#Germ the poducer series#
II series were completed and tested for the army. The 1st, 2nd and 3rd tank divisions were soon outfitted with the latest light tanks off the line, but because of the increased efficiency, it also meant tanks could be experimented with much quicker. The highly sophisticated tanks would now roll out of the factories completed and ready for combat. The only limit to the capacity of these factories were thus the amount of chassis that could be placed in the factory at one time and the limited working hours of the employees, but it did mean instead of one tank being completed at a time, a whole batch was done within one day. That way, a worker could pick up the part, place it onto the chassis and repeat that for every chassis on the line.
According to Ford, the tank chassis would be placed in a line with each part that needed to be attached on the sides. The industrialist would continue influencing and proposing modernisation for the German industry, sometimes doing so before the American military industrial complex could. It was a highly efficient plan combining the American assembly line model with the German engineering tradition.įor his efforts, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle 1st Class, it was the highest award a foreigner could receive for their contribution to the German cause. With this method, the Germans didn’t need experienced engineers to work on one tank at a time, rather, they could become the head engineers leading the assembly from above and could inspect the armoured vehicle once it was completed. Ford and his engineers devised for Germany to take on the Fordian model of the assembly line, where people without an engineering background could assemble a tank simply by repeating the same action over and over again each day. He was a known antisemite and Nazi officials had contacted him before on grounds of doing business, and now the German industry definitely needed his expertise in mass production. The saviour of the German tank production was none other than Henry Ford, the American automotive industry giant. It was vital to the Blitzkrieg doctrine that armoured divisions were constantly on the move and capable of fighting the enemy without quarter, they wouldn’t be able to this if they couldn’t even outfit the planned divisions. The army needed hundreds if not thousands of tanks at a time, preferably there was even a reserve of armoured vehicles to replace losses fairly quickly. The workshop style of manufacturing might have been adequate for automotive industries for elites wanting their own unique car, but tanks were a wholly different case. The tanks were created in a workshop by several engineers working on one tank at a time, this was wholly inadequate to even fully supply the three planned tank divisions with Panzer I tanks, and those were the lightest and easiest to produce. For a country with the ambition to create a mostly motorised and armoured army the German tank production from its inception in 1933 was highly inefficient.
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