Schwern's answer is very good and exhaustive from the technical standpoint. PTRD 41: The Simple Soviet Antitank Rifle of WWII.PTRS-41: Soviet Anti-Tank Rifle Semi-Automatic.Why Armor Skirts & why only Germans? (with Panzermuseum Footage).This was later refined to make High-Explosive Squash Head (HESH) ammunition.įinally, for your viewing pleasure, 10 minutes of bullets impacting against armor in slow motion. Even with no penetration, the shockwave travels through thin armor and causes spall fragments to peel off the inside armor and bounce around the tank. Instead of breaking apart, the flat end would hit the armor and squash transferring all its energy into the armor. This was a normal cartridge with more gunpowder and the bullet placed in backwards. The first field-expedient way to stop a tank with a rifle was the reversed bullet. Note: Spall liners were not used in WWII.īecause of the spall effect, you don't even need a penetration to do damage. Source: Think Defense: Vehicle Protection. If you get a penetration it's not just the bullet bouncing around doing damage, but fragments of armor add a shrapnel effect. Now your bullet is on fire and can ignite all those flammable things inside the tank. Your round might be armor piercing-incendiary like the 14.5 x 114 mm BS Soviet anti-tank round. Mind you, Soviet tanks are notorious for being built for short people, and The Chieftain is hilariously tall, but it should give you some idea. Source: The Sherman Tank by Roger Ford pages 28-29.įor reference, here's a tour inside a T-34-85. Look at all that stuff to mess up! And that's without crew. You're very likely to hit a crew member, or a hydraulic line, or fuel line, or a fuel tank, or an oil line, or an oil tank, or a shell.īelow is a cutaway view of the US M4A4 Sherman tank. Every bit of available space is used to create as small a target as possible, and as light a tank as possible. With the exception of some odd experimental designs, WWII era tanks are incredibly cramped and incredibly complicated machines filled with all sorts of things that "don't react well to bullets". The chance of hitting a vital point seems incredibly small. If you imagine a tank it is a huge armored box. While heavily armed and armored Allied tanks existed, particularly the French Char B1 and British Matilda II, they were very slow, and only available in small numbers. The Germans invaded France and the Soviet Union with mostly light Panzer I and IIs. In this context, a 20 mm, 12.7 mm, or even 7.92 mm anti-tank rifle made sense.Īnother thing to realize is the bulk of armored forces were light tanks. It's only in the later war when the T-34 and KV-1 appear that guns and armor begin a rapid arms race. The Panzer II carried a 20 mm autocannon. The Panzer III's 37 mm was considered a good anti-tank gun in 1940. Panzer IV, about 30 mm on the front, 20 mm on the sides.Ĭontemporary anti-tank weapons, too, were very small.Panzer III, started with 15 mm, upgraded to 30 mm.Here's the armor thickness of some of the main armored vehicles used by the Germans during the Battle of France mid 1940. But in the early stages of WWII the situation was quite different. When we think of tanks in WWII we think of great big hulking Tigers and well angled T-34s. They did so because only the Soviets employed them in large numbers in WW2. Modern "spaced armor" is used to defeat shaped charges used by many anti-tank grenades and rockets, but we know these were added to protect against anti-tank rifles. The Germans considered anti-tank rifles to be such a threat to the sides of their tanks they added armored skirts, schürzen, to the sides of their tank hulls and turrets to protect against them. Even late in the war, tanks were designed with less armor in the sides and rear to save weight and so were still vulnerable to ambush. Once WWII started, plenty of these anti-tank rifles were available and tank armor was thin enough that they were still effective. These tests were conducted in November 1939, two months after the invasion of Poland. To give you an idea how desperate the US army was for anti-tank weapons, they tried shoving rifles and even rocks into the running gear of tanks to hilarious lack of effect (except on the rifle or rock). The infantry needed something to stop a tank smaller than an artillery piece, and from further away than you could throw a grenade. Anti-tank rifles were made as a stopgap measure during and after WWI.
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