In the summer of 1940 Germany had beaten France and was looking across the Channel at England. The plan was called Operation Sea Lion, and it had a problem nobody could solve: the landing craft available could not put a tank onto an open beach.
So somebody proposed driving them there along the bottom.
Sealing a tank
Between June and October 1940, 168 tanks were converted — Panzer III Ausf. F, G and H, together with a number of command versions, plus a separate batch of Panzer IVs. The work was not subtle, but it was thorough.
Every opening was closed. Air intakes received sealing covers. The exhausts got non-return valves so water could not push back up them. The commander's cupola, the gun mantlet and the hull machine gun were covered with waterproof fabric. An inflatable rubber tube ran around the turret ring, pumped up once the tank was buttoned down, so the turret could still be rotated once ashore after the tube was blown off.
Air came from the surface. A hose ran up to a float that carried the intake and a radio aerial, so the crew could still be told what to do while they were under several metres of water.
They were rated to fifteen metres. At that depth there is nothing to see, so the driver steered by gyro-compass and instructions from above.
Sea Lion never happened
The invasion was postponed in September 1940 and quietly abandoned. The diving tanks, however, existed, and they worked. Rather than convert them back, the Germans sent them to Milowitz near Prague and modified them again — this time with a fixed snorkel pipe through the commander's cupola, better suited to river crossings than to a Channel beach.
The River Bug, 22 June 1941
On the first morning of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the diving tanks of the 18th Panzer Division drove into the River Bug near Patulin, disappeared, and came up on the Soviet bank.
It was the only time they were used as designed. The equipment was novel enough that Soviet defenders on the far bank had no reason to expect armour to emerge from the water in front of them.
After that they were treated as ordinary tanks. The hardware quietly disappeared into the wider war, and the idea reappeared decades later as standard deep-wading equipment on post-war tanks — the snorkels you see stowed on the back of a Leopard or a T-72 are the same thought, better executed.
The model
COBI's Panzer III Ausf. H, set 2672, is a 1:28 model built from 963 blocks. The Ausf. H is one of the three variants that were converted into diving tanks — the model itself is the standard land version, with a removable Maybach HL120 TRM engine, a lift-off armour section showing the crew positions, and a tank commander figure.
It is in stock and ships from our own shelves.
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