The Tiger Tank’s Training Manual Was Peppered With Porn and Poetry
No WW2 tank terrified its opponents as much as did the German Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger Ausf. E, commonly known as the Tiger I. Entering service in 1942, this heavy tank’s main assets were thick armor that its common adversaries could not penetrate except from close range, and a powerful 88mm gun that could destroy its foes from far awa. That gave the Tiger an extensive safe standoff distance, within which it was practically invulnerable. Tigers had a powerful psychological hold on their enemies’ imaginations, and few Allied tank crews relished the prospect of encountering them.
Luckily for the Allies, Tigers had plenty of downsides. They were heavy and slow gas guzzlers; had a limited range; were difficult to transport; were poorly engineered for their expected battlefield environment; were notorious for their mechanical unreliability and propensity to breakdown; became immobilized when their overlapping wheels got jammed with snow and mud; were expensive to produce and difficult to manufacture, with only 1300 built during the war – a number lower than the typical monthly production figures of opposing T-34 or Sherman tanks. When Tigers worked, they were terrifyingly good, but fortunately, the Tigers often did not work, and there were too few of them make a difference in the war’s ultimate outcome.
On the Western Front, where the Allies lacked powerful armor capable of taking out Tigers, other than Sherman Fireflys with big guns, and M10 tank destroyers, Tigers maintained their superiority until war’s end. But on the Eastern Front, that superiority was increasingly challenged by T-34/85s, IS-2s, and IS-122s whose guns could destroy Tigers from various ranges.
To address the Tiger’s extensive reliability issues, and bring the crews up to speed on its complexity, German authorities went the risque route. The officer tasked with writing up the Tiger’s training manual decided to spice up things up by peppering the document’s pages with porn. He also included plenty of dirty limericks and jokes, but what stood out the most was the nudity and porn throughout the manual.
A big breasted blond character named Elvira, usually sketched in red to more readily jump out of the pages, made numerous nude appearances throughout the manual to make it more appealing to the trainees. Elvira’s nude appearances were not random or gratuitous, however: she showed up, while showing a lot of skin, in those sections the trainees were expected to pay the most attention to.