Best Tank Killer of WW2 continued

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We went through this before... There were some Tigers that were destroyed by skipping rounds into the underbelly of the tank... We are not talking one single round, but several rounds impacting into the same area...

While this happened quite infrequently, it still happened...
 
I'm going to be truculent and disagree with you lesofprimus. To me the concept is soundly in the realm of the impossible. I have never seen any post-battle research that indicates that .50calibre rounds killed a tank by bouncing up into its undersides. This is in the same leauge as the claims of P-47s turning over Tiger tanks with concentrated fire.

I don't believe that a .50 calibre round, or even a steady stream of .50 cal round,s could do serious damage to a German tank after being deflected off the ground and into its belly. Dispersion and ground deflection alone are going to gaurentee that the rounds wont line up neatly and punch through the armour.

At a minimum the rounds have to pass through 26mm of armour, at an unfavourable angle after coming up off the ground. The .50 cal is a good gun, firing a good round, but the physics of it is simply impossible. A 12.7mm round doesn't have a desirable length/diameter ratio to penetrate armour that more than twice its own diameter. The energy it would expend trying to punch through that much armour would rob it of all velocity and stop any spalling effects, which is really the most leathal thing to a tank crew.

Think about it. If it hits the ground at 30 degree angle and then leaves it at a similar angle, there has to be a serious loss of energy to alter the direction of travel. So your round traveling at 30 degrees now hits the flat bottom of a tank, with anywhere between 1 and 3 1/2 inches of RHA.

Assume that the bottom armour is just 1 inch. A round hitting flat (90 degrees) has to punch through 25.4 mm of armour, better than the best performance of WW2 US .50cal AP rounds by about 2mm. If the round strikes at ~60 degrees, it has to pass through approximately 30mm of armour. If it strikes at ~45 degrees then it has to pass through ~35mm of armour. It it strikes at ~30 degrees then it has to pass through about 50mm, or twice the value of the armour at 90 degrees.

What I do accept is that many German tanks were disabled by straffing. Pouring rounds into the engine exhaust grates, setting off external fuel and ammunition stores, damaging tracks, damaging crew doors, damaging external equipment ect would all contribute to a 'soft kill' i.e. the tank is abandoned or no longer in fighting condition, but is capable of leaving the battle-field and is fully repairable. German tank crews who underwent air attack with aircraft firing HMG rounds describe it as something similar to standing in a corrugated iron shed and having someone hurl a handful of pebbles at it.

Just a hypothetical to consider; if the .50 WAS indeed capable of killing a tank through this method, why wasn't it used by other airforces, with heavier standard weapons? Surely the British with 4 20mm Hispanos on the Hurricane, Typhoon and Tempest would of done something similar? The Hispano, with a similar M/V and 3 times the round weight, would surely be better at similar straffing atack.
 
Heinously stolen from one of Tony Williams long forums discussions at aviationbanter.com:

1. It is extremely unlikely that any bullets bounced off the road
would strike a tank's belly armour at an angle better than 30 degrees
(that would involve the plane attacking in a dive steeper than that).

2. The penetration of a .50 AP round at 300 yards and 30 degrees is
just 5mm (official figures) - and that's without bouncing off the road
first).

3. The belly armour of any 1944 tank is at least double that, to the
best of my knowledge.

4. In order for the bullets to bounce off the road but penetrate the
armour, the road would have to be harder than the armour plate.
Click to expand...
 
Perhaps then, the pilots were shooting up the engine compartment and the track assembly which appeared to them as destroying the tank. To them, flying along at 300 mph at 2000 ft, they saw a tank rolling on the road, they strafed it damaging the tracks and it stopped. No way they could observe what was damaged on it.

I do suppose though it would have been effective against the various lightly armored vehicles.
 
Hehe, anything with a lot of rockets! I suppose the IL-2 is a good one, I also like the P-47.. I suppose good cannons could peirce armor. I wouldn't think to say the P-38 right away but.. it can hold a lot of rockets.
 
In my opinion the best tank killers are:

Fw-190F-8 with 2 13mm, 24 R4M Rockets or Panzerblitz rockets.
Ju-87G-1 Stuka with 2 37mm Cannon
Hawker Typhoon IB with 4 20mm Cannons and 8 60lb rockets.
P-47 Thunderbolt with 8 50 cal machine guns and 10 5in rockets.
 
Youre forgetting the Hs 129B-2/R3, with two 20 mm MG 151/20 cannon with 125 rounds per gun, plus a 37 mm BK 3,7 gun in a ventral pod.......

The first pilot to earn the Ritterkreuz - Knight's Cross for his tank kills in the Hs-129 was Hptm. Rudolf-Heinz Ruffer for his 72 tank kills on 9 June 1944.... He was killed by flak in July 1944.... Less than a handful of 129 pilots would earn that distinction during the war....
 
They were supposed to replace them with some Eyetalian ones, but then Italy surrendered and that was the end of the -129....

I think that without the 75mm that they had in some of em, the -129 was a good tank buster... Alot of pilot errors and crashes kinda put a dark light in this kite... Some of the more experienced -129 pilots knew how to fly it and made some decent kills...
 
My opinion on all of this is that ALL aircraft make "good" tank busters. As was shown especially in the western front, if the enemy, the Allies in this case, have complete air supremacy and good weather no tank is going to go anywhere. Once they were spotted, even from a Piper Cub, the actual tankbusters came in and busted.

Also I wonder, in the western front, how many German tanks were destroyed vs. tank to tank combat or infantry to tank combat compared to be destroyed from the air.

:{)
 
I would take the Fw-190F-8. Two 13mm Mg/131 and the R4M setup would be lethal. If i had a choice i wouldnt have any 20mm guns on my 190, contributing the weight savings to more ammo for the Mg/131 or the fuel/external stores carriage, or simply more armor, because you couldnt have enough when you were running low level strafing/tank busting missions.

Also, looking back on that tank killing with .50 cal and 20mm rounds, i heard that on the history channel no less. They were talking about P-51D's strafing and destroying tanks by bouncing rounds off the road into the underside. I saw a video of this, guncam footage, and it looked disabled, but at the speeds, you couldnt tell, so im assuming the track/engine was disabled, and the tank simply stopped and wasnt knocked out, as was claimed.

Does anyone have the kill records on german Wirbelwind or any other german antiaircraft tank from the war? ive always been interested in those wicked looking things, and never saw any kill ratios/records.
 
The Fw-190F-8 Panzershreck with 12X 55mm rockets, or the -190F-3/R3 with the twin 30mm MK 103 gondolas, IMO, was the best tank killer, but erich has let on that there were some Me-262's running around with armor piercing R4M's knocking tanks out left and right, although I myself have not been able to confirm this...

I have found some confirmation of Typhoons bouncing 20mm rounds under some tanks, but not .50 cals....
 
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