The King Tiger was Germany's costliest tank, yet bombing capped it at 492
Allied troops called it the King Tiger or Royal Tiger. Weighing almost 70 tonnes, it merged the Tiger I's thick armour with the sloping plates of the Panther. Germany ordered 1,500, but relentless Allied air raids on its factory meant only 492 were ever finished.
Henschel received a design contract in 1937 and Porsche another in 1939, with both prototypes sharing a Krupp turret. Porsche's version put the turret at the back and used a petrol-electric drive, one of several unorthodox ideas that found little favour. Henschel's more conventional hull, resembling the Panther's layout, won, and the firm built every production vehicle. It simplified the running gear by overlapping the road wheels without interleaving them, easing maintenance compared with the Tiger I.
Two turret types reached service. The first, often wrongly called the Porsche turret, had a curved front and an awkward bulge for the commander's hatch; only fifty were fitted. From December 1943 a simpler turret with a thick flat face removed a dangerous shot trap and freed space for ammunition. Its long 88 mm gun, combined with a Leitz sight, proved extraordinarily accurate: in practice, hitting a target the size of a tank at 1,000 metres was almost certain with the first round.
Weight was the weakness. The Tiger II used the same 700 horsepower Maybach engine as the far lighter Panther, leaving it underpowered and thirsty at a time when fuel was scarce. A more powerful fuel-injected engine was approved in January 1945, too late to matter.
The tank first fought in Normandy on 11 July 1944 with the 503rd Heavy Panzer Battalion, and on the Eastern Front with the 501st. Five raids between September and October 1944 wrecked 95 percent of the floor space at Henschel's works, crippling output. Its chassis also formed the base of the Jagdtiger tank destroyer. The King Tiger shows a late-war pattern: impressive engineering that could not offset shortages of fuel, factories and time.
Source: Tiger II
