The Tiger tanks produced by Germany during World War II are legendary. As with all legends, however, there is as much myth as truth in their story. Part of their mystique originated during the war, when what little information the Germans gave out was tinged for propaganda purposes. The inflated German accounts were somewhat offset by Allied versions, which tended to understate their capabilities. As we shall see in the chapters that follow, both sides had good reason to withhold the truth, for while the Tigers were not as good as the Germans had hoped they would be, they were far more formidable than the Allies had feared. With the Panzer V ("Panther"), the Tigers were the first German tanks designed uncompromisingly as antitank platforms. Earlier German tanks were originally the product of tradeoffs, particularly in their armament, of a school of thought that considered dedicated antitank guns as the principal counter to enemy tanks. Only after some bitterly earned combat lessons did the Germans come to consider armor-defeating capability as the prime attribute of a tank gun. Ironically, the Tigers were armed with variants of an antiaircraft gun that was pressed into service as an antitank weapon when the Germans encountered unexpectedly heavily armored French tanks in what was otherwise an easy victory in the battle of France.
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