Tanks!!

[haroldeye]

It's a bit challenging to fire HESH from a Wombat/Mobat. The noise, the effects of the backblast and no insult intended, the people. Really! We had a race from the Tank sheds at Warcop to the firing point 2k away up a big bloody hill manhandling the guns, then three rounds at three tgts. Probably the hardest thing I've ever done. Thank God for the Mortar platoon.

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by haroldeye

It's a bit challenging to fire HESH from a Wombat/Mobat. The noise, the effects of the backblast and no insult intended, the people. Really! We had a race from the Tank sheds at Warcop to the firing point 2k away up a big bloody hill manhandling the guns, then three rounds at three tgts. Probably the hardest thing I've ever done. Thank God for the Mortar platoon.

Most of our M40 106 rounds were HESH-I never personally fired HEAT from it-though some of my subordinates did when we used to have things called 'anti-armour concentrations'.....which was a polite way of saying 'we have all this time expired ammo and need to get rid of it...and you lot might get some training value out of it'

....you were lucky lad-didn't the Wombat/Mobat have a 2-wheeled carriage?...well the 106 had a one wheeled two split trail setup-try manhanding that over hundreds of metres including a river! ....bastard instructors!

I hold the dubious privilege of being the first unit member to score as direct hit on the target at our first live fire-being the 4th or 5th to fire-and my predecessors having been fined a dozen of beer apiece for missing! My weregild would have been 2 dozen had I missed-and I hit bang on! The target was a Mk3 Ford Zephyr-at 1200m....and the impact tossed it about 20 feet in the air and flipped it upside down. Even 36 years on I can still see the imagine in the gunsight...

Interestingly-a couple of years later, whilst doing a TOW course in Hawaii as a YO, I was chatting to one of the instructors-a grizzled old US SSgt vietnam vet who mentioned that in Vietnam they'd had a flechette round for the 106....now that would have been interesting to fire and see the effect...!

[Dr Pepper]

Haroldeye-does this trigger any memories? Taken at Tekapo training area-in the SI high country-it might even be me in the gunners seat for all I know-no way of confirming that-but it was one of a series of shots taken that memorable first live firing shoot.

[Rogerbh]

Supposedly, a 105mm flechette round with 8,000 8 grain projectiles made hamburger out of any VC infiltrator that was unfortunate to be hit by it at point blank range.

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by Rogerbh

Supposedly, a 105mm flechette round with 8,000 8 grain projectiles made hamburger out of any VC infiltrator that was unfortunate to be hit by it at point blank range.

I imagine it would do a half pie decent job of jungle clearing as well....the one you posted is obviously a conventional tube artillery projectile-but no doubt was adapted for the 106.....which in fact is actually 105mm calibre-the '106' nomenclature being solely applied to prevent confusion with ammunition types in the logistic supply chain...

While we're on the subject of the 106-as both haroldeye and I have indicated-the bloody things make a fearsome bang when fired-and have a massive signature as the photo above demonstrates-and by the way the weapon is pointing to the left in the photo-so the backblast is creating the huge cloud of dust and smoke at the rear of the gun-4 to 5 times larger than the muzzle signature. Definitely a 1-shot and scarper weapon system....

We also found them absolute sods for starting fires-quite apart from the M8C .50 cal spotter round, the HESH rounds themselves had a bad habit of shedding the tracer unit in flight-which was about the size of an aerosol can cap-and this used to go spinning off to one side to start its own fire when it landed-usually somewhere 1/3-1/3 way from the gun to the target you were engaging..

[philll_77]

I quite liked the "squeeze bore" anti-tank guns.
This is a captured 2.8 cm schwere Panzerbüchse 41 being inspected by a plucky Brit.



Barrel reduced from 28 to 20mm, gave a muzzle velocity anywhere up to 4,500 ft/s, but they wore out rather fast!

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

Some of the Israeli reserve officers I worked with on UNTSO inspections on the Golan Heights were veterans of the 73 War-and of course the 'Valley of Tears' battle (in the northern part of the Golan) was the second largest tank battle in history, after Kursk. One of them mentioned to me that they even had to resort to ramming each other towards the end, amidst the dust, smoke, confusion and total lack of cohesion

One of the interesting aspects of Israeli tank doctrine is the preference for having the tank commander "unbuttoned", resulting in a lot of tank commander casualties, but better control.

This raises one of the underappreciated tactical problems in armored warfare-- how to talk to tanks and get them to do the things that you want them to do. Tank buffs tend to get very nerdy about guns and ground pressure, but they rarely obsess about innovations in communication and commander visibility.

So while there are any number of threads around the web devoted to the superiority of the Panther tank over the Sherman, you won't find nearly so much attention to an important area where the Sherman was much, much better: the radios.

Signals doesn't get much love in the military history world, but from Napoleon's highly efficient staff to embedded forward air controllers, getting information to local commanders, and their awareness of "where the hell am I and what's happening around me"-- very much an underappreciated problem.

One notable for British tankers-- the Israeli tanks in "Valley of Tears" were Centurions, modernized by the Israelis who call them "Shot" (= "whip")

[Dr Pepper]

This is nothing unique to Israeli tactics-ANY AFV crew commander will prefer to operate in the 'head up' mode-the difference in situational awareness between head up and 'buttoned up' is enormous-and it is not just visual it is acoustic as well-likewise drivers as well as commanders (and I've done both jobs at various times in my early career) prefer operating head out-the driver being even worse off when buttoned down than the commander-with normally only 3 vision slits or periscopes-straight ahead, half left and half right-whereas the commander usually has a panoramic array. The effect on the driver is to massively restrict the field of view-especially close in-when driving.

Even at night it is preferable to drive head out rather than resort to IR-the use of which is-quite apart from being an active system-and thereby detectable by the enemy-extremely exhausting to use in terms of driver concentration-and I speak from first hand experience!

Of course current generation vehicles with HD TV cameras, II and TI sights and driving aids are a world away from the state of play in the 70s and 80s, network enabled vehicles keep track of your fuel consumption, ammunition usage etc and take a lot of the mundane work away-especially from the Pl or Tp Sgt!...even to the point where they can automatically generate resupply requests...

Deepsepia you overlooked an even more important communication feature-especially relevant to the Sherman given its general role-the tank telephone!

[for the unfamiliar-this is a field telephone connected into the tank/AFV internal comms system, mounted on the rear of the vehicle in a reasonably protected yet accessible position which allows infantry outside the vehicle to communicate with the crew-in particular the commander, without having to clamber up on to the vehicle and attract the crew's attention-and possibly hostile fire-in the process...]

There is also the issue of internal communication-ie the crew intercom-and in that respect it is very hard to argue against the superiority of the German equipment of the time.

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by philll_77

I quite liked the "squeeze bore" anti-tank guns.
This is a captured 2.8 cm schwere Panzerbüchse 41 being inspected by a plucky Brit.



Barrel reduced from 28 to 20mm, gave a muzzle velocity anywhere up to 4,500 ft/s, but they wore out rather fast!

There were I believe German plans to produce a 128mm squeeze bore AT gun-which would have been a devastating weapon-and probably effective well into the 1950s had it ever seen production-the largest actual squeeze bore weapon in use being the 75mm Pak 41...but you still end up fighting the problem of barrel wear-even now, there are few small arms weapons that can achieve this sort of muzzle velocity...and I know of no conventional weapons that can reach or exceed 5000fps mv [and I am excluding rail guns as being 'non conventional']

And the larger the gun the worse the problem of bore and chamber erosion-the Paris gun being an extreme case-each individual shell was incrementally numbered, and fractionally larger to cope with chamber and barrel erosion-and had to be fired in exact numerical sequence. likewise-though not so extreme-the British 16 inch naval gun proved disappointing in use, due to its higher than normal mv, but lighter projectile (comparatively speaking) -and though not inferior to the earlier British 15 inch-was in practice no better-which is why only two vessels-HMS Rodney and HMS Nelson-were equipped with it-barrel wear alone-and the cost of manufacture dictating that it was not a cost effective option.

Of course the British 15 inch went through a lot more models and improvements than the 16 inch-so had battleship gun calibre continued to increase through the 1920s and 1930s no doubt Britain-being jealous of its #1 naval position-would have done something to improve the service life and performance of the 16 inch. And there is really not a lot known about the few bigger ones-the British 18 inch was not very successful-and the Japanese 18.1s on the Yamato and Musashi didn't see a lot of use-general consensus seems to be they were no better, performance wise than the US 16-inch..

[Mal Hombre]

Originally Posted by deepsepia

One of the interesting aspects of Israeli tank doctrine is the preference for having the tank commander "unbuttoned", resulting in a lot of tank commander casualties, but better control.

This raises one of the underappreciated tactical problems in armored warfare-- how to talk to tanks and get them to do the things that you want them to do. Tank buffs tend to get very nerdy about guns and ground pressure, but they rarely obsess about innovations in communication and commander visibility.

So while there are any number of threads around the web devoted to the superiority of the Panther tank over the Sherman, you won't find nearly so much attention to an important area where the Sherman was much, much better: the radios.

Signals doesn't get much love in the military history world, but from Napoleon's highly efficient staff to embedded forward air controllers, getting information to local commanders, and their awareness of "where the hell am I and what's happening around me"-- very much an underappreciated problem.

One notable for British tankers-- the Israeli tanks in "Valley of Tears" were Centurions, modernized by the Israelis who call them "Shot" (= "whip")

This clip from Fury demonstrates both aspects..