The Germans had been studying enemy armour since the start of the war and they were always collating new ideas and designs and more often then not, incorporating them into their own tanks. The Panther Tank  was a direct derivative of the Russian T-34 for example.

On the 23rd June 1942 the German ministry for armaments who were at that time involved in the development of U-Boats suggested to Adolf Hitler that it could be feasible to construct a tank with a weight of 1000 tons or even 1500 tons. Hitler who was always encouraging his developers to come up with new designs for all variety of new weaponry, liked the idea and ordered Krupp the giant steel factory to go ahead with the project.  The first Tank was to be called the P1000 Ratte (Rat) Landkreuzer (land cruiser)

Dimensions

The P1000 was to be 35 meters long, 14 meters wide and 11 meters high, the size of a decent sized office block ! The tracks that the tank would ride on were to be 3.6 meters wide each side and each plate would be assembled from three 1.2 meter segments. The tracks would need to be this wide so the P1000 would not just sink into the ground under its own weight.

PowerPlant

The P1000 was due to be manned by a crew of 20 and powered with two MAN V12Z32/44 24 cylinder 8500Hp U-Boat engines delivering a combined power output of 17,000 hp.

Another consideration was the idea of eight Daimler-Benz MB501 20 cylinder 2000 hp Motor Torpedo Boat (E-boat) engines, delivering a combined power output of 16,000.  The mathematics showed that the P1000 would be able to travel at 40 to 45 Kmh with 16 to 17,000 horsepower at its disposal.

Below a diagram depicts a big single gunned design.

As the Daimler-Benz MB501 was a more reliable and cost effective engine it would probably have finally been the engine of choice to be installed in the tank.  Four engines would have run the left-hand side tracks whilst the other four would have run the right-hand side

Armaments

The P1000 was destined to be armed with all manner of guns including  two 280mm SK-C/34 naval guns modified off a Heavy Cruiser ship, a single 128mm gun along with 100 rounds carried for each gun.  Eight 20 mm Flak38 anti-aircraft guns and  two heavy caliber 15mm Mauser 151/15 cannon.

Support legs might have been considered to stabilize the tank when the huge gun fired as the recoil would have been tremendous.

Whilst the P1000 was being worked out on the drawing board, Krupp came up with an even bigger idea, and that was to develop a 1500 ton monster tank...the P1500. It would have an armor mantle of at least 250mm thick going up to 360mm with 220mm side armour and 150mm top armor plating.

It was designed to be armed with a super heavy duty 800mm Mortar gun similar to that used on the railway gun 'Dora'.  Also two 150mm artillery cannon and an array of machine guns and anti-aircraft guns would be included into it.

The P1500 was destined to be powered by four U-Boat engines, possibly the MAN V12Z32/44 24 cylinder 8500hp design that would render a power output of 34,000hp.

Poor Function

The P1000 or indeed even the P1500 was so large that the Germans didn't call it a 'tank' they instead called it a Land Cruiser. At over 1000 tons the tank would not have been able to cross any bridges and would have ploughed up the streets as it trundled by.

It would have had to go through buildings rather than traverse around them as the majority of streets would have been too narrow and it would have been more like trying to drive a battleship than a tank through them.

Below an artists impression of what the P1000 could have looked like driving up a main road in war torn Europe.

The construction of a tank of such colossal proportions would have ruined German Industry more than the allied bombs were doing.  The P1000 would have required manufacturing equivalents of a naval shipyard with thousands and thousands of skilled labourer's drafted in to create it.

The transportation of all the materials needed to construct it would have hampered the German war effort by many factors and could even have brought it all  to a standstill.

The End

In early 1943, Armaments minister Albert Speer cancelled all the projects surrounding these monster tanks as it would cost too much in time, resources, money and manpower  and instead he insisted that resources be plied to the already tried and tested conventional tanks currently in production. Speer envisaged that an Ultra big tank would just propose a priority target for enemy bombers and fighters and would be a very vulnerable object.  The British Typhoon and the American P51 Mustang fighter aircraft were already quite adept at shooting tanks on the ground with rockets.

Regardless of how thick you can make the steel that protects a vehicle like this, there is always enough explosives to destroy it.  Special purpose ' Landkreuzer ' bombs would almost certainly have been developed by the Allies to tackle some thing like this, especially as knowledge on "shaped" charges was already being understood.

The P1000 turret that had already been made by this time ended up as a coastal defense battery near Trondheim in Norway.

The Tiger MkIII also known as the Maus was a 188 ton tank and did actually get past the drawing board and made it to field trials. It took up valuable time and resources, so much so that it was never completed in time and the War came to an end whilst it was still being produced. Many Maus tanks under early construction were found by the allies as shown in the photo below.

In many ways it was all too costly and crazy, by late 1943, Hitler was losing the war on all fronts, he had sacrificed 250,000 men at Stalingrad and defeat after defeat besotted him. Ariel bombardment of German factories, establishments and City's had been stepped up by the Allies but new prototype tanks were still being built with Germanys stretched and limited battle damaged resources.  The best road to success for Hitler would just to have built the Tiger MkII and knocked them out by the thousand instead of all these wired and wonderful time and resource consuming inventions and innovations.

The Russians for example, only made three main different types of tank, the T-34, the KV-1 and KV-2, there was one or two variations and one or two other tanks made like the JS-1 but basically they were all either T-34's or KV-1's.  Over 50,000 T-34s were produced in Russia and it was quantity that beat quality in the end.

Below the Russian mass produced KV-1

Below the Russian mass produced KV-2

Below the Russian mass produced T-34-85 which was the same as the stock T-34 but with an 85mm caliber instead of the 76mm. The particular tank below had sunk in a bog in Latvia in 1944 and was rescued in 1983.

The figures placed on the deck of the P1000 are also to scale to represent the size of the tank. It has to be said that if the P1000 had been built it would have been the most awesome tank of all time.

With other vehicles at the same scale placed next to the P1000, we can envisage how big this thing was really going to be.

Whether or not this type of camouflage pattern would have been utilised on the P1000 will never be known.