Elefant/Ferdinand Heavy Tank Destroyer |
| Written by Marcia Malory | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Germany's Elefant/Ferdinand Heavy Tank Destroyer was an excellent tank when it came to destroying other tanks at long range, but it wasn't very useful as an assault gun. It hade no defensive capability at close range, and its 34.6 inch (8.8 centimeter) STuK 43/2 L71 gun had limited traverse.
Adding a Maschinengewehr 34 (MG34) machine gun to the tank helped to improve its assault capability, but it remained mostly effective as a long range weapon. There is a story about an Elefant knocking out a Soviet T-34 from 3 miles (4.82 miles) away. About half of the Ferdinands also had cupolas for the commander added to them.
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The 64-ton Ferdinand, which was named after Ferdinand Porsche, who designed it, was not very effective at Kursk, when almost all of these heavy tank destroyers were defeated by Soviet tank-killers.