Officially named the Ferdinand on February 6, 1943, the vehicle required a crew of six.
With the main gun now firmly placed toward the rear of the chassis, the engines were relocated into the middle of the vehicle. To compensate for the recoil of its main gun, designers extended the back of the casement to the back of the hull. The design called for the driving compartment to be placed in the front, the fighting compartment in the middle, and two engines in the rear. Layout began with the standard formula used in Germany. Porsche supervised the development of the vehicle. An order was issued in October 1942 for the conversion of 90 hulls into the new tank destroyer. The specifications for this turretless vehicle included a maximum frontal armor thickness of 200 mm and use of the 88mm Pak 43/2 antitank gun, the most powerful in Germany at the time. He submitted a proposal to build a heavy tank destroyer using these hulls. Assuming his design would win, Porsche already had stored 100 Krupp-built hulls at the Nibelungenwerke in St. Being a friend of German leader Adolf Hitler, his design was expected to win however, test trials in 1942 showed the Porsche model failed in deep mud and its drive system was mechanically unreliable, thus the Henschel model was selected. The Ferdinand had its origins as Porsche’s failed entry into the heavy tank competition for what would eventually be the famous Tiger tank. Named in honor of Ferdinand Porsche, the Ferdinand, which was later renamed the Elefant, had a decisive effect in any armored clash in which it participated. Both were vehicle commanders in one of Hitler’s new wonder weapons at Kursk, the heavy tank destroyer (Jagdpanzer) Ferdinand. Henning was personally responsible for 10 of the kills, while Leutnant Hermann Feldheim tallied 11 more. Before the day is over the kampfgruppe has decisively smashed the attack, destroying 22 Soviet tanks, some at more than 2,500 meters. Hauptman Rolf Henning’s kampfgruppe stands in the path of this counterattack. On Kursk’s Northern Front the Soviets continue to hammer at the exhausted left flank of the German Ninth Army from the direction of Maloarchangelsk. The Red Army has not only withstood Hitler’s Operation Citadel to eliminate the Kursk salient, but it has launched its own offensive.
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