So welcome to today's Deep Dive. Our mission
today takes us straight into a pretty massive
stack of historical notes and some Wikipedia
data to uncover the story of a true mechanical
behemoth. Oh, absolutely. It's a heavy one. Yeah,
literally. We are looking at the German Empire's
very first operational tank and incredibly the
absolute only one they've produced and actually
utilized in combat during the entirety of World
War I. So we're diving into the history, the
engineering, and just the sheer chaos of the
A7V. It really is a remarkable piece of history.
I mean, it perfectly illustrates how industrial
warfare completely transformed in just, you know,
a few short years. Right. Because, as you probably
already know, the grim reality of the Western
Front's tactical deadlock by 1916 was just, it
was bleak. The static muddy trenches had essentially
frozen the conflict in place. Just miles of mud
and barbed wire. Exactly. But the moment those
British Mark series tanks rolled across the mud
in September of that year, literally ignoring
the barbed wire and machine gun fire that had
kept infantry pinned down for months, that static
warfare just shattered. I mean, the psychological
shock of seeing these armored fortresses crawling
toward your trenches, shrugging off rifle fire.
It completely changed the calculus of the battlefield.
Yeah, the panic on the front lines traveled up
the chain of command almost instantly, which
is wild because up until that point, the German
high command had shown very little enthusiasm
for armored vehicles. They had seen some early
proposals but offered almost no funding. Right.
They basically ignored it. Yeah. But the appearance
of the British tanks force an immediate and desperate
Okay, let's unpack this because the German War
Ministry suddenly realizes they're incredibly
far behind in an entirely new category of warfare.
How does a massive military bureaucracy attempt
to close that gap overnight? Well, they default
to what large binocracies do best, right? They
form a committee. Classic. Yeah. And specifically,
they handed the problem to a department whose
name sounds entirely unrelated to cutting -edge
weaponry. In German, it was the Algeminus Kriegsdepartement,
up tiling seven for Kerstweisen. Which translates
to the General War Department, Section 7, Transportation.
And for anyone listening who's wondering where
this legendary tank gets its snappy acronym,
that unwieldy bureaucratic title is the source,
Abteilung 7 Verkehrswesen simply becomes the
A7V. I mean, they essentially named their terrifying
new weapon of war after a transportation subcommittee.
It's a rather mundane origin for such an imposing
machine, isn't it? But this committee had a remarkably
urgent job. By December of 1916, they finalized
their requirements and handed them over to Joseph
Ulmer, who was one of Germany's foremost automobile
designers. Right. And the blueprint they gave
him was essentially a wish list for military
dominance, drafted by men who had never built
a tank. What did they want it to do? Well, they
demanded a 30 -ton vehicle. It needed to be capable
of crossing ditches up to one and a half meters
wide. It had to hit a top speed of at least 12
kilometers per hour and a Initially, they wanted
it heavily armed with cannons facing both the
front and the rear, supplemented by multiple
machine guns. So they're handing an automobile
designer a blank sheet of paper and asking for
a 30 ton land ship on a tight deadline. I mean,
that meant Volmer had to cut some serious corners,
right? Oh, absolutely. Like for the chassis,
the running gear and tracks of the tank. He didn't
invent an entirely new system. He looked at what
already existed and heavily borrowed from the
design of the American Holt tractor. Yeah, that's
a crucial detail. I read that the engineering
team actually sourced examples of these Holt
tractors from the Austro -Hungarian Army just
to reverse engineer the tracks and suspension
systems so they could handle the immense weight
they were planning. What's fascinating here is
how the German command originally envisioned
this entire production run. When Vollmer was
working on the blueprints, the overarching design
philosophy was to create a universal chassis.
Like a modular system. Yes. The military wasn't
just building a tank. They were attempting to
build a modular base platform. So out of the
initial order of 100 chassis, the high command
eventually decided that only 20 were going to
be finished as the heavily armored fighting vehicles
we know today. Wait, so if they ordered a hundred
of these massive chassis, why did only 20 actually
make it onto the battlefield as armored tanks?
Was that like a production failure or a specific
strategic choice by the War Ministry? It was
absolutely a strategic choice. It was driven
by the desperate logistical realities of the
German war effort. The remaining 80 chassis were
purposefully designed to be unarmored cargo carriers.
Oh, OK. They designated them as Uberland Wagon,
which translates to vehicles. The German Army
needed heavy supply carriers capable of navigating
ruined terrain just as desperately as they needed
frontline weapons. So the armored A7V tank we
are examining today was actually the minority
variant of his own production run. That's wild.
The military prioritized logistics over armored
assault. Exactly. Well, that focus on logistics
makes sense given the strain on their supply
lines. But let's look closely at those 20 chassis
that did get the armored treatment, because the
physical presence of this machine is staggering.
To give you a sense of scale, the A7V was 7 .34
meters long. That's over 24 feet. It's massive.
Yeah, it was over three meters wide and 3 .3
meters high. If you stood next to it. The roof
would tower over a single story house. It was
a massive moving steel box. And the armor plating
wasn't uniform, right? They slapped up to 30
millimeters of hardened steel on the front. Right,
which was thick enough to easily shrug off standard
infantry fire and even some light artillery shrapnel.
Though the roof was much more vulnerable at only
10 millimeters thick to save weight. But the
exterior dimensions were just... I mean, the
internal layout is what makes the A7V truly unique.
And honestly, from a human perspective, incredibly
grueling. The crew requirements were just unprecedented.
Officially, the A7V required a minimum of 18
men to operate a single vehicle. 18 men in that
box. Cramming 18 men into that space is less
like a traditional tank crew and more like trying
to operate a small naval vessel inside a sealed
iron boiler. How do you even divide the labor
among that many people inside a single vehicle?
Well, the division of labor was strictly defined,
even if the physical space wasn't. You had an
officer commanding the vehicle, typically a lieutenant.
You had a driver responsible for navigating the
massive chassis. You needed two mechanics actively
monitoring the engines, one of whom doubled as
a signaller. OK, so that's five. Right. And to
operate the main cannon at the front, you had
two artillerymen, a gunner and a loader. And
finally, 12 infantrymen were packed inside to
operate the secondary weapons, acting as six
machine gunners and six loaders. Just shoulder
to shoulder in there. Exactly. And that was just
the official manifest. During actual combat operations,
crews were known to bring extra men along, sometimes
cramming up to 25 individuals inside the hull.
Imagine 25 men sitting inside a steel box that
has virtually no ventilation, positioned directly
above two massive gasoline engines. I mean, the
heat radiating off the engine block, the fumes
from the exhaust, and the cordite from the fired
weapons, the deafening mechanical roar, the sensory
overload must have been paralyzing. It would
have been an absolute nightmare. Communicating
orders over that noise would have required shouting
at the top of their lungs or just relying entirely
on physical taps and hand signals. And they weren't
just passengers, they were managing an overwhelming
amount of firepower. Here's where it gets really
interesting. Let's look at the actual armament.
They were deploying from this iron box No, the
secondary firepower alone was devastating the
sides and rear of the a7b bristled with six seven
point nine two millimeter mg -808 machine guns
the infantrymen manning these stations had to
manage a staggering amount of ammunition the
tank carried between 40 and 60 cartridge belts
of 250 rounds each Wow, we are talking about
up to 15 ,000 rounds of machine gun ammunition
packed into an already overcrowded, highly combustible
space. And then there is the primary weapon.
Mounted right at the front of the tank was a
5 .7 centimeter Maxim Nordenfelt cannon. Officially,
the crew was supposed to carry roughly 180 shells
for this main gun, a mix of canister, armor piercing,
and high explosive rounds. Which is a lot of
heavy ordnance. Yeah, but just like the crew
capacity, the official limits were often ignored.
Crews regularly stashed up to 300 heavy artillery
rounds inside the cabin before rumbling toward
the front lines. But the origin of these main
cannons highlights a massive vulnerability in
the German production pipeline, doesn't it? It
really does. It reveals the intense strain on
German manufacturing at the time. The grand irony
of the A7V is that its primary offensive weapon
wasn't even German. Right. Many of those 57 millimeter
front cannons were captured enemy guns. The German
Army utilized British cannons they had seized
in Belgium during the opening months of the war.
Later on, they integrated Russian -made copies
of those same guns that were captured on the
Eastern Front. So you essentially have the German
Empire's flagship armored vehicle rolling into
battle, relying on captured British and Russian
weaponry to punch through enemy lines. Yes. The
supply chain was so fragmented that some A7Vs,
like chassis number 504 named Gretchen, were
initially built with just two forward -facing
machine guns and had to be awkwardly retrofitted
later to carry the 57 -millimeter cannon. I imagine
that fragmented production inevitably bled into
the engineering quality too. For all its heavy
armor and immense firepower, the A7V carried
some fatal design flaws that made it incredibly
dangerous for its own crew to operate. It did.
The propulsion system was really the heart of
the problem. The tank was powered by two centrally
mounted Daimler Mercedes four -cylinder petrol
engines, each outputting about 101 horsepower.
Okay. On a paved road, these engines could push
the 30 -ton vehicle to about 15 kilometers per
hour. That was surprisingly fast compared to
the heavy allied tanks of the same period. It
also featured an individually sprung 24 -wheel
suspension system, which theoretically provided
a smoother ride than the unsprung rigid trikes
of the British designs. Theoretically. Right,
theoretically. Because those advantages completely
evaporated the moment the A7V left solid ground.
And a World War I battlefield in 1918 is the
furthest thing from solid ground. I mean, the
terrain is a pulverized moonscape of mud and
craters. How did that suspension and propulsion
system actually handle the realities of the Western
Front? Very poorly. The A7V had an extremely
high center of gravity, a massive armored overhang
at the front, and incredibly low ground clearance.
This combination made the vehicle highly prone
to overturning on steep slopes or crater edges.
Just tipping right over. Yeah. Deep trenches
or heavily churned muddy fields were practically
impassable. The cank would simply bottom out
and get stuck. Furthermore, the architectural
design of the hull placed the driver high up
and relatively far back from the nose. This created
a massive blind spot. How big of a blind spot?
The driver could not see the terrain for a full
10 meters, roughly 33 feet directly in front
of the vehicle. When you realize the driver had
a 33 -foot blind spot, it completely changes
how you view their combat operations. The commander
is trying to spot targets and navigate a chaotic
battlefield. desperately signaling a driver who
is effectively steering a 30 ton box of explosives
blind into heavily cratered terrain. It's an
absolute recipe for disaster. Which becomes painfully
clear during their combat debut on March 21st,
1918 near the St. Quentin Canal. The German High
Command finally unleashes their secret weapon
and the results are, well, incredibly underwhelming.
Underwhelming is putting it mildly. The debut
highlighted every mechanical failure we just
discussed. Five tanks from detachment are ordered
into action. Before they could even engage the
enemy, three of those five vehicles suffered
catastrophic mechanical failures and broke down.
Wow. Three out of five. Yes. The remaining two
did manage to lumber forward and help stall a
minor British breakthrough, but their tactical
impact was negligible. It was a deeply anti -climactic
start that proved just how unreliable the platform
was under combat stress. But the narrative shifts
dramatically just a month later, right? On April
24, 1918, during the Second Battle of Villers
-Bertineau, the A7V secures its place in military
history. This engagement marks the very first
tank -on -tank battle ever recorded. It does.
The tactical situation at Willers -Brittano was
ambitious. The German command assigned three
detachments of A7Vs to spearhead an infantry
assault across a four -mile front. Unsurprisingly,
reliability issues struck again, and two tanks
broke down before reaching the assembly area.
Typical. But, 13 A7Vs successfully made it into
action. As the assault progressed, three of these
German tanks, including chassis number 561, commanded
by Second Lieutenant Wilhelm Biltz and named
Nix by its crew, were advancing through the fog
and smoke when they unexpectedly converged on
a position held by three British Mark IV tanks.
It's just a profound moment in the evolution
of warfare. For the very first time, an armored
force pushes through the fog of war and realizes
they aren't facing soft infantry targets but
an opposing armored force staring right back
at them. The psychological shift for the crews
inside must have been jarring. The historical
records give us a remarkable blow -by -blow account
of the tactical choices made in those crucial
minutes. The British formation consisted of two
female tanks and one male tank. We should clarify
that. Right. In the nomenclature of the time,
Female tanks were armed exclusively with heavy
machine guns intended for anti -infantry roles.
The male tank, commanded by Second Lieutenant
Frank Mitchell, carried two heavy six -pounder
cannons in its side sponsors. Those female British
tanks quickly found out that their machine guns
were entirely ineffective against the 30 -millimeter
frontal armor of the A7Bs. Even worse, the armor
-piercing rounds fired by the German MG 08s were
successfully penetrating the thinner hulls of
the British Mark IVs. Yeah, it was a bad matchup
for them. Taking heavy internal damage, the two
female British tanks were forced into a rapid
retreat, leaving Lieutenant Mitchell's lone male
tank to face three advancing A7Bs. The tactical
disadvantage was severe. But Mitchell held his
ground. Recognizing that machine guns were useless,
he focused his six -pounder cannons on the lead
German tank, the Nix. And this is where the A7V's
flaws really hurt it. Exactly. The maneuverability
crisis we discussed earlier played a massive
role here. Biltz, commanding the Nix, struggled
to position his heavily restricted top -heavy
tank to return effective fire. Mitchell managed
to score three direct devastating hits on the
Knicks. Ouch. The kinetic impact and internal
damage from those six -pounder shells disabled
the German vehicle. The crew was forced to execute
an emergency evacuation from the crippled tank
under heavy fire, and tragically five of Bilz's
men were killed as they bailed out into the mud.
Seeing the Knicks knocked out so decisively,
the remaining two A7Vs opted to withdraw rather
than risk the same fate. Mitchell then pivoted
his focus to the advancing German infantry. switching
his cannons to fire case shot. We should briefly
explain case shot for anyone unfamiliar with
the term. Yeah, Mitchell essentially swapped
out his solid armor piercing shells for rounds
filled with hundreds of metal balls. When fired,
the cannon acts like a giant shotgun, spraying
shrapnel across a wide area, devastating against
exposed troops. Exactly the right tactic for
the situation. Mitchell routed the infantry advance
before his own tank sustained track damage from
an exploding mortar shell, forcing him to abandon
the vehicle. That single engagement proves that
armor could defeat armor, but the skirmishes
didn't end there. Later that afternoon, another
A7V engaged a completely different class of British
armor. a group of Whippet tanks. These were much
lighter, faster medium tanks designed to exploit
breakthroughs. The heavier A7V managed to successfully
target and destroy one of the Whippets before
the British retreated. As for the disabled tanks
scattered across the battlefield, the Nix was
eventually coaxed back into motion by its surviving
crew, but it broke down completely before reaching
German lines. So they couldn't save it? No. To
prevent the Allies from capturing their technology,
a German demolition squad rigged the Knicks with
explosive charges during the night and completely
destroyed it. Another A7V engaged in the battle
named Elfriede suffered the exact fate the engineers
feared. Its high center of gravity caused it
to flip completely upside down into a crater.
It was abandoned in no man's land and carefully
recovered by French troops three weeks later
for study. Which brings us back to the broader
strategic view. So what does this all mean? We
have this massive, terrifying machine that required
immense resources and a 25 -man crew successfully
fighting the first armor engagements in history.
How do we assess its ultimate impact on the outcome
of the war? If we connect this to the bigger
picture, the A7V was fundamentally a failure
of scale. The German Empire poured vast resources
into designing this vehicle, yet they only ever
produced 20 operational tanks. Just 20. Yeah,
fielding 20 tanks across the entirety of the
Western Front is a statistical rounding error.
It made practically no strategic difference to
the wider war effort. The German High Command
ultimately sidelined the armored program because
their industrial capacity was already stretched
to the breaking point, prioritizing U -boats
and aircraft. They simply couldn't manufacture
the raw materials or spare the specialized labor
required to refine and mass produce a flawed
tank design. The production numbers really highlight
a staggering industrial disparity. While Germany
struggled to field 20 A7s, the French industry
successfully manufactured over 3 ,600 of their
light, highly effective Renault FT tanks. Incredible
numbers. And the British built thousands of their
heavy Mark series tanks. Facing those numbers,
how did the German infantry cope with the armored
imbalance? Well, they adapted by utilizing their
enemy's success. The ultimate irony of the German
armored effort in World War I is that they fielded
significantly more enemy tanks than they do their
own. Yes, the German Army actively captured roughly
50 British Mark IVs that had broken down or been
abandoned. They towed them back to their own
workshops, repaired them, painted massive iron
crosses on the sides to prevent friendly fire,
and re -designated them as Bute Panzer or captured
tanks. The German military relied far more heavily
on salvaged British engineering than they ever
did on the A7V. That reliance on captured technology
speaks volumes about the A7V's legacy. But what
happened to these massive machines once the armistice
was signed? Did the surviving chassis just get
sent straight to the scrap yard? Most of them
were indeed scrapped by the victorious Allies
in 1919 to comply with disarmament treaties.
But their story didn't end immediately with the
armistice. During the severe civil unrest in
Berlin in 1919, a right -wing paramilitary Fright
Corps unit known as CoCAMF desperately needed
armored support. They actually located some of
those unarmored Uberlin wagon cargo chassis we
discussed earlier. The unit bolted heavy steel
plates machine guns onto the cargo frames to
create improvised A7V -style vehicles, naming
one of them Heady, and used them to quell the
uprisings in the streets of the capital. I've
also seen claims floating around historical forums
that the French government shipped a surplus
of captured A7Vs over to Poland to fight in the
Polish -Soviet War in the 1920s. Is there any
truth to those rumors? None whatsoever. It is
a persistent myth, but modern historians have
thoroughly debunked it. The archival records
are incredibly precise. Every single A7V chassis
produced during the war is fully accounted for
in the documentation. Not a single vehicle was
transferred to Poland. That's pretty definitive.
Yeah. The accountability of those records also
leads us to the final fate of the very last A7V
on Earth. Out of the original 20, there is only
one lone survivor left intact today. Chassis
number 506. The crew had painted a grinning red
devil on its armor and named it Mephisto. How
did this specific tank manage to avoid the scrap
heaps of 1919? Mephisto survived through a combination
of bad terrain and geographical isolation. During
the massive armor clash at Villers Predon New,
Mephisto became hopelessly bogged down in a deep
crater. The crew was forced to abandon it in
the middle of no man's land. Just left it there.
Yeah, because the area remained hotly contested.
It sat there rusting in the mud for almost three
months. Finally, in July of 1918, Australian
and British troops secured the sector. Recognizing
the intelligence value of an intact German tank,
they attached steel cables to Mephisto and used
two British tanks to physically drag the 30 -ton
behemoth out of the crater and behind Allied
lines. That must have been quite the operation.
It was. It was eventually shipped to London and
from there it was transported all the way to
Brisbane, Australia to serve as a war trophy.
And it remains there to this day. Mephisto is
carefully preserved and sitting on display at
the Queensland Museum in Australia. If you aren't
able to travel to Brisbane, you can find a few
high -quality replicas in Europe. The Tank Museum
at Bovington in the UK houses a fantastic running
replica called Schnuck, cleverly built using
plywood and angle iron mounted over modern tractor
engines. That's a great piece. It is. Meanwhile,
the German Tank Museum in Munster displays a
highly accurate static replica named Wotan. But
Mephisto is the only authentic battle -scarred
original left in existence. It serves as a tangible
artifact of a deeply chaotic moment in military
engineering. When you examine the massive steel
plates of Mephisto, you are looking at the sheer
desperation of an empire trying to innovate its
way out of a losing war. It truly is a remarkable
journey from the immediate panic of the German
War Ministry rushing to form Section 7 to Joseph
Vollmer attempting to build a 30 ton weapon on
top of a tractor suspension to the terrifying
reality of 25 men trapped inside a deafening
iron box fighting the first armor on armor engagement
in human history. The A7V represents a monumental
leap in military technology pushed to its absolute
breaking point. This raises an important question
regarding the trajectory of that technology.
Our source material details a few unfulfilled
variants of the A7V that were actively in development
when the war ended. The most prominent was the
A7VU. The U stood for Unlafenda Ketan, which
translates to tracks running all the way around.
So the engineers finally recognized that the
British wraparound track design was superior
for crossing the massive trench networks. Precisely.
They drafted a prototype with a rhomboidal hull
mimicking the British Mark series, featuring
wraparound tracks to solve the ground clearance
issue. They also moved the heavy cannons away
from the front, planning to mount them inside
sponsons, which are essentially armored platforms
protruding from the sides of the hull to improve
the center of gravity. Makes sense. But the prototype
they built in June 1918 was incredibly nose -heavy,
weighed an astonishing 40 tons, and suffered
from terrible maneuverability. They initially
ordered 20 of them, but halted the project just
months before the armistice. There was also conceptual
work on a variant known as the A -7V Flakpanzer.
This was an experimental anti -aircraft platform
where engineers planned to reposition the engines
and mount heavy, captured Russian 76mm fuel guns
directly onto the chassis. The visual of a 40
ton heavily armed rhomboid A7VU crashing through
the trenches is a fascinating scenario to picture.
It is a stark reminder of just how rapidly the
core concepts of armored warfare were evolving,
even as the German Empire's industrial capacity
was collapsing around them. We'll leave you to
ponder how the integration of wraparound tracks
or mounted 76 millimeter field guns might have
radically shifted the armored doctrines of the
1920s and 30s had those engineers been given
the time to refine their designs. Thank you for
joining us on this deep dive into the origins
of German armor. Keep questioning the established
narratives, keep exploring the hidden mechanics
of the past, and we will catch you on the next
deep dive.