The much-vaunted German Leopard 2 tank – 18 of which were sent to Ukraine in 2023 after prolonged national debates and foot-dragging by the outgoing Olaf Scholz government – is reportedly proving a flop on the battlefield.
According to a confidential assessment by Germany’s own defence ministry, and published by the Daily Telegraph, the Leopards have disappointed their Ukrainian army crews, as they are said to be over-complex to operate and vulnerable to aerial attack by Russian drones.
So limited are the Leopards’ capabilities proving in real battle conditions that their range and mobility are restricted. According to the study, they are being used as little more than moderately mobile artillery pieces.
The Leopards’ disappointing performance will come as no surprise to anyone who has studied the history of the German tank since the dawn of armoured warfare in the first world war. For, contradicting the popular legend of the all-conquering ‘Blitzkrieg’, German panzers in practice have repeatedly exhibited similar failings – tending to be too large and heavy, too thirsty for fuel, and over-complicated to operate. They have, in fact, shown all the faults of a weapon designed by a committee.
In the Great War, the Germans were taken completely by surprise by the first few tanks developed in secret and introduced by the British on the Somme in 1916. The French also produced nimble Renault tanks in vast numbers, and in 1917 the British deployed hundreds of the new machines in warfare’s first ever mass tank offensive at Cambrai, leaving the Germans struggling to respond.
As such latecomers to armoured warfare, Germany was slow to find an answer to the Allied tanks, and when they did it had all the faults of future Teutonic tanks. The A7V Sturmpanzerwagen was an unwieldy, slow-moving monster, weighing over 30 tons, with a crew of 20. Since they were so expensive to produce, only 20 of the A7Vs saw service on the Western Front in the last year of the war and failed to prevent Germany’s defeat.
Between the world wars, though far-sighted soldiers like General Guderian realised that the invention of the tank had transformed the nature of warfare, the German panzers proudly paraded at the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s gave the world the misleading impression of a fully mechanised army. In fact, behind the Blitzkrieg façade, the German forces that conquered France in 1940 were still largely reliant on footslogging infantry and the horse.
The war-winning armoured vehicle of the Second World War was not a German tank, but Russia’s T-34 – a sturdy warhorse with sloping protective armour and a simple design, making it easy to mass-produce in large numbers. The T-34 proved its worth on the battlefield of Kursk in 1943, outnumbering and outgunning the German opposition in the biggest tank battle that the world has yet seen.
To counter the T-34, the Germans introduced the famous Tiger I – a heavy tank that packed a formidable punch with its 88mm cannon. But lurking beneath its superb exterior, the Tiger exhibited all the familiar faults that have bedevilled German tanks throughout their history. Weighing nearly 60 tons, the Tiger was simply too heavy, and tended to bog down when the going was soft.
In addition, it was ‘over-engineered’, with specialised parts not interchangeable with other tanks. This made it expensive to manufacture in sufficient numbers to make a difference, and prone to breaking down on the battlefield. As a result, fewer than 1,400 of the Tigers were produced in the two years between August 1942 and August 1944, and ultimately it did not fulfil its war-winning promise. The Leopard 2 seems to be following in the same underwhelming tradition of the Tiger and the A7V.
But however well or badly it is performing in Ukraine, 18 Leopards were never going to be enough to turn the tide of war against Russia. Their very presence – and apparent failure – in the same territory where their predecessors were defeated 80 years ago is a highly symbolic humiliation at the hands of Russia for a Germany that agonised so painfully about sending them there in the first place.
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