From the aircraft thread "aircraft that did the most.......... tank guns.

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Shortround6

Major General
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Jun 29, 2009
Central Florida Highlands
Schweik said:
Why they couldn't put a slightly better howitzer preferably with a HEAT shell I'll never understand. Even the French 75 / 1897 would have been better.
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And here you are showing your technical ignorance. The British 3in tank howitzer weighed 222lbs and fit in the same gun mount as a 2pdr. The British used a gunnery system in which the gunner controlled the elevation of the gun with a shoulder piece. Seen here near the soldier on the lefts right shoulder.

No geared crank wheel, no ability to fix the gun in elevation. This was one of the limits to british long range gunnery.

The barrel and Breechblock of a French 75 (at least the American version) went 1035lbs, It also recoiled up to 49 inches in a field gun.
BTW the US M2 and M3 tank guns used the same ammo as the French 75. Which rather shows the size gun mount/turret needed. The tank guns got different recoil systems.
The later British 75mm gun that replaced the 6pdr (and fit in it's gun mount) also used the same ammo. or at least the ammo would fit all the guns.

So yeah, if you could put a cannon from a Sherman tank in a Valentine or Crusader it would have been a big improvement.

Heat shells were not a magic solution, it also took several years to get even relatively effective heat shells. Heat shell design was constantly evolving and post war heat shells should, in no way, be used to indicate what a WW II gun/shell could do.
The Germans went through 3 different patterns of 75mm heat shells for the short 75mm gun in the MK IVs (and I am not sure if the last of them was intended more for the half tracks and armoured cars that used that gun.)

Heat shells that were spun (fired from rifled barrels) lost quite a bit of penetration and it took a while to overcome that. Proper shape was also important. British had a heat shell for the 3.7in pack howitzer with a short nose that the Indian army used against the Japanese and it didn't perform that well but since the Japanese tank armor wasn't very thick it worked OK against them.

Heat shells were also short range, last ditch, projectiles in the early years. Work good in the jungle, forests or built up areas. In the desert they had a serious liability. The had to be low velocity in order to function properly and low velocity means they are hard to hit with at long range. US 75mm pack howitzer used one at 1000fps mv while the standard HE could be fired at 1250fps, the German 75mm FK 38 used one at 440mps compared to the normal HE shell being fired at 605mps.

The British did have couple of solutions sitting in the warehouse (so to speak) , the question is why didn't they use them. It took until 1942 to make HE ammo (and then only 40,000 rounds so production started very late?) but there was no real reason why 40mm Bofors projectiles could not have been loaded in 2pdr cartridge cases.
The British were also slow in adopting ABCBC projectiles, they don't show up until 1943, these would have increased the penetration ranges of the 2pdr by 400-500yds and decreased the need to get close on the thicker armored German tanks. The ABCBC projectile, as a type, existed before WW I for naval shells so it is nothing new, it just required (in addition to engineering time) somebody willing to spend the money on them.
 
fubar57 said:
Battleships are cool. Thought I'd start the sidetrack early
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Their guns are cool, who needs tanks when you have guns taken off battleships, well, so long as you're not in Singapore where supposedly they were facing the wrong way for use against tanks. Very useful though at Sevastopol and Leningrad, where they were still attached to battleships. This is not side tracking at all. Roll on. So imagine, the Germans land in England, and the RN simply beaches a few battleships round their landing zone and keep on firing. The Germans are sure to lose.
 
to further correct a few things.


The M3 gun was just a little more powerful than the M2, they used the same ammo, the M3 used a longer barrel, and had around 100fps more velocity. Some people quote Chamberlain and Ellis at 2300fps but that is a misprint. MV was 2030fps.

I like this part. "could also flatten anti-tank gun positions, spotters and artillery as quickly as they were detected". Man, what a bunch of dummies the US had for commanders. they could have saved building, manning and shipping all those 105mm howitzers and 155mm howitzers and guns, just few more Shermans with 75mm and just about any German postition could have been flattened as quickly as they were detected?

AS for "even had a gyrostabilized gun which could shoot on the move". Spoken like a true "Timmy the power gamer". It only worked on elevation, not traverse so every time the tank slewed, even a little bit the gun is thrown off target, it also didn't respond all that fast which meant it only worked at slow speeds. It was unreliable and needed extra maintenance.

It worked so well (sarcasm) that later M4s were completed without it and the US would not use a gyrostabilizer in a tank until the late 1960s or 1970s.




Boy, so much misinformation in so few sentences.

Yes the early MK IIIs (37mm guns) had two coax machine guns, however we are back to the Germans trying use a light machine gun (or general purpose machine gun) in the same role the British were using a heavy machine gun (or medium if you prefer to keep the heavy designation for the larger than rifle caliber guns). Photos in Chamberlain and Doyle show the guns having feed slots in the top consistent with using 75 round saddle drums, On the MG 34 you have to change the top plate on the receiver to change from the saddle drum to a belt. The early MG 34 machine guns used light barrels that needed to be changed in order to keep from overheating and burning out. In the squad you had the gunner and one to two assistants to supply ammo and help change barrels for each gun. In the tank turret you had one man trying to service two guns. No prize for guessing he could NOT keep up the volume of fire that two guns would suggest ( Italians often used paired machine guns but since they feed them with 24 round box magazines the actual rate of fire was not all that high.) Two guns gives an advantage if one jams
An MG 34 could empty a saddle drum in 5 seconds if you held the trigger back. Most machine gunners were trained to fire 5-6 round bursts.
The British started with the water cooled Vickers gun (and 250 round belts) and switched the Besa gun which went over 40lbs for the air cooled gun and so was a substantial piece of kit. It was designed for sustained fire, many german units used them not only in the Czech tanks but on tripods. The British guns could pretty well match the volume of fire from the two german guns over a period of time that lasted more than a handful of seconds.


The guns the British used could put out around 200rpm for quite some time. This being a practical rate of fire, not cyclic rate or theoretical.

Germans did adopt an heavier barrel for the AFV version which helped. They also switched to belt feed, which was probably cheaper and allowed greater storage. But their belts were shorter than the British belts.
The turret gun could be directed by the tank commander (by giving orders to the gunner).
On some tanks the hull gun was operated by the radio operator, he either had to pick out targets himself or divide the tank commanders attention (which was already spit several ways).
Some other hull gunners had other jobs depending on army and tank. By the end of the war most armies that could afford new tanks figured the hull gunner wasn't worth the space hi took up (more fuel or more ammo was a better use of the volume).
The only tanks using hull guns at the end of the war (or post war) were legacy tanks (tanks that were designed in WW II or used major components designed in WW II like the American M-47.

I am not sure the British got any canister rounds for the 37mm gun (in fact I am not sure the US used them in NA or Europe or at least to any extent.) any in any case the max effective range was only a few hundred yds.

The whole .50 thing is nonsense. Yes American troops like to fire the .50 (it made lot of noise) but some of the importance the ordnance dept attached to it can be seen in the ammo supply for it. An M-4 Sherman, depending on model, carried either 300 or 630 rounds of .50 cal ammo. this compares to the 4,750 .30 cal rounds for an M4A1 or the 6,250 rounds of .30 cal in an M4A3.

And again we have a division of duties, If the commander is playing John Wayne and firing the .50 then he is not commanding the tank (making effective use of his 4 crewmen, the 75-76mm gun, the co-ax gun with it's telescopic sight and power traverse or the engine/mobility of his tank.
If the loader is firing the .50 cal gun then the commander is doing his job (mostly) but the rate of fire of the main gun (and the co ax gun) are severally affected. Unless the commander tries to pitch in on occasion.

The .50 was intended to be an anti aircraft weapon. defending against air attack while fighting ground targets was rare. Sticking a crewman's head and upper torso out of the hatch (and armor protection) to play with the .50 in a close quarters fight seems like a good way to loose crewmen.
 
Another collection of snide and baeless insults - you think I sound like "timmy the power gamer" ? You sound like a lonely and frustrated person with a chip on his shoulder who probably desperately needs to go on a date, how is that for candor? I don't see what that has to do with the debate. I don't like being insulted and it's pointless to flex nuts on the internet so save that for someone who wants to play that particular game with you like 'timmy the power gamer'.

You are spewing out an avalanche of text here once again to try to make the point that one machine gun is better than 2 or 3. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of gun guy? If you are then you are being intentionally misleading because anyone who ever fired a machine gun knows that machine guns have stoppages. Water cooled guns are better and some models in general are more reliable than others, but machine guns can't shoot all day and eventually they do overheat if you keep firing, they have stoppages and jams for all kinds of reasons.

Hull guns / two guns were common in the following tanks:

T-34 (all versions)
Kv-1 most had had 3 or 4 machine guns including one on the back of the turret
IS-II 1 x DShK (12.7mm HMG) plus 3 x DT (LMG)
Pz III
Pz IV
Pz V ('Panther')
Pz VI ('Tiger I')
Pz VIB ('Tiger II') (both versions)
M-3 / 5 'Stuart' / 'Honey' (originally had some extra fixed hull guns usually deleted)
M-3 'Lee' / 'Grant' (originally had an extra turret gun usually deleted)
M-4 'Sherman' (all versions, most also had 12.7mm / .50 cal HMG)
M-26 'Pershing'
Cruiser MK VIII 'Cromwell'
Infantry Mk IV 'Churchill' (some had flamethrower instead of bow gun)
Cruiser A 34 'Comet' (Predecessor of the Centurian)

So the notion that they were a waste of time and deleted is ridiculous, as a subset of the farcical argument that 1 mg is better than 2. The British figured this out too they were just a little bit late to the game. The coax does in some cases have better range (depending on the tank) but the extra gun barrel capable of firing is really important, especially when tanks are breaking through infantry lines such as at El Alamein.

As for using the .50 cal 'AA' machine gun against ground targets, a cursory examination of any WW2 battle account involving machines which had these guns will show you how often they actually were used in that matter (hint - much more than at airplanes even though they were used against airplanes too). They had much greater range than all the LMG's, hit much harder, could penetrate protection including light vehicle armor from halftracks, self propelled guns and so on, could penetrate cover that was adequate against LMG's.

As for the notion that they wouldn't use an exterior mounted HMG - look at some photos of action in North Africa, the tank crews were almost always outside of the tank. Not just because of the heat. Buttoned up meant you couldn't see anything. Experienced crews would typically button up only when under direct fire or artillery strike, or when taking small arms fire from nearby infantry.



Finally, lets try to remember that this whole machine gun argument is just a subset of the point made about British tanks lacking HE capability (already well established before I ever posted to this website) which itself is a subset of did US made / designed kit make a key difference in North Africa, including planes and artillery and all kinds of other stuff. You seem to be just arguing for the sake of disagreeing.
 
As for the 105 and larger guns - of course even bigger HE guns are better at taking out enemy guns and infantry - especially if the latter were well dug in or inside fortifications. But the US 75mm was widely regarded as highly effective in an anti-infantry (and AT gun) role.

What it boiled down to was a radius of destruction. With a 2 pounder you basically had to hit the gun barrel of an AT gun sticking out between the sand bags, not easy at any distance even when calm and collected, let alone on the verge of death. More or less the same with the 6 pounder AP round, you would have to hit within 1 -2 meters or so to do any damage. Machine guns weren't too much help either especially if the AT gun was dug in.
  • The 75mm gun on the M3 or M4 had about 1 lb of explosive and a 10 - 20 meter 'kill radius'. So if you hit within 20 meters you can get that AT gun, or at least seriously rattle the crew. Much better.
  • A 105mm howitzer has maybe a 30 meter 'kill radius' maybe a little more in open terrain. It can also rattle armored targets just from the explosive power of the HE.
  • 155 or 150mm, depending on the exact type, maybe 50 meters.
All of those figures would be kills for people in the open, dug in and behind sand bags etc. the real world 'kill' radius might be half that, but it's still much better than requiring a direct hit. In general, US troops considered the 75mm quite good for normal targets, 155 was better for fortified targets. And the 105mm was kind of in between.

The .50 cal by the way, can actually mess up AT gun crews behind gun shields and sand bags due to the much harder hitting nature of the gun. This is why it and other HMG remained in use (both US and RUssian versions) to this very day.

The Gyrostabilizer was used. Not by all crews, but this was mainly a training issue. They were still putting them in Shermans at the end of the war. It wasn't anywhere near as good as modern stabilization systems, but it helped a lot with either shooting on the move (at shorter ranges) including with the coax machine gun, and for lining up the shot more quickly after stopping at longer ranges. For crews that knew how to use it, it conferred an advantage.

An interesting article on US gun stabilization f4rom Popular Science in 1944

WARFARE TECHNOLOGY: Gun Stabilization as Explained in 1944
 
fubar57 said:
Just because it has Allied Tank Casualties in the title and the word "Causation" in the index......
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Verry informative stuff. I found it surprising that, at least according to this report, land mines account for a pretty consistent 20% of American tank casualties in all theaters. I wouldn't have guessed it to nearly that high or so consistent theater to theater.
 
I do have a couple of problems with those videos. First of all the World of Tanks, if anyone has played that game will know that the mistakes and bias is overwhelming. It's a lot of fun, but woeful in it's accuracy.
The 75mm was good enough to deal with the earlier PzIII and Pz IV but as admitted in the video not good enough to deal with the Tigers and Panthers if met in equal numbers. I wonder how many US and British tankers would agree with his overall assessment. The Pz IV F2 had thin armour but the better gun so things were equal as each tank could destroy the other. Later Pz IV tanks had much thicker armour on the front and regained the advantage.
The US were very keen to get the 17pd and there is a reason for that, it was a lot better than the guns they had, and they needed it.
 
Once again you accuse people of things or arguments they never made.

Please show the post where I claimed one machine gun is better that two?

What I am trying to claim (and perhaps not doing a very good job) is that two are not necessarily twice was good as one, or that 3 are 3 times better.
2 guns may be 1.5 times better than 1 gun, or 1.75 times better or only 1.25 times better.

And lot depends on the guns, the location/mounts and what is meant by "better".

as a rather extreme example I will pick on the Italian M13/40 and it's machine guns.



Italian twin bow machine guns in the M13/40 and derivatives, also pretty close to the set up in the M11/39 turret and some armoured cars.

Now from most accounts it was pretty good gun, It was not prone to breakage or jams (yes any machine gun can jam, but some do it a lot more than others).
It used a very heavy barrel 9 7/8 pounds according Wiki so it could fire for quite a while before needing a barrel change or overheating.

The M13/40 carried 3-4 of them, two in the bow, one coax with the main gun in the turret and one (?) that could be mounted for AA work (or shooting infantry?)

However in figuring out how effective this gun was, or rather how effective the M-13/40 was while using these guns, lets remember that the M13/40 only carried 2808 rounds (117 of the 24 round box magazines) so if three guns are firing very much the ammo is not going to last long.
Wiki says cyclic rate of fire is 550rpm and practical is 350rpm which seems a bit high, you are going to need 13-14 magazine changes in one minute. Which at 2 seconds per change doesn't leave enough firing time.
In any case most medium (or heavy) machine guns didn't usually fire over 200-225 round per minute unless the situation was really desperate. even in the great Vickers machine gun barrage of WW I (just short of 1 million rounds in 12 hours by 10 guns) the best gun of group (120,000 rounds) averaged about 167 rounds per minute.

But back to the M13/40. Even if the Breda Mod 38 is a good gun (and I am not saying it isn't) the paired guns in the photo are in the hull, which means that when in a hull down firing position they are unusable, the gunner is also the radio operator, trying to do 4-6 magazine changes a minute (to do 100-150rpm) is not going to be easy, We do expect the gunner to aim don't we? they have a limited amount of traverse.
Going to the turret we have one gun coaxial with the main gun. we also have a two man turret, some sources say the commander is also the gunner, correction welcome. Then you have the loader. I am assuming the loader takes care of the machine gun as far as loading it goes. Most other tanks are arranged that way. Co-ax gunis on the opposite side of the main gun from the gunners seat and the sight.
we have problem with the 4th gun (the AA gun) for use in close quarters combat (or any non AA use for that matter) in that there is nobody to man it. If the commander has his head and shoulders out of the hatch firing this gun he is not firing the main gun and/or the coax machine gun. If the loader is firing the external machine gun then after the first 24 rounds nobody is reloading the co-ax gun.
now compared to a MK III with a 50mm gun or a Matilda or Valentine, all 4 if the ammo bins were full, a big if in NA at times, had about a 10% variation in ammo, The MK III being low the M13/40 in the middle and the British tanks on the high end but 200-300 rounds out of 3000 is not that big a deal.
Like I said the M13/40 is pretty much a worst case (unless you count the Japanese tanks) and in some situations the single Besa gun may not be as good, but the 3-4 Breda mod 38s are in no way 3 times more effective than the single Besa.

This may be more verbiage than some would like.


Now this has some elements of truth but also shades things a bit. Some people seem to think the US .50 cal was a super gun that hid it's blue underwear and read cape in the tool box.

Yes the gun has phenomenal range, which most of the time is unusable due to terrain, weather, the sight system and/or the mounts. It also hits very hard. much harder than RCMGs but (there are also buts) .50 cal ammo weighs 5 times what RCMG ammo does and takes up about 3-4 times the volume. In a volume constrained space, like a tank, every 100 rounds of .50 cal ammo may be worth 3-400 rounds of .30 cal ammo.

Many people also confuse cover and concealment, or they underestimate what kind of cover is needed against full power rifle ammunition. US .30 cal M1 ball (lead core) was rated at (single shots) penetrating 4 in of concrete at 200yds, 13.8 in of solid oak, 6.5in of dry sand, 7.3 in of wet sand, and it would go through 19in of loose earth at 400yds, the penetration in sand increased at 600yds due to the bullets yawing less. Penetration in white pine could be 4 feet or more.

The wood is dry lumber, not live trees and moisture content, knots and grain will vary things but obviously wooden houses are not cover. Neither are stucco coatings or one layer of veneer brick.
I don't have the penetration tables for the .50cal M2 Ball ammo or the AP, I have the tables for the older M1 ball which was about 20% less powerful (and not used by the US in WW II but used by the British , at least early in the war). Penetration of many things is roughly double although a few things are rather different. Armor and plain steel are way up (.50 cal ball used a steel core) but concrete is only up about 50% at close range and loose earth is only up a bit over 30%.

The .50 was a very good gun, it was sturdy, reliable, hard hitting and accurate, it was also large, heavy and required quite of bit of logistical support because of it's ammo. You never get something for nothing.

I would say that it doesn't matter how many tanks from WW II you can list with hull guns and gunners, , or even with machine guns out the rear of the turret (who manned that one anyway?) they just weren't a very good idea, the vast majority of post war tanks dropped it as the space inside the tank could be put to better use. History of tank development veered away from it and never went back.

I hoe this makes my position a bit clearer.
 
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