2024 in Review

With 2024 coming to an end, it's time to look back on my achievements in military history over the course of the past year. 

2024 was a major year for books. Thanks to several release dates coinciding, I had quite a number of titles come out this year.

The first was Achtung Tiger: How The Allies Defeated Germany’s Heavy Tank. This book represents the culmination of over ten years of research that started not long before Tank Archives did. Some of that work went into a number of Tiger-related articles on this website, but most of what I uncovered lay dormant until the publication of this book. As traditional with titles written by the Military History Group, I sat down for a discussion with The Chieftain, which you can watch on Youtube. The book itself was also quite well received by the Panzermuseum Munster.

Armour vs Time

The battle of the sword and shield raged since time immemorial. The sword got an edge once, which led to the end of the era of knights clad in armour. However, history repeats itself, and the idea of armoured cars began to appear even before the First World War. The result of this was the tank, which over time became a fixture of the battlefield. Naturally, anti-tank weapons were created as soon as tanks became known. The battle of the sword and shield continued.

An example of changing requirements for tank armour. The FCM 2C had the thickest armour of any tank built during the First World War, but penetration trials conducted by the Germans in 1940 showed that this armour was weak by WW2 standards.

Armour powerful enough to resist cannon shells became a staple of all tanks only during the Second World War. It became clear in the fall of 1939 that bulletproof armour was not enough. At the same time, the idea of armour against shells appeared long before. Protection of tanks against something bigger than a bullet was obvious, but the nature of that something changed over time too, This is what we will talk about today.

Video: Historically Accurate Panzer '46 - Heavy Tank M26 Pershing

The Americans were the first to get their next generation tank to the battlefield in 1945. How did it fare and what upgrades did they test out that could have been applied to the design had the war gone on for a little longer? Find out in my latest video.