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Headphone storage
German tank crews had wired headphones for communication within and between tanks. In the turret of the Tiger 1, the commander and the gunner had headphones. The loader, who crawled around the vehicle retrieving ammunition, could not wear them.
Two boxes were fixed in the turret to store these headphones when not in use. This is a headphone box in the Bovington tank, before restoration [1] .
The box had a lid. The inside was padded.
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. Four different positions for these boxes have been seen, and are shown in the following diagrams.
Arrangement #1 is seen in tanks '712' [2] and '833' of S. Pz. Abt. 501 [3] . The boxes were screwed to brackets welded to the inside wall, about halfway up. The commander's box was behind him, on his right. The gunner's box was behind him, on his left.
The tank's stowage was redesigned in December 1942 [4] , possibly because the escape hatch was added. The Bovington vehicle was produced a few months later, with these boxes fixed in arrangement #2 [1] . The turret was apparently becoming crowded because the gunner's box was now out of his reach. Both boxes were now to the commander's right. When opened, the lids of the boxes fell on either side of a roof support beam.
Arrangement #3 is drawn in the Turret Manual [5] for the turret with the 40mm roof. But it must have originated earlier, when the turret was redesigned with a new cupola.
The commander's box was now low down near the turret ring, on the center line. The gunner's box was on the opposite side of the turret, where only the loader could reach it. Even more strange, it was on its side and its lid opened toward the rear of the vehicle. This was probably due to a lack of space in the turret.
In the final Tigers, as seen in the 'Saumur' vehicle [6] , stowage boxes were removed from the turret walls and mostly replaced by open coaming on the turret ring. The headphone boxes were preserved, but they no longer had lids. This example is in the 'Saumur' vehicle [7] . The original ivory paint can be seen at the bottom.
The boxes were bolted to the turret ring, just above the main bolts in the ring. I don't know exactly how they were attached, but there was no direct attachment to the wall or to the coaming.
Sources
[1] Survey of vehicle 250122, Bovington, by David Byrden
[2] Survey of vehicle 250031, by Stephan Vogt
[3] Tiger 1 on the Western Front
[4] DW to Tiger 1
[6] Survey of vehicle 251114, at Saumur, by Jean-Charles Breucque
[7] Survey of vehicle at Saumur, by Hilary Louis Doyle
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