P-47 strafing a Tiger tank video

[Zimme83]

Depends on what you mean with "scores of prisoners", it did happen that prissoners were killed by allied forces yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_massacre Is one example. Killing of POW was also rather widespread in the pacific war, by all sides.

[save]

Brittish and German's had a better attitude towards each other in general, Waffen-SS excluded.

Read below and make up your own mind.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Bacque/Brech2002.html

[Pongo]

No Tigers were likely never strafed dead by 50 cals.
Yes a western allied pilot could strafe kill anything from an truck to a LVTP and call it a tiger.

Yes if the Germans had won the war Chuck Yeager and many others that fought them would have been in trouble. So would people who did not fight them, and many that fought for them. Defeating the Nazis was win win for everyone.
No there is no real difference between many of the civilians killed by the Luftwaffe and many of the civilians killed by western allied pilots, nor in the morality of the pilots.

[Gman]

Wow, a Pongo sighting.

You coming back to play the beta Pongo?

[lyric1]

No Tigers were likely never strafed dead by 50 cals.
Yes a western allied pilot could strafe kill anything from an truck to a LVTP and call it a tiger.

Happened to stumble across this book today online.

Hell Hawks!: The Untold Story of the American Fliers Who Savaged Hitler's Wehrmacht.

From the link shown online a few interesting excerpts.

A Tiger I’s hull armor was impervious to nearly all American tank fire, and even the 25mm armor on the turret top and rear decking would defeat a .50-caliber round. On paper, .50-caliber machine gun fire would do nothing but rattle the Tiger crew’s eardrums. But there were cooling fan gratings and air intakes on the rear deck, and thin armor on the underside, that might allow a P-47’s sheer volume of fire with its eight Browning M2 guns to score a lucky hit and disable a Tiger’s engine.

“A glance back to the intersection showed the third tank backing to the north about a hundred yards into an orchard. He could wait his turn, I thought.

“The second tank pulled off the main street into a dirt lot between some buildings. When we kept hitting his ventilator grates with our bullets he pulled out and to the east. He then parked between two buildings on the north side of the street. We continued to work on his grates until he pulled out and turned back to the west on the main street. That was one harassed Tiger!

“As the Tiger continued west past the intersection we continued to ricochet .50 caliber bullets into its belly and pounded its grates as before. Finally the tank stopped in the middle of the street and remained there despite our attacks. It was now time to worry the third tank. We made one high-angle attack on the grates of the third Tiger. This forced it to move out of the orchard on to the secondary road from whence it had come.

OK maybe they were not Tigers?


“Next morning we received a wire from the tank force commander expressing appreciation for the attack. His forces took the town without further casualties. They found one Tiger destroyed, the second was incapacitated and it was captured, while the third had gotten away. From this we learned that our guns could cripple a Tiger tank despite its supposed impenetrable armor.”

Ground forces say yes they did find tigers.



http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/thunderbolt-versus-tiger-tank-%E2%80%9Cwrecking-the-german-army%E2%80%9D/

Basically your right they could not strafe it dead but they did knock one out of the fight with 50 cals.

[Pongo]

They certainly could have bounced a round through the grates into the cooling or something that may have stopped the tank and being under contact it may have been lost.
But is that strafed dead and was it a tiger. The US Army actually faced almost zero tigers at all in NW Europe.
Starting in Dec 44 there was an accepted field mod on the panther to make  elevated covers for the intake and out-takes on the rear deck out of pieces of the side skirts. They would not have done that if it was not something that had caused a problem both from strafing and from arty splinters.
Western allied ground attack aircraft grossely over claimed both the numbers of tanks they destroyed(by at least 5 to 1) and the kind of tank they had destroyed.

But if 1 50 cal round of 1000s fired gets into the cooling system and disables a tank and we call that being able to strafe that tank dead, then you could do it with .22s as well.

Both common sense and the effect in the battles tell us that the 50 cal was not a tank strafing weapon, but a magnificent strafing weapons vs most anything else.

[Pongo]

Wow, a Pongo sighting.

You coming back to play the beta Pongo?

I tried it about 8 months ago, may be back again when it gets into production.

[EskimoJoe]

One .50cal is a fearsome enough weapon. I firmly believe that 8 of them firing on a target at once, with up to 16 or even 32 of them (two-four aircraft) could very well sling enough lead to land a round, even a few richochets, and disable a tiger.

Yes, on paper the armor is too thick and the .50 doesn't offer enough penetration, however there are a LOT of things in a combat environment that happen that nobody looking at the papers would ever have believed.

For instance, the use of IEDs in Iraq and then Afghanistan just kinda happened. Nobody saw that coming. It took a few years to develop ways to counter them, too.

I completely see tigers being disabled from strafing runs as a very plausible outcome. Not as good as a few bombs, but good enough. One less tank for the guys on the ground to deal with, the better. Even if it's not fully dead, and even if the crew gets away.

My two cents.

[Ack-Ack]

For instance, the use of IEDs in Iraq and then Afghanistan just kinda happened. Nobody saw that coming. It took a few years to develop ways to counter them, too.

Actually, the reasons it took us time to develop counters for IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan was because we forgot the lessons learned from Vietnam on how to detect and counter IEDs.

ack-ack

[save]

Disabling and killing is very different, you could hit open hatches etc, killing crew members that needs to be replaced.
Tracks will be replaced quickly.

If the tank don't get burnt out it can be reused after repair if battle field conditions are right.

IED's that /killed  M1's where 155mm shells dug in, any antitank mine can disable it.

[Zimme83]

Or the tank can be strafed and unharmed but has to be abandoned for a different reason... A lot of Tigers simply ran out of fuel and had to be abandoned by its crews.

[DaveBB]

Speaking of M-1s, at least one M-1 was lost to small arms fire and several were disabled by small arms fire in the Battle for Baghdad.  The bore evacuator on the M-1 is fiberglass.  Shoot it with a few rounds of rifle caliber ammo and the tank fills with toxic fumes.  The M-1 that was lost had a fuel line hit through the rear deck.  The fuel line dripped continuously onto the red hot turbine engine and started a fire that wouldn't extinguish.

Source: Book "Thunder Run"

So yes, I'd say it would most definitely be possible to disable a Tiger 1 with 50 cal fire.  There are lots of openings on a tank, even on the rare occasion that they are buttoned up.