew. Snowy night, the crew bedded down in the track imprints behind the tank. He slept off to the side. Break gave way on slight slope. He woke up to dead mates.
The tiger did NOT live up to it's reputation, especially on the western front
It did live up to its reputation. go back to, what? I'm assuming your american so grade 1 English?
@@datcheesecakeboi6745the Americans didn't fight any tigers until they entered Germany. What little tigers that were in France ended up around Cean. Most tigers were on the eastern front.
@@datcheesecakeboi6745 the first Tiger ever encountered by the allies was destroyed by a British truck with a 6 pounder mounted on it
@@datcheesecakeboi6745 "go back to what?*
What does that even mean?
@@tonybaloney8401 wow your English really is as horrible as I thought
Hello,i like your videos,i know almost everything about ww2.
Cheers dude✌️
"... which certainly lived up to its reputation" until it broke down
like any other tank
@vampi-chan3793 yes, but it broke down a whole lot more than other tabks
@@the_coveted_one2163
Only around 500~ King Tigers were ever built, a very small number compared to other tanks. For example, the soviets built 84.000 T-34 tanks and a loooooooot of them did broke down, way more than any other tank in the world and there are many more tanks that surpass the King Tiger by just the numbers.
@vampi-chan3793 thats not the point, my point was that the tigers (and by extension, early model panthers) were unreliable
@@the_coveted_one2163 only early models, you should research about it.
My british colleague's grandfather was a tank driver. Everyone slept under the tank but there wasn't enough space for him, so he slept inside. One night it started raining, the ground became soft and the tankn smashed the crew. The grandfather had to drive alone back and he was crazy terrified as you can't teally defend yourself , being the only person in the tanm.
We slept in the Abrams all the time.
How comfortable was it?
Did anyone ever choke the ol chicken in it
Seems like common practice for tankers in generally. I read about Soviet tank crews that also sleept under their tanks, even in winter, they used small stoves to keep warm and heat up their tanks.
in the winter the ground was frozen in the USSR
Soviet tankers did just that, especially often during winter. They even made a fireplace under the tank belly. Hot metal kept them warm and didn't let the engine freeze over cold night.
So does the tank slowly crush you as it's lowering more and more closer to the ground. And you get woken up during that and get to slowly enjoy it?
Damn.
It's funny, the later German tanks were renowned for being better then the Sherman. But they were in such low production due the declining resources of Germany that the Sherman tanks rarely faced a better vehicle.
My uncle served as a tank commander in the Korean War on Heartbreak Ridge winter of 1951-1952. He said that he survived because he would sleep in the tank completely buttoned up.
I sleep on the steel floor of M109 howitzer to stay out of the rain . It was a prized location
"You probably wouldn't choose to sleep inside of a tank" well... you're clearly not a tanker
U.S. tankers had the highest life expectancy of any combat MOS - mainly because artillery was the biggest cause of death, and then if a Sherman was knocked out, only 1 crewman would typically be killed.
Ya.
And while German tanks were actually very good at anti-tank. (Not amazing mind you)
German anti-tank teams where either on the eastern front or actually kind of bad at there jobs.
Very few Americans ever saw tigers, even fewer still saw Tiger IIs. Almost exclusively panthers, or Panzer IVs
Fun fact Sherman’s didn’t always fight tigers until they were in France Belgium and Germany but most of the time they had to worry about panthers instead
The Tigers we're mostly in Russia fighting heavy soviet armour
*Panzer 4 approaching*
"GUYS RUUUN IT'S A KING TIGER!!!"
ID rather freeze to death than getting crushed by the tank and slowly suffocating
I met a veteran, Albert, who was part of the 774th Black Cat Tank crew. He fought through the entire European Theater. He's 100 years old.
My Grandma's uncle was a tanker in the Korean war and he got stabbed in the back while sleeping outside, he lived afaik but from what I remember he drew the short straw on sleeping outside and everyone else stayed in the tank
My grandpa told me that when he was in the Pacific, the Japanese took out a bunch of tank crews by tossing grenades under the tanks when the crews were sleeping. He was infantry at that time, but after that, he was tasked as a tank driver since he had experience driving tractors. His crew all slept in the tank.
Forgot to add at the end “when they weren’t out of fuel”
Q: "Where you'd sleep in a WW2 Tank?"
A: you don't sleep in the tank,
You sleep on the ground outside, underneath the tank.
i pride myself in being able to sleep anywhere comfortably and now i have to know if i can do it in a sherman tank aswell now
A King Tiger or a Panther sure is scary to face, that is, assuming they get there in the first place
By the end of the war there were about 50,000 shermans and over the entire time it existed less than 2,000 tiger tanks of all types. How formidable they must have been if their entire population is effectively a rounding error for the amount of tanks the US and Soviet Union fielded. I would sleep very comfortably knowing that next friday I'd be having ice cream while Hanz is using his last bullet on himself.
Just gotta make with those positive waves, and if you get enough of em, then there's no way we can lose baby...
*woof woof woof*
As a tank crewman from the mid 80’s, I can quote my 1st Sergeant on the issue. “To sleep on the ground in an assembly area is a request for death.”
- 1SG James Littau, C Co, 3/68 Armor
Ft Carson, Co
Now, he specifically referred to being on the ground NEXT to the tank, the risk, of course, being run over by another vehicle. But tankers ain’t tankers ‘less’n they sleep on their vehicles.
I hear they often slept on the engine deck, because it was nice and warm.
The reason the tigers reputation was so fierce is they didnt fight em often cause the transmissions on em kept breaking down
My dad fought in Korea and one of the supporting tank crews slept under their tank. It rained in the night and the tank sunk in the mud, killing all the crew. I've heard about it happening in ww2 as well. You'd think this would be something tank school would warn you against doing.
Being completely covered by a sinking tank is a true nightmare. If I ever decided to do this i'd place a stick down into the ground with a marker on it. If the tank ever bent the stick from sinking down, the person on watch would be forced to alert everyone to get out.