How Bad Was The Maus?

Imagine you're a tank designer, and how happy you get when you are being told "you must not cut the weight on this thing under any circumstances" 😂

"Maus rolls into battlefield" Every Allied Air Forces: Oh look! Free target!!

the development history of the maus along with its peculiar design compared to the tanks that Germany fielded at that point makes it really intresting

I think the grand thing a lot of people forget about the Maus is that it didn't really fit all the requirements needed of a tank versatile to change a battlefield: 1: 188 tons, a whole lot of man-hours, resources, assembly time, and maintenance going into a singular tank that could instead be used to make 3-4 Panthers or 2&1/2 Tiger IIs doesn't tend to be very good for supply lines or actual force projection. That one finished Maus can maybe get to one front after a lot of time in the logistics line, meanwhile a batch of Panzer 4s or Panthers could be divvied up among multiple locations where they were needed the most. 2: Combined arms. You know what the worst nightmare of a tank is? Being unsupported. You know what an air force loves? Enemy tanks and strategic targets that aren't supported. As far as I'm aware the German air force had been effectively wiped out by the end of the war, so the Maus probably would've been going into conflict zones where there would be no deterrents from American or Russian air attack, and seeing how fond the US was of their close air support and strike runs?...Only takes so many passes from a P-47 or P-51 before one of those bombs or rockets gets lucky. 3: Size matters. The Maus was big, heavy, and slow. Armor was fantastic, that's a fact, and it would've stopped Allied 75s, 76s, and maybe even the 90s dead in their tracks, but when this thing barely clears 10 KPH and can't go over most bridges due to the fact that it'll collapse them, you're looking at a tank which is very limited in combat and deployment capacity, and being a big, slow target not only means it'll be easy for the enemy to see coming and engage from range, but artillery and indirect fire weapons are probably going to love chewing it to pieces. Also don't forget the survivability onion, the Maus would definitely be seen, due to its large size, acquired, due to its slow speed, and hit, due to a lack of overall maneuverability, which means the only two layers it has left are 'Don't be penetrated' and 'Don't be killed'. 4: Numbers, if you have an unkillable super-tank that can beat everything it comes across, that's great, but if you only have one, your ace in the hole can only be in one place at a time, and it has to get re-sorted and travel between all the points on the front to really make a difference. For a Maus? Once one was in the theater, it'd probably be staying there, because trying to load it onto a train or use the roads to ferry it to another side of the front would be far too impractical. You're also fighting a war where hundreds of thousands of hostile troops and thousands upon thousands of hostile tanks and vehicles are pushing your frontline from all directions. Sure, a Sherman might not be able to fight a Maus in a head-on engagement, but the Sherman can outmanuever and outrun the Maus, and if it decides it wants to disengage, there's no way in hell the Maus is ever keeping up with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual tactic would've been to just keep slamming smoke rounds into its face while one was getting out of engagement range. 5: Last but not least, supply. Sure, the Maus was a big, intimidating battlestation on tracks, but even if it did manage to get produced and deployed in a capacity to potentially make a difference, every single one is a massive drain on fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and crew, both of the tanking and mechanic variety. Not to mention you'd have to ensure those crews assigned to it knew how to operate the behemoth and didn't wind up botching the transmission or fouling one of the important internal systems. This doesn't even get into the risks or time required to reload and resupply it after engagements, the potential hazard of it running out of fuel or breaking down en-route to the fight, or the fact that the second any Allied forward scouts got their eyes on one they'd be forwarding its coordinates to every artillery battery active in the theater or every available strike craft looking to earn another mark for tanks killed. I'm no history expert, but part of me is left to think pursuit of ordeals like the Panther II (If that's even what it might be called) and the E-75 would've been...Maybe not more practical, but more reasonable in implementation and returns. Even then, Germany still would've lost, as when one's this far on the backfoot and this far into the pit of no potential recovery...Even a wonder weapon probably isn't enough to make a difference.

2:38 What the hell was that kill? Now I get why I died in the past to that 75mm

Well, tanks are all about balance. If you make a tank super heavy and near invisible to armor penetration, it will have some major downsides that limit its use to specific scenarios. Transportation becomes a nightmare and so does maintenance and recovery. In the end the disadvantages outweigh the advantages heavily.

Not to mention by that point the allied airforces had effectively green air so a super slow huge tank would be a free kill for any plane that could carry a bomb bigger than 50KG

Very By the time they could be fielded.. On both fronts all German airpower would be completely decimated leaving it nye unprotected against aerial attacks. And considering how large the silhouette is.. It would be hard to miss Not to mention the problems with transport, repair infrastructure

The reason I like the Maus is it seems so crazy and the fact the German's considered going even further with the Ratte. Same basic idea with the German proposed battleship plan that had ships double the weight of the Iowa class battleship.

While the electric transmission was referenced as having been used for tanks and busses, I think it's notable that the real sucess of such systems were on trains, which revolutionized that industry, difference being of course that they have all the space in the world to give adequate cooling and power generation, in addition to the obvious differences in traction type and load demand. What are the "superheavy" soviet tanks that supposedly brought about the Maus? I'm aware of WoT having the KV-4 and KV-5, but it seems to me like they lack any basis in reality.

ironically, with how costly the Maus was to build, it was probably cheaper to build multiple AT bunkers with the gun

I remember watching a video about the maus and Why it would fail, one of the arguments was that, by the time the maus would've come out, it wouldn't have been able to do much because allied CAS were pretty much free to bomb it to hell since the luftwaffe was basically gone.

I think the maus would have been scary but i dont think it would have changed anything about the wars outcome. Honestly i think hitler was way too obsessed with armor rather than providing better infantry equipment and bolstering materials for the luftwaffes planes to be repaired or replaced. There was immense pressure from hitler to produce more tanks that were heavier and heavier. I think this really hurt them in the long run.

I was waiting this video. Thanks Spookston!

The problem with the Maus is its basic design. It would be completely ineffective and unusable in combat. It was extremely vulnerable to aircraft and would have been just a slow-moving artillery target. It honestly kinda seems like something someone with no real idea on how warfare works would design a tank, "Just put an absurd amount of armor and a really big gun on it, then it will kill everything." The Maus would have basically no strategic mobility and likely by the time it got to the front, the battle would be over.

The Maus would have been an awful heavy tank, but it was not designed as a heavy tank. It was designed as a "tracked bunker", and in that role it could have performed adequately. Attach 3-5 of these to an engineering section, roll them into prepared positions, and use them as bunkers. This would have allowed defensive positions to be more mobile while still giving better protection and firepower than could be provided by other vehicles. The Maus wasn't as good as some people claim, but it definitely wasn't as bad as some people claim either. It's still debatable if the resources were better spent on more assault guns, though.

I literally just today finished researching the Maus. Perfect timing!

In my opinion, the peak of heavy tank design was the IS-7, what a beast of engineering

Also the fact German fuel storages and you could hardly get the damn thing anywhere between the low speed and weight preventing it from crossing a lot of bridges in Germany.

I love this series, will you ever do a plane version? How good was the mustang, the hurricane, so on so forth?