76.2 MM Sherman Main Gun

I just talked to a man who was in tanks during WWII. Specifically he was in Shermans in the US Army and when When I asked him what gun his tank had he said it was a 76 mm gun at which point I asked it if was the Firefly (the British Sherman with a 76mm). He said no, and that it was 'a Russian gun'. I know that the US also had Shermans with 76 mm guns but this is the first I have heard of it being a Russian gun. The Sherman in question was probably an M4A3.

Q1. Was it a Russian gun? (Since he was a company commander I tend to believe him)

Q2. If yes, was it a Russian gun supplied under a reverse Lease-Lend?

Q3. Or was it a Russian design built in the US?

Q4. If it was a Russian gun was it the one that was carried by the T-34?

If you have any information on this gun, please provide sources since I am researching this myself also.

Thanks!!!!!

******************************************************* *************

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot; ******************************************************* *************

The gun in the 'Firefly' Sherman was actually a 77mm British '17-pounder.' A very fine gun that the Germans really respected. They concentrated everything they had to knock the Firefly's out first. The 77mm had a very high muzzle velocity, greater than the German '88' and not much less than the 75mm Panther gun. The Firefly was entirely a British modification. They converted what tanks they could by doing some cutting and welding on the turret, moving crew positions around (they had to cut a second hatch in the top of the turret so the ammunition loader could get in and out), and as I remember, had to rotate the gun 90 degrees to fit it to the mantlet. In their wisdom, and with awesome predictability, the tank experts of the US Army declined to adopt the British innovation, telling General Ike that the '76mm' (originally a US Navy 3-inch gun) would handle anything the Germans had. (This is mentioned in Bradley's autobiography 'A Soldier's Story.' Of course it could not

the real shame was that the british 3.7' anti-aircraft gun was superior to the 88 and it was hardly ever used in an anti-tank role and nwasn't converted into a tank gun. at alamein the brits had a 1000 3.7' sitting there doing nothing.

Yes, the Firefly mounted the 17-pr, but Mr. Picky would like to point out that the 17-pr (true calibre 76.2mm, mounted in Firefly, Challenger, Achilles and Archer) and the '77mm' (true calibre also 76.2mm, mounted in Comet) were not (quite) the same gun.

Sort of, but Mr. Picky adds that a request for 17-pr Shermans was made to the UK, and that the US 3-inch 'Naval gun' (mounted in M-10) and 76mm gun (mounted in M-4 and M-18), despite again having identical calibres, were not the same gun.

Apart from the British 3.7in and American 90mm AA guns, of course...

Not WW2, but I think most people have been using fin (APFSDS) these past ten or fifteen years, no?

No argument there.

All the best,

No, no, no and no, in that order.

Hunnicut's excellent 'Sherman' is the definitive source on the Sherman and its armament. I can't imagine where the idea that the US 76mm was a Russian weapon came from.

All the best,

No.

In the future, I suggest you be a bit more careful about where you place your faith.

AFAIK, the Western Allies *NEVER* got anything from the Russians in return for Lease-Lend, or whatever.

In my personal experence with the Russians, I think this caused us a whole lot of grief. Giving anyone, especially the Russians, without 'consideration' causes you to lose respect in their view. The Russians are great at negotiating, and we never gave them a chance to haggle.

In the outer banks of North Carolina, some idiot introduced the Nutria (or Corpyu ) , an animal something like a beaver from South America, despite it already having been found to be a pest in Louisiana. In North Carolina, they are called 'Russian Rats.' The US 76mm gun was just as Russian as a Nutria, which is to say, not at all.

It was not the same as any Russian gun, whatever.

The US had a number of 75mm guns going back to the 'French 75' of the late 1800s. At least two of these guns were used in tanks. The next tank, or AT, gun that came along, that was exactly the same size, was called the '3 inch' gun. The next one was called the 76mm, it was exactly the same size.

The British also had what I call '3 finger' (as in' 3 fingers of Scotch' or 3/4 of a 'hand' to avoid confusion with other 'nominal' designations) guns. The first one was called the '17 pounder' gun.

This was exactly the same size as the US 75 and 76mm guns, sometimes said to be 76.2mm which is now exactly 3 inches. No dimension of anything is complete with out the tolerance. I don't know what the tolerance on any of the bores was, but certainly 0.2 mm was meaningless, probably 2mm was, also.

Then they developed another one, and they called it the '77mm.' It was the same size too.

None of these guns had anything to do with any Russian gun. And, nothing to do with any German gun, either. And, not a lot to do with each other. All together, there must have been at least a dozen '3 finger guns' used by various powers in WW II.

The greatest source of information on WW II AT guns is the paper written by our own expert,. John Salt.

Henry Hillbrath

Dear John (again):

Now that is 'picky.' Isn't an APFSDS also an APDS, but an APDS is not an APFDS? And to really get picky, shouldn't we then in the interests of accuracy, discriminate between the material used in various models of these projectiles: tungsten-steel, stintered tungsten carbide, and staballoy (the depleted uranium stuff)? The principle that is common to all these (that the British invented

It looks like it was not a Russian gun. Now I can ask why it was called such. It may have been a design that the Russians wanted on the tanks we supplied to them.

I am and was very aware that people get mistaken ideas and that this might have been one of them. I posted my questions to get some accurate information and some references. So far everyone who has directly answered the questions has said it was not a Russian gun.

I am aware that the Russians gave very little back (if anything) unless you count their tying up the largest segment of the Nazi war machine. But there was a small amount of reciprocity (like allowing the western Allies use of airfields a few times) and the question was obvious to ask if the gun was truely Russian.

So far that is the general opinion. I was not sure since I had never heard of a 'Russian' gun being mounted on a Sherman either. But there is always the possibility and I have learned that just because I have never heard of something (however unlikely) does not mean that there was nothing in it.

******************************************************* *************

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot; ******************************************************* *************

'FS'=Fin Stabalized

The original APDS rounds were spin stabalized. The advantage of fin stabalization is that longer, skinnier penetrators can be used which cannot be stabalized by the regular twist rate.

There are many other subclassifications that can be brought in, also. However, it goes beyond picky to require that every possible thing be said about everything. Picky only requires that what is said be *right*.

All WW II discarding sabot projectiles used stintered tungsten carbide, so there is no need to distinguish between the materials in that period.

'bore'?

And, again, to be picky, what the British invented was the idea of having the sabot seperate. The Germans had already used sabots. In some cases, they were 'rigid' sabots. APCR. Armor Piercing Composite Rigid, in British designation. This is the type that the US used exclusively in the WW II era. There is no great disadvantage to APCR at short range.

The Germans (well, actually, I guess they were Czechs.) also developed the 'squeeze bore' concept. This is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the development of ammunition. The squeeze bore, contrary to many statements by all sorts of people, including Ian Hogg, *does not* cause the projectile to go faster. What it does is provide a larger base area to facilitate high velocites in the bore, and then reduces the base area before the round exits the bore to reduce aero losses.

As soon as the British had the idea of dropping off the sabot, rather than squeezing it, no one ever looked back to squeeze bores, which would not have been the case if the squeeze did result in higher velocites.

The US did develop shaped charge rounds, but I don't buy 'fixated.' There are disadvantages to shaped charges, as there are to all other types of projectiles, and the US, at least in the era that I was involved, really looked on them as a sort of stopgap, specifically, a way to counter the IS-III with the 90mm gun. (If you could hit it. Lack of accuracy was one disadvantage of the fin stabalized shaped charge rounds.)

Not to my knowledge. In fact, the British were not much interested in shaped charges at this time, and had a romance with 'squash head' rounds, which the US was not much interested in.

And when the US finally added APDS, I

'UK??'

The US 'finally' added APDS (HVAP-DS in US designation) sometime in the late 40s or 50s. That was not that long after the British developed them, and made the US the second power to adopt them.

The HVAP-DS round for the 90mm gun was a US development, and used a different method for seperating the sabot than British designs (I can no longer remember the details of the design.) The 105mm did use the already developed British design, and possibly some German designs.

Well, I just gave you the short form, anything else you want to know, just ask.

[snip]

[snip]

[snip]

I know about German machine guns that had that high a cyclic rate, but no Allied ones in the WW II era.

something here. But, I fear that there is a problem with designations.

IIRC, the US called the very same idea an 'incindiary' projectile. And, in US service, they were ubuqutious.

They consist of a round with a bit of filler that consists of a fuel, a powered metal, like aluminum or magnisium and an oxidizer probably potassium nitrate. When the projectile hits the target, the filler is crushed and the resulting heating is sufficent to ignite the mixture. No fuze. No detonator. Ballistics was about the same as the standard round, but not quite so good due to the lower density of the filler.

Whether incindaries 'explode' or not is a matter of definitions. ('It depends on what you think 'is' is'.) It certainly does not 'detonate.' After having argued this many times, I learned that Webster's and other standard sources allow definations of 'explosion' as weak as 'makes a noise.'

So, I don't think the DeWilde was a romantic, mysterious, or as effective as you have gotten the impression that it was.

Henry Hillbrath

Dear John:

Sorry for the confusion. I did not mean to have anyone confuse the two 77mm British guns. The Comet gun was a shorter barrel gun to fit the smaller turret of some of the British tanks. Nomenclature is difficult to get right. Let me try again with the following data from (who else?) Richard Ogorkiewicz:

British 17-pounder: 76.2mm; v=2950fps; 3950fps (APDS): Sherman Firefly and Centurion I ' 77mm: 76.2mm; v=2575fps: Comet US 75mm/L40: 75mm; v=2050fps: Sherman M4 ' 76mm/L50: 76.2mm; v=2600fps: Sherman M4A3E8

The earlier US Navy designation for the 76/50 was '3-inch/50. You can see two of them on the quad of the naval base at Port Huaneme (sp?), CA. Later in the war, the gun was fitted with automatic loading machinery, but cam too late to fight the kamikazes.

2600fps was the muzzle velocity on the standard APC anti-tank round. However, the muzzle velocity on the HVAP tungsten core round had a lot more giddy-up, about 3,400fps. I would think the older 76 (3 inch naval) had a similar surge in power when using the HVAP ammo.

As far as I know, HVAPs weren't available until 1945 and never available in quantity to most US tank crews.

Source British and American Tanks of WW2 by Peter Chamberlain & Chris Ellis Arco Publishing, NY 1969.