The ‘Thirsty’ German Truck That Dragged Every Anti-Tank Gun The Wehrmacht Fired At British Armour D
March 1934. The Krook Gustal for Brick, Essen, Germany. A truck rolls out of the factory on six wheels. It is not large. It is not heavy. It carries no armor. It mounts no gun. A canvas tarp covers the rear bench where four soldiers sit facing backward and behind them hooked to a toebar.
A small steel gun on two pneumatic tires bounces across the cobblestones. The combination looks like a utility vehicle, something you would expect to see carrying office furniture or building supplies. The truck is open cabbed, unprotected, built for speed rather than survival. The gun it toes weighs less than a grand piano.
It looked inconsequential. It looked soft. It looked like exactly the kind of vehicle that would not survive a single week of real combat. Within 6 years, roughly 7,000 of these trucks would be produced. They would haul anti-tank guns across the deserts of North Africa, the forests of Poland, the wheat fields of Belgium, and the frozen plains of the Soviet Union.
They would put German firepower into position against British tanks on more battlefields in more countries across more years of the Second World War than any other vehicle in the Vermacked infantry. They would be present at the moment the German army realized it had brought the wrong gun to the fight and they would be killed off.
Not by enemy action, not by mechanical failure, not by bomb damage, but by their own thirst, consuming 45% more fuel than the vehicle that replaced them. Their name was the crop L2H143. Their soldiers called them the Proszer and they were the forgotten logistic spine of the Vermachts anti-tank war.
To understand why the Protzer existed, you need to understand the problem Germany faced in 1929. The Versailles treaty had stripped the Reichair of heavy weapons. What remained was an army thinking very carefully about what it would need the moment rearmament became possible. On a drawing board at Friedrich Kupe G and Essen, engineers had begun work on a light cross-country lorry without a firm military order. They were not guessing.
They were anticipating. Germany was going to rearm. When it did, it would need motorized anti-tank capability at the infantry division level. And that capability would need a vehicle that could keep up with a Panza division on the road and still operate across open fields and farm tracks when the paved roads ran out.
The solution Crop built was unusual. The engine at the heart of the PRs was air cooled. While every other European nation was fitting water-cooled engines into military trucks, Crup designed a horizontally opposed four-cylinder boxer unit, displacing 3.3 L, putting out 60 horsepower in its final production form. Air cooling eliminated one entire failure mode.
There was no radiator to puncture, no coolant to freeze or boil away. In the North African desert and on the Eastern Front in January, that choice would matter in ways the engineers could not yet foresee. The drivetrain was equally deliberate. The PRZ was a 6×4, meaning four of its six wheels were driven. A non-driven axle sat just behind the cab carrying two spare wheels, and those spare wheels served a second purpose that had nothing to do with punctures.
In soft ground, when the belly of the chassis dropped toward the earth, the spares acted as rollers, preventing the truck from digging itself into mud or sand. It was a simple solution to a problem the German army expected to encounter often. It worked. The PRS rode on six road wheels and two spares, all fitted with the same 7.
50×7 tires. Its 8-speed gearbox built with two locking differentials, let it manage terrain that would stop a standard two axle truck outright. Top speed on a paved road was 70 kmh. Fully loaded with four soldiers, their equipment, and ammunition, it weighed just over 3,700 kg. It carried a payload of 1150 kg.
It was light, it was fast, and in the mid 1930s it was the most capable military light lorry in Europe. Croo began series production in 1934. The Hier Fafan designated eight variants across the type from the KFZ68 radio mass carrier to the KFZ 81 light anti-aircraft prime mover. Two dominated production.
The KFZ69 was the standard gun tractor. The Protzcraft wagon built to tow one specific weapon. The KFZ70 was the 10-man troop carrier. Bench seats running along both sides of the open rear, capable of moving a full infantry squad and their gear at tank speeds. The weapon the KFC69 was designed to tow was the 3.7 cm pack 36 anti-tank gun.
Together, the two pieces of equipment defined the Vermach’s frontline anti-tank doctrine from 1935 onward. In every motorized infantry division of the first wave, every anti-tank battalion held 36 pack 36s. In every infantry regiment, a 12 gun anti-tank company held 12 more. On 1st September 1939, when the Vermacht crossed into Poland, virtually every one of those guns rolled to war behind a crook prozer.
In Poland, the combination was devastating. Polish armor consisted mostly of the TKS tanket and the 7TP light tank. The PAC 36 fired an AP round that cut through their armor at ranges beyond 1,000 m. The prots moved the guns into position faster than horsedrawn teams could repositioned them under fire faster than infantry could manage and kept the anti-tank screen mobile enough to follow the Panzer advance. The campaign lasted 36 days.
The PRZ came home without a serious mark against its name. Then came France. May 1940, the Vermact poured through Belgium and into France with the same formations, the same guns, and the same crook protzes that had torn through Poland. For the first two weeks, the combination worked exactly as it had before.
French Hotchkiss and Renault R35 light tanks fell in the same way the Polish armor had fallen. The PRs moved the Path 36s forward, the crews fired, the tanks burned. On 21st May 1940, near the town of Aris in northern France, something different happened. Units of the British First Army Tank Brigade attacked south toward Aris with the intent of cutting the German supply corridor.
The tanks leading that attack were Matilda M2s. The Matilda was not a fast vehicle. It topped out at 24 kmh. It carried a 2 lb gun and a small crew behind armor that ran to 78 mm on its thickest face. It weighed 27 tons. The Path 36 fired around with enough energy to penetrate roughly 30 mm of vertical armor at 500 m.
Against Polish tankets, that was more than sufficient. Against the Matilda 2, it was useless. The AP rounds struck the British tanks and bounced away. Crop Protzer after Crop Protzer towed its gun forward into a firing position. The crew traversed and elevated. The commander gave the order and the round hit the Matilda and fell to the ground. The Matildas kept moving.
According to accounts recorded in divisional histories and cited in later German operational analyses, path 36 crews at aris fired until their ammunition was exhausted and the British tanks were still advancing. German soldiers gave the path 36 a name that day. They called it the hear kopgarat. The army doorner winl personally redirected 88 mm anti-aircraft guns into ground level firing positions to stop the British counterattack.
The PAR 36 did not stop it. The PAR 36 could not stop it. The gun that the Protzer had been dragging across Europe was already obsolete against British armor in the very first year of the war. The PRZ itself was not responsible for that failure. It had done everything asked of it. It had moved the guns.
It had moved the men. It had kept up with Panzer divisions on roads and managed to function across Belgian farmland without getting itself permanently stuck. But it had done all of this at a cost that Vermach logistics officers were beginning to document with increasing concern. The PROS drank fuel. Its 110 L tank carried enough petrol for roughly 450 km on road.
That meant it consumed approximately 24 L for every 100 km driven, a figure that sits in Vera Oswald’s standard reference on Vermach vehicles. The Opel Blitz 1.5 ton truck which was already entering service under the Shell Plan Rationalization Program managed 16.5 L per 100 km. The PRZ was burning 45% more fuel per kilometer than its replacement in a war that increasingly depended on fuel supply lines stretching hundreds of kilome across occupied territory.
That difference was not a footnote. It was a decision. Now, before this gets to North Africa and the Eastern Front, if you have been finding this deep dive into German military vehicles worthwhile, hit subscribe. It takes a second, costs nothing, and helps the channel grow. In 1939, a German officer named Adolf Fonchelle was appointed General Bevmeik Fidas Craften, the general planetary for motorized transport.
On 15th March 1939, he presented what became known as the Shell Plan. The Vermact was operating over 114 different lorry types. Shell’s plan reduced that to 19. Croo was retained for heavy halftrack production. It was not among the manufacturers assigned the standard 1.5 ton class. The L2H143, the Protzer, was scheduled for termination.
Series production wound down through 1941. Residual deliveries trailed into early 1942 and then it was over. The PRZ did not know it was dying. In the summer of 1941, on the morning of 22nd June, roughly 3 million German soldiers crossed into the Soviet Union. Among them, in every motorized infantry division and Panza division were KFZ69 Cup Protzes towing pack 36s.
Against the older Soviet light tanks, the PAC 36 performed exactly as it had in Poland. The T-26, the BT5, the BT7, the T-38 all fell to the gun that the Protzer had dragged forward. The kills came in their hundreds in the first weeks. The gun crews reported clean penetrations. The system worked.
Then they encountered the T-34. The T-34 had 60 mm of sloped armor on its hull front. The slope increased the effective protection to somewhere between 80 and 100 mm of equivalent vertical steel. The pack 36 rounds struck it and achieved nothing. German anti-tank crews who had driven their protzes thousands of kilometers now watched their gun bounce rounds off a Soviet medium tank at ranges where the engagement should have been decided in a single shot.
According to multiple German divisional afteraction reports compiled by David Glance and cited in his operational history of Barbarasa Pack 36 crews in the summer of 1941 attempted to close to ranges under 100 m to engage T34s through the side or rear. Several crews drove their protzes in a flanking maneuver to attempt an angle shot.
These were not the tactics of a weapon winning its engagement. They were the tactics of a weapon that had already lost it. The props continue to serve in North Africa. Vehicles of Pansyga Abtailong 39 and Pansyga Abtailong 33 arrived in Libya in the spring of 1941 alongside Irvin Raml’s Africa Corps. The KFC69 Prozes towed their Pack 36s across the coastal road and into the desert where the sand got into everything.
Where the air cooled engine earned its place by starting in the morning when water cooled alternatives boiled or froze and where the open cab design so practical in Poland and France proved catastrophically exposed to Royal Air Force fighter bombers at how fire paths in June 1941 during Operation Battle Axe.
British Matilda tanks again demonstrated that the P36 was useless against them from any angle at any range the gun could engage. The PRZ crews who survived that engagement reported the same story the crews at Ars had told 12 months earlier. By 1942, the PA 36 was being replaced in frontline anti-tank battalions by the 5cm Pac 38 and the captured Soviet 76 mm guns the Germans redesated for their own use.
The PRZ was replaced in the prime mover role by the SDKFZ10 halftrack and by the Opal Blitz in its various forms. Surviving Protzers were pushed into second line duties, training commands, occupation forces, and Luftwafa airfield defense units. Hungarian assembled versions served in the Royal Hungarian Army into 1944.
The last documented combat use was in Sicily in 1943, where surviving Protzers of the Herman Guring division were employed as utility trucks rather than gun tractors because by then the guns they had been designed to tow were no longer the guns the army needed against the pros in any honest assessment stands one direct comparison.
The British Morris C8 field artillery tractor, the Quad, was entering full production in 1939 for the same role. It was four-wheel drive throughout, enclosed its crew against weather and shell splinters, mounted a 4-tonon winch for self-reovery, and towed the 25 pounder gun howitzer, a weapon four times heavier than the Path 36, into the same kind of terrain.
The PROZ was faster on a road. The quad was more capable in everything else. Britain had looked at the problem of motorized artillery traction and built toward the vehicle the war would require. Germany had built toward a war it expected to be over quickly against opponents it expected to be lightly armed.
The protz reflected that assumption completely. Roughly 7,000 protzes were built between 1934 and 1941. Fewer than 20 are believed to survive worldwide. The Deutsches Pansa Museum in Müster holds a KFC70 restored and on public display. The Military Technical Museum at Lasani in the Czech Republic holds at least one more.
Private collectors in Europe maintain perhaps two or three runners for a vehicle produced in those numbers operating in those conflicts. The survival rate is nearly nothing. Most were worn out, scrapped, burned by aircraft, or simply abandoned in the mud. Return to March 1934. Essen. The truck rolls out on six wheels. The gun bounces across the cobblestones behind it.
The aircooled engine turns without a single coolant hose to split in the desert. without a single radiator to drain in the Russian winter. The crew of four sit facing backward on their bench, watching the factory recede behind them. It was small, it was open, it was thirsty, it was outmatched by British armor before the second year of the war it was built to fight.
The gun it towed could not penetrate a Matilda at Harris, could not stop a T34 in the first summer of Barbarasa, and was replaced by every army that had used it before 1942 was finished. And yet for seven years from Spain to Sicily, from Poland to the Libyan desert, this truck put German anti-tank firepower into position on every front the Vermach ever opened, on horse tracks and paved roads, in rain and in sandstorms at 70 kmh when the tactical situation demanded speed and had a crawl when the ground allowed nothing else. It was not elegant. It was not survivable. It burned too much fuel and it dragged a gun that was already obsolete into battles it was never going to win. It was the machine that carried the door knocker to the door.
