Rn vs IJN

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I agree the Matilda II was definitely somewhat more of a problem for the Japanese.


It seems to be a 'spec' problem related to the concept of the "infantry tank" as defined by the British military / government. Kinda like how you ended up with biplane strike aircraft and turret fighters and two seat fighters for the FAA.

Now there is some likelihood, I think, of this problem being corrected sooner (maybe in time to be useful) if they didn't have US weaponry available.
 
Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
Well the type 97 with the 47mm gun (available from 1942) could penetrate 70 mm at 500 yards, 62 mm at 750 yards. That is definitely enough to kill a Valentine particular with a side shot. Valentine III had 65mm front and 50mm side armor.
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The type 97 47mm gun could penetrate 55mm of armour at 100 metres - 40mm at 500 metres down to only 30mm at 1000 metres.

So no, it isn't going to do well against a Valentine.

Note from my post the BESA was a "reliable" MG. It didn't have jamming problems as such. Also, tanks in the jungle were always in tandem with infantry
for mutual protection so the lack of HE is again, less of a problem in close than it was in the open desert. The two pounder HE tended not to be issued anyway
as HE rounds for guns around that size were generally not much better than hand grenades anyway.

75mm guns are not going to match the 25lber which is not the only artillery that would have been available anyway - neither are 47mm AT guns
or even 88mm flak weapons. The other problem for Japan as you note here is that the guns would be spread out across the land taken by Japan
which was one of their big problems all the way through.
 
WARSPITER said:
According to all the sources
I have including some from artillery historians the 25lber rates as one of the top three artillery pieces of World
War II
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The gun was rather good, the ammo..................................not so much.
This was a constant problem with British artillery (and bombs).

Trying to find out why is difficult.
The British used lower quality steel. Artillery can use up huge amount of steel.
Assuming for illustration sake only, that a 25pdr shell weighs 20lbs with no explosive or fuse and that the gun barrel will last for 7000 rounds before it is worn out (and you can change the barrel) that barrel can fire 70 tons (short tons) of steel out the barrel. Adjust as anybody sees fit.
The point is that artillery shells are expensive in a number ways.
The British 5.5 shell changed from a 100lb low quality steel shell to a high quality 82lb shell.
They used a supercharge and picked up 1900 yds of range, about 11.7% and the HE content went from 10.5lbs to 12 lbs. Steel is a lot heavier per CC than explosives.

Not everybody can even make shells, granted HE is not armor piercing but not every machine shop with a lathe can bore out bars of steal and make shells, They tried that in 1914/15 and blew up hundreds of guns and killed/maimed hundreds of gunners. The RA was not looking for a repeat of that episode. They also weren't looking for another episode of the daily newspapers running above the fold headlines about shell shortages that could be read at several hundred feet.

If WW II had repeated WW I and the British needed millions of shells a month shipped over to France then maybe they made a good choice. Once you start shipping thousands of tons of shells around the Cape of Good hope the equation about cost vs effectiveness changes a bit.
 
WARSPITER said:
The type 97 47mm gun could penetrate 55mm of armour at 100 metres - 40mm at 500 metres down to only 30mm at 1000 metres.
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Not according to this Type 1 47 mm anti-tank gun - Wikipedia

WARSPITER said:
So no, it isn't going to do well against a Valentine.
Click to expand...

I think it actually did

WARSPITER said:
Note from my post the BESA was a "reliable" MG. It didn't have jamming problems as such.
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It doesn't matter how 'reliable' an MG is. I don't know if you have ever shot a .30 caliber machine gun but I have, a wide variety of them (from 'very reliable' to 'utter crap'). Every machine guns jams. That is just a fact. Even the most reliable ones, which IMO were the Warsaw Pact ones, will definitely jam or have some other kind of failure (such as the barrel melting down) if you keep shooting them. It is inevitable. And it takes a lot less than 3,000 rounds to get to that point. In fact a lot less than you think. Unless it's a water cooled gun the barrel will be smoking after the first 100 rounds or so, after about 300-400 rounds you typically have to change the barrel on most light machine guns. That is tough to do from inside a tank.

You can slow down the overheating problem by shooting very short bursts and waiting between bursts, and letting the gun 'rest' as long as possible. But there is a limit to how long you can extend it.


Hand grenade that you can shoot accurately at targets 1,000 meters or more away turns out to be quite helpful. That is why every other army in the world made HE capability for their tanks, even down to the small 20mm and 37mm rounds.


Not going to match... in what sense? In the AT role I am pretty sure the Japanese 75 mm AA gun for example are much better. In terms of artillery range and ROF etc., they compare pretty well. The 25 pounder (87mm) gun is not exactly vastly superior to most 10 cm+ sized artillery of the same era. For example the Japanese Type 91 10 cm howitzer (1,100 built) - range 10.7 km, rof 6-8 rpm, shell 15.7 kg, or the type 92 (only 180 built) range 18.3 km, rof 6-8 rpm, shell 15.7 kg, or the Type 96 15 cm howitzer (440 built) with a range of 11.9 km. The 25 pounder had slightly better range than the type 91 or type 96 (12.2 km) but a much smaller shell (11.5 kg / 25 lbs)
 
Hey EwanS,

re the 7th Armoured Brigade and "The Japanese only destroyed one of its tanks "...and that by the most evil combination of circumstances."

According to the 7th Armoured Brigade and its Regiments' (7th Hussars & 2nd RTR) histories they lost 45 Stuarts on the retreat to the Chindwin, ~50% to enemy action and ~50% to accidents and/or mechanical break downs. About half of those lost to enemy action were due to the Japanese 50mm mortar, with at least 7 lost to enemy direct fire artillery (mostly the Japanese 75mm field gun), and 1 to an aircraft dropped bomb. While they performed quite well on the roads, in built-up areas, and in the open country, after the first attempts they avoided going off road if possible. They were considered too light and too easily bogged down for operations off road in jungle.

The remaining 70 tanks were permanently disabled and abandoned at the Chindwin. One was towed across the river on a cable ferry/raft, but subsequently permanently disabled and used as a defensive MG hardpoint.
 
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Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
Not according to this Type 1 47 mm anti-tank gun - Wikipedia
Click to expand...
If you read further down the same article you will find the figures I gave as per the modified version of the same gun which was fitted to the type 97.

I have used an air cooled MG on test and we fired 5,000 rounds with two barrel changes. I can't see how anyone would fire more than a couple of hundred from a tank
when in the jungle anyway as they wouldn't be facing that many troops at one time.

Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
Hand grenade that you can shoot accurately at targets 1,000 meters or more away turns out to be quite helpful. That is why every other army in the world made HE capability for their tanks, even down to the small 20mm and 37mm rounds.
Click to expand...
When would a target be visible from 1000 metres in the jungle ?

Japanese type 91 - 6 - 8 rounds per minute at maximum rate for a short period. 15 minutes at 2 rounds per minute and 50 - 60 rounds per hour
fo continuous fire.

25lber - very slow rate - 60 rounds per hour. Normal rate 3 rounds per minute (180 per hour). Intense - 5 rounds per minute (300 rounds per hour).
At 3 rounds per minute continuous that is a greater weight of shot than the continuous rate for the type 91.

Add the larger British artillery that was available and the mix is greater again.

Weight of numbers is also in favour of the Allied forces as again the Japanese tanks and artillery would be spread widely.

Shortround6 said:
Once you start shipping thousands of tons of shells around the Cape of Good hope the equation about cost vs effectiveness changes a bit.
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That's probably why Australia produced rounds, cartridges and charges as well as the guns.
 
British tank machine gun, once you get past May of 1940 and many of these were there.

This thing weighed about 45-47lbs. It was not infallible but it wasn't too bad. The British kept it around for quite awhile after WW II despite the fact that it used 7.92 ammo. Only went to the 1919 Browning when the US gave them the guns and 30-06 ammo in the 1950s. Some of the Besa's lasted until the 1960s.

You absolute cannot just hold the trigger back and empty belts out of the gun, it has to be fired in bursts. However the manuals of this gun say it can be fired at around 200-225 rounds per minute for quite sometime.
Now many other countries were using modified light machine guns that went about 20-25lbs once you took the stock and bipod off. Some got slightly heavier barrels for better sustained fire. German MG 34s were easy to swap barrels on inside the tank. However many of these were 'supposed' to be fired at around 100-120rpm sustained with barrels changed every so many minutes.

Some guns were a lot easier to unjam than others, which was sort of the point in getting rid of Vickers gun. The Vickers was darn near unbreakable but it could jam in over 2 dozen different ways.

The main problem with the Besa gun in tanks was the short range and that was not the fault of gun but of the British sight system and doctrine. The tanks used a low power scope with set of cross hairs and not much else. There was no way to adjust the scope for range and there was no way to judge range in the scope like the Germans could with their little triangles.
Now combine that with the controlling the elevation with the gunners shoulder and with recoil the gun got knocked off target in short order. Big problem in the desert, not so much in jungle. Japanese used the same elevate with shoulder trick so their long range capability also sucked.

The Besa was not perfect but it was one of the most reliable tank machine guns and could put out among the highest rates of fire of any tank machine guns. Early war ones on a selector switch on the side to change the rate of fire. 450–550 round/min (Low) 750–850 rounds/min (High).
If you had to rely on a machine gun it was one of the best to rely on.
 
Hey Wild_Bill_Kelso,

re the Valentine in Burma

As I mentioned in my post up-thread, the Valentines in Burma were initially badly employed in their early actions. In their first action 6 ended up stuck in an anti-tank ditch - that is where the oft repeated trope comes from.

Over 400 were eventually shipped to the Burma theater, and in mid-1944 over 300 were still the main tank in service with the 146th RTC and 50th Indian Tank Brigade. They were replaced thereafter with M3 Lee/Grants and M4 Shermans as they became available in larger numbers, with some of the Valentines being modified for special duties (ie bridge layers, fascine layers, OP/FAC tanks, flame thrower tanks, etc).


re the Valentine and Matilda armour effectiveness

The Valentine and Matilda were impervious to the Japanese 37mm and 57mm AT guns.

There is no record of the Valentine or Matilda ever being shot at by the 47mm Type 1 AT gun.
 
WARSPITER said:
That's probably why Australia produced rounds, cartridges and charges as well as the guns.
Click to expand...
True but that took a while and shipping stuff around the Cape to Egypt was a pain in the butt.
Ian Hogg claims that the British were working on a long range shell in Sept 1943 that weighed 21lbs, that held 3lbs of HE, had 20% better lethality and range to 14,500yds. Work was not completed by the end of the war. I have seen different explosive weights for the standard shell (they also had at least 5 different types of explosives and different mixes) but 1.8lbs seems pretty good.
Just hit another statistic......over 9,750,00 HE shells (no smoke or AP) manufactured in 1941 in the UK. If I have done the math right that is 97,500 tons of steel for my hypothetical 20lb shell body. or 3,250....... 30 ton tanks. ( I know it is not the same steel
Artillery can be very expensive
 
Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
Hand grenade that you can shoot accurately at targets 1,000 meters or more away turns out to be quite helpful. That is why every other army in the world made HE capability for their tanks, even down to the small 20mm and 37mm rounds.
Click to expand...
this is also a bit debatable. I am a big critic of the British not manufacturing and issuing a HE round for the 2pdr but let's stick to a few facts. The British system of fire control sucked.
At long range just about every shot was a first shot. If you are trying hold the cross hairs a little over the target and the first round misses and the gun jumps around, where to hold for the second shot?
German fires and misses, commander calls 200 yds low (guess) and the gunner changes the sight setting from 1000 yds to 1200 yds and fires again and commander calls 50 yds low, gunner cranks up the sight a little more and so on.

British gunner has no crank and he has no adjustment on the sight and unlike the German gun which returns to the point of aim (or close) after the gun fires the British gun bounces high with every shot and the poor gunner just keeps trying to put the cross hairs a little higher in space over the top of the target. British didn't even have any extra horizontal lines in some of their scopes.

HE would have been useful but it would have been useful at close range, not long range.

BTW the German manual for the MK II tank with the 20mm cannon says AP only, no HE and says use AP against gun shields and try to get to the flank and use machine gun vs the crew.
Now how many tank crews managed to "procure" a box or two HE ammo from an AA gun crew I don't know.
 
WARSPITER said:
If you read further down the same article you will find the figures I gave as per the modified version of the same gun which was fitted to the type 97.
Click to expand...

Ah, Ok you are right I stand corrected.

WARSPITER said:
I have used an air cooled MG on test and we fired 5,000 rounds with two barrel changes.
Click to expand...

I call BS. Unless you were letting it rest for an hour after each two or three belts. The notion of a machine gun that never jams, or that you can shoot 1,500 rounds without a barrel change is 100% nonsense. It's just basic physics - shooting a .30 caliber bullet generates a lot of heat. There is no air cooled machine gun currently in existence (let alone in WW2) that can dissipate it fast enough to prevent overheating and the warping and melting of metals, which inevitably causes a stoppage.

Here is an M60 shooting 1,500 rounds. Notice the barrel is glowing red hot after one minute, and it's actually on fire after two minutes and 30 seconds and starts cooking off rounds.

M60 Barrel Meltdown

1500+ rounds causes barrel meltdown in M60. Barrel glows and then slowly warps to the side.
www.military.com

And so is the notion that tanks didn't need HE ammunition for their tanks, which is why every nation made sure their tanks had HE ammunition, including the British who switched over the US style 75mm guns. Quoting directly from the Wiki on the ordnance QF 75mm: "The Ordnance QF 75 mm, abbreviated to OQF 75 mm, was a British tank gun of the Second World War. It was obtained by boring out the Ordnance QF 6-pounder ("6 pdr") 57 mm anti-tank gun to 75 mm, to give better performance against infantry targets in a similar fashion to the 75 mm M3 gun fitted to the American Sherman tank. The QF came from "quick-firing", referring to the use of ammunition where the shell has a fixed cartridge. The gun was also sometimes known as ROQF from Royal Ordnance (the manufacturer) Quick-Firing."

WARSPITER said:
I can't see how anyone would fire more than a couple of hundred from a tank
Click to expand...

Again you clearly haven't read a lot of WW2 combat history

WARSPITER said:
when in the jungle anyway as they wouldn't be facing that many troops at one time.
Click to expand...

Well I guess you have never read any accounts of combat in the Pacific or CBI

WARSPITER said:
When would a target be visible from 1000 metres in the jungle ?
Click to expand...

Frequently. I assume you know this perfectly well, but I'll spell it out anyway. Jungle was common, but as anywhere in the world, there were and are many open spaces, in this is in particular where the HE shells become very important. You can see for example that you are taking fire from a hilltop, but don't know where exactly. Distributing a dozen or two hand-grenade sized explosive shells over the area is much more likely to do harm to the enemy.

This is a photo from Burma in 1942. M3 "Honey" tanks, Queens Own Hussars.

 
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The sighting of the gun is a separate issue. M3 / M5 light tanks could and did hit targets with HE rounds from 1,000 yards +, and that was extremely valuable in combat. Not a panacea, but it certainly helped. Obviously the 75mm or larger is better.
 
WARSPITER said:
I have used an air cooled MG on test and we fired 5,000 rounds with two barrel changes. I can't see how anyone would fire more than a couple of hundred from a tank
when in the jungle anyway as they wouldn't be facing that many troops at one time.
Click to expand...

I'm going to walk this back a little bit. Maybe you were in the military too, you shot some LMGs. Maybe you changed barrels more than you remember doing, maybe you shot a few less rounds than you remember, or maybe you just had an amazing gun and it was a super cold day or something.

I don't know you and I don't want to call you a liar. My experience is I've seen a lot of different NATO and Warsaw Pact machine guns at the range, many times, and I've never seen one that didn't jam or that wouldn't overheat after you should 3 or 4 belts through them. It is also just how physics - metallurgy etc., works as I understand it.

I do know the history of the Besa (and it's Czech origins) and it's a good, reliable machine gun. But in my opinion, and I don't think this is an outlier position by any means, 'reliable' only means so much when it comes to a machine gun.

And obviously no, one machine gun is not sufficient as proof against soft targets like infantry and crew served weapons for a tank.
 
Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
The sighting of the gun is a separate issue. M3 / M5 light tanks could and did hit targets with HE rounds from 1,000 yards +, and that was extremely valuable in combat. Not a panacea, but it certainly helped. Obviously the 75mm or larger is better.
Click to expand...
The sighting system is sort of a separate issue. Or not.
HE would have been an improvement but just HE would not have been as much an improvement as you might think.
The British figured the 7.92mm Besa was good for about 800yds range. The Besa was also rather noted for it's accuracy. The Germans generally figured that the 7.92mm machine guns in
Their tanks was good for 1200 meters or sometimes a bit more. Why the Difference? Also note that tripod mounted machine guns were often good for around 1800 to 2500 yds or more.
Are we to assume that a 40-60lb tripod is more stable than 20-30 ton tank? Different sights? Gun captain uses binoculars to spot the fall of shot?

One reason is that you can lock the machine guns down on the tripod and use a mechanical device to elevate and not you shoulder muscles. You can also use a sight that adjusts for distance. Even the M-60 had one of those.
M3s had an elevation wheel to control the gun, when the gunner let of the elevation wheel the gun stayed elevated at the same angle it was set at, if the tank was not moving.
If the 2pdr gunner took a deep breath the gun went up and down, there was no elevation wheel,

that curve piece right in front of the gunners shoulder is how the gunner actually aimed the gun. the curve went into shoulder and by moving the shoulder up and down he controlled the actual elevation. there was travel which held the gun from bouncing up and down while traveling.

So compared to an M-60 the British tank gunners had a sight that was fixed in elevation and

When firing off the tripod you had a mechanism that would allow you traverse but you had to adjust the elevation with your shoulder. Unlike what the M-60 really had. While guessing how high you had to hold over because your little slider on the back sight was frozen in position.
Stupid but that is what the British gunners were dealing with and by extension the British tank commanders.

Now that I think about it perhaps it was better that the British didn't have HE. It might have encouraged them sit stationary and try to lob the HE into a gun pit while the enemy AT gunner (with a better sight set up and an elevation wheel) walked his shots onto the stationary tank. On a ten tank to ten AT gun match up the odds do not favor the tanks.
 

I know this was not addressed to me but there may have been a difference in training and use.
If you (or me) do not know the actual rate of fire (5 round bursts with 1-2 second pause between bursts for instance) and what was done with the 2nd barrel (Bren guns by the "book" were supposed to fire 4 magazines a minute and swap the barrels every ten magazines, and lay the hot barrel in wet grass or pour water on it).

WW II was lot different than the 50s and Viet Nam. WW II barrels were plain steel most of the time. Some were chrome plated. In the 50s a lot more barrels were chrome plated but if you get the outside to start glowing you start to loose the chrome inside pretty quick. The US unlike just about everybody had started putting stellite (cobalt-chromium alloys) liners in the barrels for much increase wear resistance. The M-60s were supposed to come with spare barrel and an asbestos's mitt help change the barrel (later ones put a handle on the barrel.

yes, if you just run ammo through the gun you can wreck the barrels pretty quick. but there is a big difference if the gunners slow down a little.
Even the water cooled guns had limit. At about 200rpm (roughly 1/3 of the cycle rate) they could hit boiling at 700-1000 rounds and they lost about a pint of water every 500 rounds (?) after that which is why there were supposed to use the condenser cans.

Without knowing the actually firing rate we have no way to judge but any machine gunner that held his trigger down unless in an extreme emergency would find himself toting a rifle pretty quickly.

Edit. > 2 or even 3 machine guns is not sufficient firepower to keep a single tank safe. Which is why they operate in platoons or companies (or with infantry) because you need more than one spotter to spot the threats. It was a common tactic for one tank to hose down another tank on the same platoon to stop infantry from using hand grenades, satchel charges and other improvised devices. Better to take a little bullet splas/fragments through a slot/hole than have something blow up on top of the tank.
A single tank should be getting the heck out of Dodge.
 
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Wild_Bill_Kelso said:
The US 37mm had a cannister round from the get-go, and it was widely used in the Pacific (including from the little 37 mm AT guns). From my understanding there were never enough of those special 2 pounder HE rounds available in the Western Desert.
Click to expand...

US 37mm AP could also take out most Japanese tanks as well. It stands to reason that a Brit 2-pdr could do so as well.
 
A gun overheating too much from continuous fire is the obvious outcome. That is why we didn't. It was fired in bursts as it
should be. It didn't jam because it was kept in good condition.
 

Yeah, I know - you have explained this problem with the British sighting and laying in - and I've shot M-60s from the tripod.
 
Thumpalumpacus said:
US 37mm AP could also take out most Japanese tanks as well. It stands to reason that a Brit 2-pdr could do so as well.
Click to expand...

I never said they couldn't. 2 pounder was a good AT gun. 6 pounder was even better. It's just damn near suicidal to use a tank against Japanese troops without HE. They got away with it a few times with enough infantry protection around them, but it's not that simple. Infantry can be cleared away with a little light mortar fire. Or a few machine gun bursts. Then the tank is on it's own. Anyway, it's just one of those myths that a ton of British guys believe, just like a lot of American guys think we would have won Vietnam if not for x.y.z...
 
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