Hello everyone,
today, we are going to have a look at one of the last independent Czechoslovak post-war projects, the PM-1 flamethrower tank, built on the ST-I chassis, also known as the Jagdpanzer 38t “Hetzer”.
The tank flamethrower project itself started initially on a completely different vehicle. In 1946, the army demanded the TVP tank project to actually use a flamethrower as its secondary armament. This “feature” was removed from the project quite soon, but the army didn’t forget and so, in 1948, the 1st Department of the Army Chief of Staff decided that 75 ST-I tank destroyers were to be rebuilt as flamethrower tanks.
The ST-I tank destroyers were more or less modified Jagdpanzer 38t vehicles, produced after the war for the Czechoslovak army (since the original German tank destroyer was produced in former Czechoslovakia anyway). Some of the ST-I vehicles were even real wartime Hetzers – a few were used even in combat, repaired after the war. In 1948, Škoda Pilsen started to repair the first 30 chassis pieces, the rest was to be refitted by the Automotive Armory (1st) at Milovice. The conversion itself however was to be conducted by ČKD (the first drawing of the vehicle is from 6.11.1949).





