The Goliath is often described as a small tank. It was not a tank, and it did not carry a weapon. It was the weapon: a tracked box about a metre and a half long, packed with 60 to 100 kg of explosive, driven into a bunker or under a tank and detonated.
One use only. There was no coming back.
The French prototype in the river
The idea was not German. After the fall of France in 1940, a miniature tracked vehicle designed by Adolphe Kégresse — the engineer better known for the half-track suspension that carries his name — was recovered from the Seine, where it had been dumped to keep it from being captured.
The Germans fished it out, looked at it, and asked Borgward to develop something along the same lines. The first version, the Sd.Kfz. 302, ran on electric motors. A later one, the 303, used a two-stroke petrol engine because electric motors and their batteries were expensive and the thing was destroyed on every use.
The cable
The Goliath was driven by an operator lying in cover, watching it go. Control ran through a cable that unwound from a drum in the back of the machine as it moved — three strands, two for steering, one to fire the charge, paying out to around 650 metres.
That cable is the whole story. It was the reason the thing worked at all, and the reason it mostly did not.
A Goliath moved at roughly walking pace. Its armour was 5 to 10 mm, enough to stop a rifle bullet at a distance and not much more. And trailing behind it, unspooling across open ground, was a wire that anyone could find and cut with a pair of pliers.
Seven thousand of them
About 7,500 were built, which is a remarkable number for a weapon that achieved so little. They appeared at Anzio, at Warsaw, in Normandy. Most were captured intact, abandoned when the cable failed, or destroyed before use.
The concept, though, did not die — it just waited for better control. Remote-operated ground vehicles used today for bomb disposal are the same thought with a radio link instead of a wire.
The model
COBI's Goliath, set 2680, is a 1:28 model built from 311 blocks, with two figures. Markings are printed onto the blocks rather than applied as stickers.
It is available to pre-order. The expected shipping month is shown on the product page, and you can cancel any time before it ships.
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