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Flare pistol ammunition storage
German tank commanders communicated in various ways, including flares. A flare pistol was provided in the Tiger 1 for the commander. Through most of the tank's production run, two boxes of flare ammunition were fixed inside the turret.
This is a flare ammunition box in the Bovington tank, before restoration [3] .
The inside is padded. There is storage for 12 flare cartridges, in three staggered rows of 4 each. (You can just see the indents in the lid.) I have no images of the flare cartridges.
The stowage in the Tiger's turret was rearranged several times. There are very few photographs of interiors and we may never know the full story. Three different positions for these boxes have been seen, and are shown in the following diagrams.
Position #1 is seen in tanks '712' [1] and '833' of S. Pz. Abt. 501 [2] . The boxes are screwed to brackets welded to the inside wall, immediately to the right of the commander's seat. They are located low down near the turret ring, and the turret's main wiring cable runs underneath them. It is possible that this applies to all Tigers without an escape hatch.
The tank's stowage was redesigned in December 1942 [4] , possibly at the same time that the escape hatch was added. The Bovington vehicle was produced a few months later, with these boxes fixed in Position #2 [3] . The reason for moving them is apparently to put them on a web of metal strips that holds stowage items about 20mm clear of the wall.
Position #3 is drawn in the Turret Manual [5] for the turret with the 40mm roof. But this change must have been made earlier, when the turret was redesigned with a new cupola. In the new turret, the gun's counterbalance was placed in a frame on the back wall. The boxes have been moved so that one of them is only just clear of this new frame. The other one is moved to about 930mm from the commander's seat, to make room for other stowage.
When the 40mm roof was added, a bomb launcher was installed on the roof; the loader could fire a flare pistol through it, so he would also use these boxes.
In the final Tigers, as seen in the 'Saumur' vehicle [6] , stowage boxes were removed from the turret walls and replaced by open coaming on the turret ring. I don't know where the flare ammunition, if any, was kept in these vehicles.
Sources
[1] Survey of vehicle 250031, by Stephan Vogt
[2] Tiger 1 on the Western Front
[3] Survey of vehicle 250122, Bovington, by David Byrden
[4] DW to Tiger 1
[6] Survey of vehicle 251114, at Saumur, by Jean-Charles Breucque
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