Right Reason on Second Amendment Rights
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 Anti-tank weapons Phil Davis SCRA Meeting, December 6, 2004 January 2005 GunNews
The first tanks were used in Europe in 1916. The Germans and the British developed them almost simultaneously within a few months of one another. At that time they were basically big tractors with plating on the sides that would stop rifle bullets. Artillery rounds would still go through them and heavy, heavy caliber rifle bullets would go through them. As a matter of fact, if you aimed for the seams you could send the splatter from rifle bullets inside the tank and injure the crews. That's how crudely the first tanks were made. By the time World War II came around, the tanks had been developed from a crude, makeshift thing into a real piece of artful machinery. At the outset of the war, I'll talk about the British and the Germans first because they had been fighting for a couple of years before we got into it. At the beginning of the war, the British had one anti-tank weapon that was made portable. It was called the Boys anti-tank rifle. It was a .55 caliber bolt action rifle with a great big Mauser-type action, a huge bi pod and it packed a ferocious recoil. On the earliest of the German tanks, the Mark II and the Mark III Panzer tanks, the Boys had enough power to bust through the side armor or the side of the turret if you were close. However, the Mark IIIs and later the Mark IVs and the Tigers, then the Panzers as they came out at the beginning of the war and towards the middle of the war. A Boys anti-tank rifle was kind of like shooting at the side of a tank with a .22 rifle. It made a little-bitty gouge and just let everybody in the world know that you were there. So the British government took something called the Blacker Bombard. It was a prototype for a spring powered mortar before the war and they fitted it with a new projectile. At the same time, as the war was breaking out they started to realize that if you shaped explosives in the proper way they would blow through armor very efficiently. Its called HEAT, high-explosive anti-tank. If you can imagine an oil funnel inverted inside of a shell casing, a big hollow space up in the front like a big hollow point and then a tip with a detonator on it. When it hit it exploded and made what is called plasma or smog and it would blow down through the center and actually burn and blast a hole through the armor. They took the Blacker Bombard and changed it from a mortar to a anti-tank weapon and then called it the Projector, Infantry, Anti Tank or PIAT for short. One man of the Green Howards called the PIAT the most devilishly painful device ever inflicted on man. The PIAT weighed 37 pounds and fired a 7 pound shape charged bomb. It used a spring to propel the bomb. To cock the PIAT you stood it on its end, grabbed hold of the handle, put your feet on the shoulder brace and lifted up with 225 pounds of energy. When you got it up you had to twist it 30 degrees to lock it and then you pushed it back down. Then you placed your bomb in the front of it and you laid down prone. Most of you have fired rifles prone. You know that a 30.06 rifle when you're standing upright and you pull the trigger, it belts you a little bit. But when you're laying down prone with that thing sitting up against your collar bone, its pretty stout. When you pulled the trigger on the PIAT it jumped away from your shoulder because of the spring. It hit the bomb and in the base of the bomb was an explosive charge. The explosive charge did not launch the bomb. The explosive charge fired back at you and re-cocked the spring. So that 225 pound spring is being blasted back by an explosive charge so it jumps away from your shoulder. Now what happens to a shotgun if you fire it and its not tight into your shoulder? It belts you pretty good doesn't it? A 30.06 has a 36 pounds of recoil energy. A PIAT has 258 foot pounds of recoil energy and you must fire it prone. The PIAT was good out to about 100 yards but to really penetrate heavy armor like the Tiger or the Panzer you had to get close. On D-Day a member in the Green Howards Infantry Regiment won the Victoria Cross by blocking a key crossroads just off the beach at Normandy with a Tiger tank. There was only room for one tank to come through. He laid ten meters off the path and waited for that Tiger tank to get close, real close. As a matter of fact he fired when it was ten meters away and knocked the tank out right in the middle of the road. He won the Victoria Cross posthumously because the infantry that was with the tank killed him. He is credited with saving the beach head from an armored advance by blocking the roadway with that one Tiger tank. That explosive charge was enough to blow through the heaviest armor that the Germans had. It was actually more powerful than the main gun on our first Sherman tanks until they got the 76 millimeter and 9 millimeter guns up. The PIAT could actually penetrate more armor but you had to get close. It weighs 37 pounds. I've carried one. A friend of mine here in Springfield, Illinois has one but I could not get in touch with him to bring it here tonight. Its legal to own a PIAT launcher by the way because it's just a big spring-powered thing. The bomb itself is the thing that gets you in trouble. Each of those if you have them has to be registered as a destructive device with the ATF. The Germans used what is called Panzerfaust which means tank fist, the Faustpatrone which means tank cartridge and Panzerschreck which means tank terror. The Panzerfaust and the Faustpatrone were the two most common. They are very much like the modern Russian style RPG, a rocket powered grenade or a rocket powered projectile. The Panzerfaust was delivered in a crate completely ready to use. All you had to do was insert a cartridge into it, cock it and fire it. At the end of the war they could make these extremely fast. They were powerful enough that they would defeat any of our tanks. They were very light compared to the PIAT. The PIAT weighed 37 pounds. The average Panzerfaust weighed about 18 pounds. It had a range they say of around 30-100 yards depending on the model but most of them were only good for as far away as you could hit the Sherman tank. The Panzerfaust was all assembled when you got it and actually had instructions written on the war head. You tucked that thing under your arm and you looked down through the sight. The front sight was actually on the war head. Then you yelled in German, I can't say it but it was basically "clear the back blast" because 3 to 10 meters in behind you would be a searing jet blast that would really seriously injure you if you were in the way. When you fired it there would be a "whoosh" and everything in front of you would be obscured by smoke. The first series of the RPG were almost direct copies of the Panzerfaust and the Faustpatrone. Our troops are still encountering the earlier RPG's in Iraq today. A friend of mine who is a combat engineer says you could always tell when they got into an old stockpile. Those things go off with a huge belch of white smoke and here comes this thing cork screwing out of the smoke. He says there is an 80 percent chance that its going to miss you. And you hope that you're not the other 20 percent because its got a very big war head on it. When it hits and goes off, its very powerful. The Panzerfaust and the Faustpatrone were very ahead of time as far as anti-tank weaponry went. They also had something called the Panzerschreck which was a .88 millimeter rocket launcher much like our later 3 and a half inch American bazooka. It was powerful enough to devastate any of our tanks and was more accurate at at longer range. It was reloadable and it had a very heavy war head on it. It was fired on the top of the shoulder just like our bazooka. It even had a shield to protect your face from the blast of it going off. The Panzerschrecks were heavier than the Panzerfausts and they took a little more training. Germany and England went at it for several years before America got into it. When America got into it we were woefully under armed on most things. This included our anti-tank weaponry. Our first tanks that were in the battle over there had .37 millimeter guns on them and they were not really effective against any of the later German tanks. It was the same with our anti-tank weapons. Our first shoulder fired weapons that we used were called the bazooka which is named after a famous bands mans horn, the bazooka horn. It was a 2.36 inch rocket. The bazooka was America's answer to the Panzerschreck. Much, much smaller than the German Panzerschreck and much less powerful. It was effective enough to take out the earlier model tanks but the later models like the Panzer and the Tiger, you had to knock them out of the track or hit the engine and knock the engine out, you were not going to go through the side armor. Phil Davis Index Return to SCRA Home Page |