In addition to tanks, each battalion planned to include the following: Vehicle The limited number of these heavy tanks, plus their specialized role in either offensive or defensive missions, meant they were rarely permanently assigned to a single division or corps, but shuffled around according to war circumstances.
Maintenance troubles and the mechanical unreliability of the Tigers posed a continuous problem, so often the units would field a smaller number of combat-ready tanks. Later formations had a standard organization of 45 Tiger Tanks, composed of three companies of 14 Tigers each, plus three command vehicles. Each company commander would have an additional Tiger, and battalion command would have another two. In 1942 this consisted of 20 Tigers and 16 Panzer IIIs, composed of two companies, each with four platoons of two Tigers and two Panzer IIIs. Formation Įarly formation units experimented to find the correct combination of heavy Tiger tanks supported by either medium Panzer III tanks or reconnaissance elements. The 1,715 German losses also include non-combat tank write-offs. The German heavy tank battalions destroyed a total of 9,850 enemy tanks for the loss of only 1,715 of their own, a kill/loss ratio of 5.74. Originally intended to fight on the offensive during breakthrough operations, the German late-war realities required it to be used in a defensive posture by providing heavy fire support and counter-attacking enemy armored breakthroughs, often organised into ad hoc Kampfgruppen. A German heavy tank battalion ( German: "schwere Panzer abteilung", short: "s PzAbt") was a battalion-sized World War II tank unit of the German Army (1935–1945), equipped with Tiger I, and later Tiger II, heavy tanks.
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