THE TIGER TANK was dramatically more powerful than any other tank when deployed in 1942. How did the Germans preserve its secrets? Why were the Allies taken by surprise? What did they discover?
After 20 years of research on three continents, across 25 battle maps, 31 tables of data, more than 500
photographs and drawings, and previously unidentified first-hand accounts, these volumes reveal what
Allied technicians discovered and what the propagandists covered up and distorted. Thus, we can learn more about the Tiger as it really was, rather than the hearsay that history books perpetuate.
THIS THIRD VOLUME focuses on Tiger 131 of the 504th: the first running Tiger to be exploited in the West, the first Tiger sent to Britain, the most studied Tiger, and the only running Tiger in the world today. This volume reveals the untold story of how Tiger 131 was captured on Gueriat el Atach in almost perfect condition, after fighting for two days, against parts of four battalions of tanks and six battalions of infantry. No less remarkable is its recovery and exploitation in Tunisia, how it got to Britain, its tardy and incomplete trials, the missing reports, the tank’s relegation in disabled condition – during a politicized dispute about the relative merits of Allied tanks, and the falsification of its provenance to suggest that it was captured at Djebel Djaffa, three days earlier, by different units.
THIS THIRD VOLUME also describes: the campaigns in Sicily in 1943, mainland Italy from 1943 to 1945, France in 1944, and Germany in 1945; the Tigers captured in those campaigns; the widening gaps between the intelligence at home, what the users heard, and what their commanders, politicians, propagandists, and historians said; the first battles between the latest Allied tanks and the last Tigers; and the post-war fates of the surviving Tigers.