The German Tiger tank - or, more accurately, the Tiger I (SdKfz 181) - was one of the most feared and respected weapons ever to fight on a battlefield. Heavily armed and armored, the Tiger tank could destroy most enemy tanks at stand-off range, and was able to absorb a tremendous amount of punishment. Even though its enormous weight and relatively low power to weight ratio reduced its mobility and combat radius, in the proper hands (such as Michael Wittmann) it could wreak enormous havoc.

And so it was that in May 1941, Porsche and Henschel were ordered to supply a prototype chassis for a new heavy tank in the 45-ton class by mid-1942. Krupp was to design the turret, which would be the same for both prototypes, and would mount the powerful 88mm KwK 36 L/56 gun, which was in essence an adaptation of the famous 88mm Flak anti-aircraft gun. This requirement received additional urgency when German troops invading the Soviet Union encountered the T-34 tank which - despite a number of initial shortcomings - essentially rendered existing German tank designs technically obsolete.

The Tiger I at Bovington

Both design teams used experience gained during the years from the development of their various prototypes since 1937. Porsche settled on a chassis design with a radical gasoline-electric drive, where gasoline engines powered electrical generators, which in turn powered two electric motors, one for each track, that were controlled by an electric transmission. The vehicle had six road wheels per side, with sprockets at the front and rear (the drive being provided to the rear sprockets) and no return rollers for the large tracks. Needless to say, the complicated drivetrain led to frequent breakdowns, which was compounded by generally poor performance.

Henschel, on the other hand, developed a prototype that was of more conventional layout. While it had heavy armor in a slab -sided configuration (the value of sloped armor had not yet been hammered home by the Soviet T-34) not unlike Porsche's prototype, the Henschel team decided on a gasoline engine at the rear of the hull driving the front sprockets through a conventional transmission. Their major innovation, however, was in the road wheels: due to the new vehicle's massive weight, Henschel used an idea from one of their earlier prototypes and employed interleaved road wheels to help better distribute the weight. In essence, each side had eight torsion bars supporting a set of wheels (compared to the six wheels used in Porsche's prototype). This arrangement was somewhat more expensive to produce and made field maintenance much more difficult; for example, to remove an inner road wheel, as many as five of the outer and middle wheels would have to be removed first. However, it provided the prototype tank with a very smooth ride for an armored vehicle. Unfortunately, because of the close spacing of the overlapping road wheels, the wheels sometimes became fouled by ice or debris.

In April 1942, both prototypes were demonstrated before Adolf Hitler, after which they were subjected to rigorous field tests. Not surprisingly, the much more complicated Porsche design fared poorly, and Henschel's prototype was subsequently accepted for production. While Porsche's prototype was not selected for production to meet the heavy tank requirement, the chassis was later used as the basis for the Ferdinand/Elefant tank destroyer.

Ironically, both designs were far heavier than the 30 metric tons that the original 1937 requirement called for: the winning Henschel design - which was later designated Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger (SdKfz 181) Ausf. E - weighed in at nearly 57 tmetric ons. This was largely due to the extremely thick (for the time) armor: up to 100mm on the hull and turret front, between 60 and 80mm on the hull and turret sides, and 25mm on the top and belly. While the armor wasn't sloped - a shortcoming that was rectified in the Tiger II "King Tiger" - it was thicker than the armor plate of almost all of its opponents at the time. The Tiger’s armor could stand up quite well against most of the tank and anti-tank guns available through most of the war, particularly in engagements where the Tiger tank's 88mm gun could keep enemy tanks at ranges where the Allied tank guns were ineffective.

As noted earlier, the vehicle was fitted with an 88mm KwK 36 L/56 main gun, plus two 7.92mm MG-34 machine guns (one coaxial to the main gun, the other for the hull gunner). A total of 92 rounds of 88mm ammunition could be carried, with both armor piercing and high-explosive rounds being available.

The Tiger tank went into series production in the summer of 1942, and an average of about 50 tanks per month rolled off the assembly lines until August 1944, when production of the Tiger I ceased: total production amounted to about 1,350 tanks. The Tiger I underwent a variety of modifications that were minor compared to the many variants of the Panzer III and Panzer IV. The most visible change was to the commander's cupola: early Tiger I's sported a barrel-shaped cupola with vision slits, which was replaced in late 1943 with a heavily armored cupola with periscopes, similar to that used on the Panther and King Tiger tanks.

The Tiger I first saw combat in August 1942 outside of Leningrad, but - as with the Panther tank's debut at Kursk - it was a dismal experience for the new heavy tanks, which suffered terribly from mechanical breakdowns. Such mechanical problems, probably more than any other single factor, gnawed away at the Tiger's overall effectiveness, and were never fully resolved.

The only major variants of the production Tiger I design was a recovery vehicle (Bergepanzer Tiger) and the Sturmtiger, an assault vehicle fitted with a massive 38cm mortar.

Despite its shortcomings, the Tiger I became a legend at the hands of talented and experienced crews such as that of SS- Hauptsturmführer Michael Wittmann (among other such Panzer aces), with a comparatively small number of Tiger tanks (even single Tigers) engaging – and defeating – many times their own number of enemy vehicles.