I decided to make a variation of the “Achtung Tiger” t shirt and do an “Achtung Panther” t shirt. Both are in black and military green (olive drab).
I used the same font as the “Achtung Tiger” tee and I really like it. As always you can visit my ebay store or my online store.
Achtung Panther Panzer Tank Black T Shirt WW2 German
Achtung Panther Panzer Tank Green T Shirt WW2 German
Here’s some info on the World War 2 German Panther tank…Panzerkampfwagen V:
was a tank fielded by Germany in World War II that served from mid-1943 to the end of the European war in 1945. It was intended as a counter to the T-34, and to replace the Panzer III and IV, though it served along with them as well as the heavier Tiger tanks until the end of the war. The Panther’s excellent combination of firepower, mobility, and protection served as a benchmark for other nations’ late war and immediate post-war tank designs and it is frequently regarded as one of the best tank designs of World War II.
Until 1944, it was designated as the Panzerkampfwagen V Panther and had the ordnance inventory designation of Sd.Kfz. 171. On 27, February 1944, Hitler ordered that the Roman numeral V be deleted from the designation.
The Panther was a direct response to the Soviet T-34 and KV-1 tanks. First encountered on 23 June, 1941, the T-34 outclassed the existing Panzer III and IV. At the insistence of General Heinz Guderian, a special Panzerkommision was dispatched to the Eastern Front to assess the Russian tanks. Among the features of the Soviet tank considered most significant were the sloping armor, which gave much improved shot deflection and also increased the effective armor thickness against penetration, the wide track, which improved mobility over soft ground, and the 76.2 mm gun, which had good armor penetration and fired an effective high-explosive round. Daimler-Benz (DB) and Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg AG (MAN) were given the task of designing a new thirty to thirty-five-ton tank, designated VK30.02, by April 1942 .
The design was a direct homage to the T-34. It resembled the T-34 hull and turret form. DB’s design used a leaf spring suspension whereas the T-34 originally used coil springs. The DB turret was smaller than that of the MAN design and had a smaller turret ring which was the result of the narrower hull required by the leaf spring suspension. The main advantages of the leaf springs over a torsion bar suspension were a lower hull silhouette and a simpler shock dampening design. Like the T34, the DB design had a rear drive sprocket. Unlike the T-34, the DB design had a three-man turret crew: commander, gunner, and loader. But as the planned L/70 75mm gun was much longer and heavier than the T-34’s, mounting it in the Daimler-Benz turret was difficult. Plans to reduce the turret crew to two men to stem this problem were eventually dropped.
The MAN design embodied more conventional German ideals with the transmission and drive sprocket in the front and a turret placed centrally on the hull. It had a petrol engine and eight torsion-bar suspension axles per side. Because of the torsion bar suspension, the MAN Panther was higher and had a wider hull than the DB design. The slightly earlier, Henschel designed Tiger I heavy tank’s use of a “slack track” Christie style pattern of large road wheels with no return rollers for the upper run of track, and with the main road wheels being overlapping and interleaved in layout, were design concepts broadly repeated with the MAN design for the Panther.
The two designs were reviewed over a period from January 1942 through March 1942. Reichminister Todt, and later, his replacement Albert Speer, both recommended the DB design to Hitler because of its several advantages over the initial MAN design. However, at the final submission, MAN improved their design, having learned from the DB proposal, and a review by a special commission appointed by Hitler in May 1942 ended up selecting the MAN design. He then approved this decision after reviewing it overnight. One of the principal reasons given for this decision was that the MAN design used an existing turret designed by Rheinmetall-Borsig while the DB design would have required a brand new turret to be designed and produced, substantially delaying the commencement of production.
The MAN design also had better ability to handle water hazards, easier gun maintenance and higher mobility due to better suspension, wider tracks, and a larger fuel tank. A mild steel prototype was produced by September 1942 and, after testing at , was accepted. It was put into immediate production. The start of production was delayed, however, mainly because there were too few specialized machine tools needed for the machining of the hull. Finished tanks were produced in December and suffered from reliability problems as a result of this production haste. The demand for this tank was so high that the manufacturing was soon expanded beyond MAN to include Daimler-Benz, Maschinenfabrik Niedersachsen-Hannover (MNH) and Henschel and Sohn in Kassel.
The initial production target was 250 tanks per month at MAN. This was increased to 600 per month in January 1943. Despite determined efforts, this figure was never reached due to disruption by Allied bombing, manufacturing bottlenecks, and other difficulties. Production in 1943 averaged 148 per month. In 1944, it averaged 315 a month (3,777 having been built that year), peaking with 380 in July and ending around the end of March 1945, with at least 6,000 built in total.
