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 e ...