I olny found a anti mine tank with the name Scorpion, but is a british Matilda.
To be fair, that particular problem wasn’t down to a design fault with the Sherman but to the way it was operated. The Allies were having supply difficulties with ammunition in Normandy, so the Sherman crews started carrying a lot of loose ammunition inside the tank. While the proper ammo storage had water jackets and the like to protect the charges and shells from blowing up, the loose ammo had no such protection and hence this would brew up very, very easily when hit. Once the breakout from Normandy occurred and supply improved enough that crews stopped doing this, the problem more or less went away.
Name one other western (or indeed German for that matter) tank with sloping side armour. The only one I can think of is the Valentine, and that was hopelessly obselete by the time of Normandy.
Happily, on condition that you in turn tell the infantry that they’re not allowed to have tank support for their attacks because you’ve radically cut down tank production to make life a bit safer for the tank crews. In terms of overall casualties, the Infantry will suffer 10 times worse casualties for lack of tank support than the tankers will suffer through having an inferior tank.
Remember that the performance limit on the Sherman was weight driven, and that in turn was driven by landing craft construction methods. The only way to get a tank heavier than a Sherman ashore is to use full on naval shipbuilding techniques in a proper shipyard. Shermans and smaller can use mass-produced in a factory type landing craft. I can’t quote remember the numbers, but that difference is worth something like 1-2 years in getting Overlord launched as well as something like 10 times as many tanks getting ashore.
Considering the penetration power of the Panzerfaust a sloped armor wouldnt made much difference.
Sorta-kinda. If you’ve got sloped armour then the rocket is more likely to simply glance off or maybe have the plasma jet not pointing straight into the tank. There’s a benefit in protection terms, but you lose a lot of internal volume and hence the whole tank is significantly heavier for the same internal volume (internal volume is fixed by the crew, habitability and firepower requirements).
It’s also worth noting that no modern tank I’m aware of has sloping side armour…
The JS-2 used sloped armor in almost every corner…the panzefaut still get trough.
Interestingly a solution used wich had some effect was a solid layer of sandbags, since the sand steal a lot of the heat produced by the Panzerfaust hollow charge reducing penetration, however was useles agaist kinetic energy projectiles.
Agreed P.K. The speed of the shaped charge jet stream is too fast to be distorted by sloped armor. By the time the delivery vehicle (rocket body) can begin to bounce away, the stream has penetrated the armor, and done its mischief.the burn time for the charge is 20 or fewer milliseconds,and stream velocity was certainly over 20,000 fps,(modern stream velocities are 30-35,000 fps.) so velocity at impact, and angle of incidence, are irrellevant, it will make a hole.
Sorry, you misunderstand me - I was referring to fusing issues. There is a chance (probably not a big one, but I don’t know anything about Panzerfaust fuses) that sloped armour would cause the warhead to bounce a bit before firing the fuse. Hitting dead-on perpendicular is more likely to set the fuse off.
I know. But the namesake stuck. Of course the gasoline engine didn’t help though. But then again, the Panther also ran on petrol, so it’s hard to fault US planners for that, even though a diesel version of the Sherman was available. Whether the engine was too difficult or expensive to produce in numbers, I do not know…
Name one other western (or indeed German for that matter) tank with sloping side armour. The only one I can think of is the Valentine, and that was hopelessly obselete by the time of Normandy.
No allied tanks, although indeed the Pershing had a very low hull profile as did the Centurion. But of course, the Centurion never saw combat and the M-26 was only used in small numbers at the tale-end…
And no Panzers had sloping armor, but the Jagdpanzer did:
And the Panther had some sloping armor, though not all-the-way around.
But one thing German tanks did have was modifications such as track skirts and applique armor which could somewhat negate the first shot of a 2.36" Bazooka round…
Happily, on condition that you in turn tell the infantry that they’re not allowed to have tank support for their attacks because you’ve radically cut down tank production to make life a bit safer for the tank crews. In terms of overall casualties, the Infantry will suffer 10 times worse casualties for lack of tank support than the tankers will suffer through having an inferior tank.
I don’t agree with that at all, mate. The real problem here was in the US strategic planning in the use of armor, and some fundamental mischaracterizations of the use of tanks in The Battles for Poland and France.
One of the central problems was the core belief that tanks would not fight other tanks, and the Sherman was designed to destroy infantry and battlefield fortifications while rapidly maneuvering as tanks destroyer battalions of both men and machines would take care of the offensive threat posed by the panzers. Not everyone in America felt this way however.
There were essentially three convergent planning factions regarding the use of armor by US, and by default, Allied nations. The US Army’s Ordinance Dept., the Armored Forces Board, and Army Ground Forces Command. The OD wanted to mount a heavier 90mm gun in the Sherman, while the AFB wanted to produce a limited number of M-26 Pershings (about 500 or so) as sort of a complement not unlike how the British Army fielded numbers of 17-pounder “Firefly” Shermans to augment the relatively weak 75mm gunned M-4s…
The criminal here (for lack of a better word) was Ground Forces Command, that essentially refused to up-gun Shermans or deploy heavier tanks because they mistakenly believed that tank killers units and AFVs such as the M-10 would be sufficient to do the job. They weren’t. GFC even went to the extent of forbidding any modifications of the M-4, cannon wise, brilliantly reasoning that tankers with heavier, high velocity guns, would neglect their primary missions of fire and maneuver and merely seek duels with panzers.:rolleyes:
Remember that the performance limit on the Sherman was weight driven, and that in turn was driven by landing craft construction methods. The only way to get a tank heavier than a Sherman ashore is to use full on naval shipbuilding techniques in a proper shipyard. Shermans and smaller can use mass-produced in a factory type landing craft. I can’t quote remember the numbers, but that difference is worth something like 1-2 years in getting Overlord launched as well as something like 10 times as many tanks getting ashore.
Sorry man. But it was flawed doctrine, not production, that was the problem here. The industrial capacity of the US would permit quick upgrades of the Sherman to reduce losses. But few were undertaken until the flaws in that doctrine were realized. I really don’t think it was too much to ask that at least 50% of the versions of the Shermans deployed by D-Day be either the “Easy-Eight” or Firefly models. I also believe the US Army could have deployed a few hundred Pershings to the ETO had they really wanted too without great difficulty. While I realize there were space and weight limitations on sea transport, and at least a number of 75mm Shermans were desirable since this was more than adequate to provide fire support to infantry, I highly doubt production or timetables were the problem. Getting them across the Atlantic or the channel, maybe. But the number of Shermans produced was in far excess of what was actually deployed or needed…
I agree. Most were probably fired point-blank by German SS and Wehrmacht concealed in the hedgerows…
In any case, they could have fired them into the rear engine compartments or simply knocked the tracks off…
Correct. Allied tankers also used logs or field modifications of add-on metal plates. And of course, track skirts or applique armor, the kind the Germans mounted on their numerous upgrades of the MKIV panzer, may also have minimized the damage…
The problem was ultimately solved by the combination of using hedgehoppers (forks mounted ad hoc on the front of Shermans), bulldozer variants of the Sherman, and the creative use newer tactics and explosives to circumvent planned German positions and defenses…
I get what you are saying, and on the surface, it may seem probable to have that happen, but Shaped charge warheads are all base fuzed, the initiator is in the tip, usually some sort of piezo device,but firing trains of various sorts could have been used. which would then trigger the base fuse, starting the formation of the stream.The explosive filler must begin burning from the base to properly form the shockwave in the filling, and create the stream. This process happens within a few thousandths of a second, not long enough to allow for any real deflection of the warhead.The entire process taking less than 20 thousandths of a second to finish the job.
Its all just too quick. Even in cases of extremes of impact angles, the failure to function rate would be insignificant.Initiator function is designed to work at any attitude, as long as the initiator strikes the target. As to what damage it will do, that depends upon what part of the vehicle is before the stream when it forms.
Sorry, you misunderstand me - I was referring to fusing issues. There is a chance (probably not a big one, but I don’t know anything about Panzerfaust fuses)
it was a normal base fuse as the standar hollw charge proyectiles, it is possible that the grenade could bounce but not likely, the Panzerfaust projectile is slow so his fly path is a parabole, and if well aimed the grenade should hit the armor in a descendat trajectory…thus eliminating the effect of a sloped plate.
Correct. Allied tankers also used logs or field modifications of add-on metal plates. And of course, track skirts or applique armor, the kind the Germans mounted on their numerous upgrades of the MKIV panzer, may also have minimized the damage…
And sandbags, a lot of sandbags, note this M4 Easy Eight in France, 1945.
Nah. That’s just camoflauge, so the Germans thought it was a roving bunker.
The sand was very fashionable in those days, this is a 76mm Sherman from the 25 Battalion, 14 armored div.
Notice the cage bars on the side, for detonating a Panzerfaust warhead before it hits the armor…
Sloped armor was intended to defeat kinetic A.P. by deflection. If it did begin to penetrate the plate, the round would tip into the the plane of the armor. The axis of the projo would rotate to a more perpendicular attitude. while this is a function of the mechanism of penetration, it also loads huge amounts of lateral stresses onto the projo, the hope being to cause it to fracture, and break up, defeating it. This is the concept in use with the modern multi layered armor used by Nato forces. (in the case of kinetic rounds) Shaped charge is another story.
I’ve always been puzzled about “shells bouncing off the armor of the Tiger or Panther” thing.
Wouldn’t say, even the basic 75 mm gun of the earlier Shermans, which could penetrate some 76 mm 30-degree sloped armour at 500 yards, have been able to BORE at least halfway (and cause quite a bit of damage) into the German tanks’ frontal armor, rather than simply “bouncing off” ?
Frankly, I don’t think the German tanks were really that much more heavily armored than the Shermans, with some 5 to 6 inches frontal, despite being angled, and the Tiger’s front wasn’t even sloped, so I am quite puzzled about their famed “invincibility”.
The Sherman, while having 2 1/2 inches of frontal hull armor, had a relatively good slope of about 45 degrees.
Its a matter of physics, A projectile, whether Ap shot, or shell, is several times longer than its diameter.As it impacts the target plate, the point, (ogive) rapidly decelerates as it pushes into, and begins to force the armor plate to flow around it. The rest of the projectile, is still moving, compressing the body of the projectile towards the point. If the point for whatever reason cannot move through the plate quickly enough, the moving mass of the unencumbered part of the projo will begin to tumble, and spin the projo off in some other direction,or the combination of compressive, and lateral stresses will become too great, and the projo will break up losing all of its energy. in the case of an AP shell, the fuze delay may initiate the filling too early, or at least before the projo passes through the plate, destroying the projo. lastly, if the armor just stops the incoming round, it will bounce back (equal and opposite reaction) away from the target, leaving what dent it may, and nothing more.
sloped armor can help defeat kinetic AP. but in the real world of a tank to tank fight, the relative angles of flight trajectory, and vehicle attitudes on uneven ground surfaces, may negate the benefits of sloped armor as much as support it. Hot rolled face hardened welded armor is much tougher than cast armor (similar thickness) of the same period. The advent of shaped charge warheads made all of the forgoing a mute point. There is more to it than this, but I’m typing on the fly.
A couple decades ago a accquaintance did a analysis of possible angles of forntal armor and turret gun mantel or turret face. He set paremeters for likely vertical angles or pitch from the ground surface and for horizontal angle or yaw from the axis of a attackers gun barrel. After running several thousand examples though the program he observed that the larger percent of the time the angle increased vs decreased. I never got a look at his numbers but got a description from him and another who used the analysis for a miniatures game of tank on tank combat. They told me he tried several different ranges for possible difference in horizontal angle and found that the average angle increased significantly, unless the probability of a strict headon aspect was especially high.
3 images of a Sherman tank commander bailing out wounded of his vehicle after being hit by a 75mm round from a panther in the city of Köln (Cologne) 6th march 1945.
That’s from the film “High Noon in Cologne.” The tanker’s leg was severed and he bled to death…
The Panther was stalked, then destroyed by three consecutive hits from an M-26 Pershing’s 90mm gun. It burned for three days…
I think George posted the YouTube video of the sequence in the Pershing thread…