“These tanks were also helpless in muddy ground after heavy rainfall. It was not possible to develop and implement technical vehicles capable of, for example, evacuating a damaged 70-ton ship from the battlefield. In a word - the great Tiger had to fall victim to his own greatness. There is not entirely clear and reliable information about how and when the “Royal Tiger” underwent its baptism by fire. This most likely took place - according to many sources, including German ones - in the summer of 1944 during the operation in Normandy, where the 503rd Heavy Tank Battalion and the 101st SS Heavy Tank Battalion operated, armed with tanks of this type. They can be seen in numerous German newsreels. There are sources according to which, already in mid-July 1944, heavy Tigers took their first beating there, losing three vehicles. Shortly thereafter, in August, the Tiger B made its infamous debut on the Eastern Front. The first formation to be fully armed with this equipment, the 501st Heavy Tank Battalion, was sent to fight against the Red Army. It is one of the best German armored units, having fought, among others, in Tunisia and on the Eastern Front. It was withdrawn to Germany for rest, replenishment of losses and rearmament so that it could be used in the most critical place of the front.”
“And this one just appeared here, between Staszów and Oględów. On this sector of the front, the situation was extremely unfavorable for the Germans, but it also potentially contained the seeds of possible success. However, combat potential appropriate to the assumptions was needed. Since the Tiger B suffered frequent breakdowns, the shortage was supplemented with worn-out Panzerkampfwagen IV machines. It was believed that the tankers would be able to stop the attacking units of the Red Army, which were slowly starting to exhaust their potential after the offensive launched on the plains of central Ukraine. The Lviv-Sandomierz operation, launched on July 13, led to the efficient destruction of the German defense and the rapid shift of the front line westward. After Lviv and Brody, Lublin was captured on July 22, Przemyśl was captured on July 27, and on July 29, Soviet tanks reached the Vistula in the area of Baranów Sandomierski. On the march, they managed to gain a foothold on the western bank of the Vistula, and the help of the Poles was invaluable. They helped collect crossing resources and indicated the most convenient approaches to the river bed, remembered from the times of the operations of Russian troops during the previous world war. Years later, this was admitted and appreciated by Soviet commanders such as General Paweł Rybałko, commander of the 3rd Guards Tank Army. The fighting to deepen and widen the bridgehead was very fierce and, for the attacking forces, effective. Already on August 1, 1944, the Germans tried to counteract this with attacks from the Tarnobrzeg and Mielec area. Not only were they repulsed, losing, among other things, Stalowa Wola with the nearby airport and the looted and devastated Zakłady Południowe (which, however, quickly became a renovation base for the front), but also allowed the Red Army to reach Staszów, more than 20 km away from the western bank of the Vistula, on August 3.”
""This threatened the Germans with opening the road in the Krakow-Silesian direction for the Red Army and threatened large groups of the Red Army to flow into the lowlands of central Poland. They worked intensively for this, regardless of the fact that supply routes were dramatically stretched and the reserves weakened. This is evidence of the determination of the Russians that by August 5, when they took over Tarnobrzeg, 13 bridges had been built on the section of the Vistula between Tarnobrzeg and Baranów Sandomierski, through which the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front were crossing. Intense fighting was also taking place a little further north, on the Warka-Magnuszewski bridgehead the loss of further strategic positions on the Vistula meant the collapse of the front. Therefore, it was decided to suppress the Baranów-Sandomierz bridgehead with a strong armored attack directed towards Staszów (a similar tactic was used on the Warecko-Magnuszew bridgehead, where a heavy battle was fought near Studzianki).
This is why new, rested units were brought here, including the 501st Heavy Tank Battalion armed with Tiger Bs. The fighting mood of the German tank crews was not dampened by the fact that as many as 15 new powerful machines broke down while… being loaded onto railway platforms in Germany. When the Tiger Bs, having left the lorry at the Kielce station, moved on their own tracks towards the headquarters of the 16th Armored Division, from where they were to reach the site of the planned battle, it became even sadder. Another 10 tanks were disabled, the rest moved forward slowly, preceded by sappers checking and strengthening subsequent bridges along the battalion’s march route. Despite this, the fighting spirit did not die down, and in a night skirmish the group attacked Soviet infantrymen. Their light anti-tank guns turned out to be completely ineffective against the powerful armor of the German colossi."
I can give you a whole book about Garfield the cat, because that’s how you could call a fat cat like Tiger B who got a beating. 250km without a failure - only those from the headquarters wrote that, all the crews’ reports from the battles describe how tragic the tank was.
The crews were gushing about how tragic this tank was, division commanders sent these reports to the army command, the army command sent these reports to the factories, and the engineers from the factories replied that the tankers did not know how to operate their equipment properly. It’s the same as with today’s armored weapons, “the warranty does not cover driving on sand.”
