Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Aircraft and Vehicles => Topic started by: Jag34 on April 23, 2016, 06:25:09 PM
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Here is a topic I find hard to believe, being that I was a tanker for 33 years and retired this year. I know what a .50 cal can do, being I was also the TC for a lot of years. I also know the soft points of a tank, top, rear, underbelly of the tank and the top of the engine deck. Now I can see firing .50 AP into the top of the engine grills and penetrating the deck, but the underbelly of a tank from a ricochet from a .50? I don't know as I have never seen this happen. But, this coming from a WWII Veteran I would normal not second guess them since I was not there.
You watch it and tell me what you all think
https://youtu.be/GmjwK80IpjE
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That's what he said! However, what kind of road would a .50 cal bounce off of and still penetrate a tank? AND, how did they aim well enough to pull that off? If .50s ever did penetrate a Tiger then it must have been a fluke. Meanwhile, Panzers would be a lot easier and since Americans almost never saw Tigers he probably just misidentified his target.
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That's what he said! However, what kind of road would a .50 cal bounce off of and still penetrate a tank? AND, how did they aim well enough to pull that off? If .50s ever did penetrate a Tiger then it must have been a fluke. Meanwhile, Panzers would be a lot easier and since Americans almost never saw Tigers he probably just misidentified his target.
Maybe you did not read what he typed. " I was a tanker for 33 years and retired this year. I know what a .50 cal can do, being I was also the TC for a lot of years. I also know the soft points of a tank, top, rear, underbelly of the tank and the top of the engine deck.". And depending on the angle that .50 hitting the ground, yes it will bounce off.
And he is right. Tank designs worries about side front armored than back and top. Tiger top turret and top hull thickness was about 25mm. That is just enough for .50s to penetrate and take out the turret or engine.
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And depending on the angle that .50 hitting the ground, yes it will bounce off.
Yeah, I read it.
He didn't say that and I dispute it. I also dispute that a .50 could penetrate a Tiger's 20mm at the most likely angle that any fighter of the period would have made. The 10mm of a panzer, yes. Not a Tiger. Even if it had, the damage would have been repairable and not something that would wreck the tank. Again, Panzer different story.
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Back in the 2000s, we had a huge debate over this exact same clip. The consensus, summarized greatly, is that no, 50 caliber rounds bounced off a road could not penetrate the bottom of a tank. Too much energy would be lost, the strike angle would be too shallow, etc, etc. I'm sure the thread still exists, and you can read it ad nauseam.
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Back in the 2000s, we had a huge debate over this exact same clip. The consensus, summarized greatly, is that no, 50 caliber rounds bounced off a road could not penetrate the bottom of a tank. Too much energy would be lost, the strike angle would be too shallow, etc, etc. I'm sure the thread still exists, and you can read it ad nauseam.
Yah is a standard joke on many boards.
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Now Angelina Jolie? She could make that shot.
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I doubt the p47 pilot ever "saw" what damage he did, but creativity never hurts.
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Pilots and fishermen telling stories... :cheers:
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The most a .50 cal API will penetrate is about 18 mm at 500 meters. The Tiger I had 25 mm worth of top armor and bottom hull armor.
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(http://www.fprado.com/armorsite/Tiger1-2002-Picz/Armor_Scheme_Tiger1.png)
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All good points on the armor Tiger obviously being too thick.
I must add though that I wouldn't believe this possible if the tiger had only 5mm of belly armor XD
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Come to think about it. How many Tiger tanks were there? Sure as hell not a dime a dozen. There are many types of German tanks and majority certainly did not have the armor thickness of a Tiger tank either (Panther and Tiger II obvious dose) . Also, i high doubt that these FIGHTER pilots were trained to ID the types of tanks, or for that matter, any German equipment they see. They attacked anything they see fit contribute to the German War machine.
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(http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/fhsw/images/4/4a/PzIVF1armour.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20141203102342)
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From what ive read a lot of German tanks encountered by te Allies became "Tigers" in the reports.
There were ~150 Tiger tanks in France after D-day out of around 2500 German tanks and tank destroyers. So it seems likely that tanks were misidentified as Tigers. If they manage to strafe German tanks w .50:s it were most likely not tigers as said above.
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It's very dangerous to do low level attack on a ground forces in good hiding, specially at priority units they deployed big chunks of 20mm's AAA defending those areas.
1rst SS corps killed scores of attack aircraft's during their campaign at Caen area, confirmed by wreckage's. Due to the difficult terrain the allied fighter bombing where not that effective, artillery however, was sending quite a fews tanks back to the rear for repair.
source "Steel Inferno"
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I'm wondering if the majority of people miss interpreted what the pilot was saying in the video. :noid
Listen carefully :old:
He is talking about a gas trailer that most "tiger tanks" would carry around with them. The gas tanks were armored accept at the bottom. The pilots would shoot @ the trailers, getting them to set on fire and sometimes bouncing rounds up under the trailer gas tank, causing it to sometimes fall off of the armored vehicle and most likely explode.
:cheers:
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Yeah, again most of the tanks that used those trailers were Panzer IVs. Also, again, to most Americans in WWII every tank they saw was a Tiger tank.
EDIT: As to the armored fuel tanks I don't think so. The images I have seen are just fuel barrels. There is no armor on them at all.
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Come to think about it. How many Tiger tanks were there? Sure as hell not a dime a dozen. There are many types of German tanks and majority certainly did not have the armor thickness of a Tiger tank either (Panther and Tiger II obvious dose) . Also, i high doubt that these FIGHTER pilots were trained to ID the types of tanks, or for that matter, any German equipment they see. They attacked anything they see fit contribute to the German War machine.
With all respect, they would have to be trained to ID it for it to be confirmed German so they could attack it.
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With all respect, they would have to be trained to ID it for it to be confirmed German so they could attack it.
Why, they go behind enemy line to take out anything (troops, vehicles, tanks, trains, and yes cattle/sheep/goats and horses) that is a target.
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With all respect, they would have to be trained to ID it for it to be confirmed German so they could attack it.
P-47s unfortunately had quite a few friendly fire incidents on American and British troops. And don't get me started on all the civilian farms that were strafed. Chuck Yeager said it best (I'm paraphrasing) "We better win this war, or we'll hang for what we've done".
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P-47s unfortunately had quite a few friendly fire incidents on American and British troops. And don't get me started on all the civilian farms that were strafed. Chuck Yeager said it best (I'm paraphrasing) "We better win this war, or we'll hang for what we've done".
Americans and British both mis-identified friend from foe from time to time.
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P-47s unfortunately had quite a few friendly fire incidents on American and British troops. And don't get me started on all the civilian farms that were strafed. Chuck Yeager said it best (I'm paraphrasing) "We better win this war, or we'll hang for what we've done".
Maybe Yeager was ashamed of a mistake he made?
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American even killed one of their own Generals and quite a few soldiers in a massive blue on blue.
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Maybe Yeager was ashamed of a mistake he made?
American fighters were strafing everything that could provide any resources to the war effort for Germany. This included civilians. I believe it is Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldier", it shows two beautiful blonde girls. Both worked on a farm, and both had just been strafed by an American aircraft. One was dead. That image was pretty haunting.
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Are you referring to this image? http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1154425 NSFW due to disturbing imagery.
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Hmm, not American at all if so. I have looked in vain for a similar situation with German girls strafed by Americans.
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Are you referring to this image? http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1154425 NSFW due to disturbing imagery.
No. It was definitely France. It was from a book by the famous historian Stephen Ambrose.
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You better be the winner of a war - you will never be charged of things both you and the losing party did, like killing scores of prisoners or stafing civilians.
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Besides the Russians, did any of the other allies kill scores of prisoners?
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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.
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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 (http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Bacque/Brech2002.html)
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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.
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Wow, a Pongo sighting.
You coming back to play the beta Pongo?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.