Imagine a tank so heavy that any typical European bridge would fracture beneath it, so its designers planned for it to crawl across riverbeds underwater, powered by a cable from a second identical tank on shore. This episode examines the Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, the heaviest fully enclosed armored fighting vehicle ever built. It begins with Ferdinand Porsche’s March 1942 order for a 100-ton tank, Hitler’s obsession with invincible super weapons, and the ironic naming that shrank a Mammoth to a Little Mouse while the design ballooned to 188 tons.

The episode breaks down the engineering: turret armor up to 240 millimeters thick, a 128-millimeter gun with a kill range beyond 3,500 meters, a petrol-electric drive using a Daimler-Benz aircraft engine, and a layout that sealed the driver away from the commander behind a wall of machinery. It explains the doctrine of a mobile bunker for breakthrough assaults, the dismal real-world speed and range, and General Heinz Guderian’s critique that the designers forgot a machine gun. It ends with Allied bombing of the Krupp works in Essen, the scuttling of the prototypes at Kummersdorf in April 1945, and the Soviet effort to assemble one working Maus for display at Kubinka.

• Why the Maus reached only about 13 kilometers per hour in testing, with a range of 160 kilometers on road and just 62 off-road despite 4,200 liters of fuel
• The submerged crossing plan with an 8-meter snorkel and an electrical tether, and why it collapses under the friction of real combat
• How the Elefant’s losses to Soviet infantry at Kursk foreshadowed the Maus’s missing close-defense weapons and the pistol ports added as a fix
• Why a 14-axle custom rail car still exceeded bridge limits and tunnel clearances, making the tank nearly impossible to transport
• How the V2’s scuttling blew its 55-ton turret off the hull, and why Soviet engineers needed six FAMO half-tracks to move it