Armor quality-Tiger vs. JSII

You know, you really cannot overlook the armor on both tanks either. I believe the armor on the tiger was a harder steel than the Russians could create at the time. Now, I also heard that as the war went on that the Germans could not make the armor as pure as it was when the Tiger was first introduced; so would this mean that it could not withstand large caliber gunfire as in its early years? I do not know.

Any comments to this reference would be well taken.

Henry Hillbrath

I know nobody outside the UK bothers much with HESH, but I've never heard it suggested that HESH doesn't work on hardened armour

The tiger didn't use sloped armour which meant that any shot at it didn't have good odds of glancing of, and the fact that sloping armour actually makes the armour thicker.... So when the Russkis introduced their new hardhitting guns the Tiger quickly became outdated.

Best Regards

Patrik 'Ozzy' Olsson

The Tiger II (or King Tiger) did have sloped armor. The Tiger I was outdated by late 1943 when the Pz V Panther Model A arrived. This mid-stage Panther was faster, lighter, had better armor (by virtue of its sloped frontal glacis plate), and had better penetrating power with its long barreled 75mm gun than the Tiger I.

(in reply to my scribbling)

Lets try that again. HESH, or HEP, or whatever, works great on *hard* stuff. concrete is a great example of a hard material that has a lot of strength in compression, but is lousy in tension. Just the thing that *will* spall.

And, as I understand it, the orignal rounds knocked the backside of the hard plate off. The fact that both sides of the plate were hard was sort of an unintended side effect, anyway, and by annealing the inside face, the spalling could be suppressed.

I was quite surprised that the British were still using HESH in the Gulf war, myself. But, I heard that, also.

[snip about sample of armor with spalling. Let me bring my armor sample to the demo, and my round will work, too.]

I took the Ammo course at the ordnance school in 1960.

At that time, some HESH/HEP rounds (I never quite understood the difference.) had been issued to US forces, then with drawn.

What I said about why the US didn't like them is just exactly what I recall my instructors telling me, but, some of the explantion I added myself, based on my engineering experence.

and, in theory, HESH would be just as effective on a thick plate as a thin one, if the plate were 'perfect.'

Nothing is more deadly than HESH, if it works.

Not such a big swinger

But, HEAT performance can be improved by 'despinning.'

This is sort of a misconception. HEAT is only less effective against non armor targets because it does weigh less.

The blast and fragmentation effect is much the same in all the 'non jet' directions as it is for any other HE round. And, the penetration is great on bunkers.

But, I know from the questions asked by my fellow students, and others, that not everyone sees this, right off.

[snip]

True.

Maybe the most important thing is that for rounds with equal effectiveness, the HESH round, because it can be spun, has greater accuracy, and a greater effective range.

At the time I was at the School, there was quite a lot of 'JS III Dread' among the Armor guys in Germany. The HESH round was looked on as a way to be able to meet the threat, without a bigger gun. But, the US became convinced, and the British did not, that it didn't work. The US answer was HEAT, which did not have very good accuracy, and the only solution was, just as it was in WW II, M4s on Tigers, was you had to get in close.

But, in WW II, that didn't turn out to be a problem. Tigers could not choose, in most instances, to fight in the open, where they could make use of their range advantage, because that left them open to the 'Jabos' over head.

Tanks, by themselves, do not an effective armored force make.

Henry Hillbrath

Henry Hillbrath

They are the same round. For some strange reason the US Army refused to make use of the (correct British designation: APDS. Both are 'sabotted' rounds but neither would really be described as 'long-rod penetrators' in the modern sense. The actual penetrator tended to be a fairly short, thick, bullet shaped affair designed according to the known ballistics of the day.

This is a somewhat hypothetical discussion, but, from what I have been told, the whole idea of HESH started with the discovery that the German armor was face hardened. Which means WWII.

The only example that I know of of actual use was not an AT gun projectile, but the famous 'Garmmon Grenade' aka 'Sticky Bomb.' And, I don't know of any actual results of its use. Sounded a lot more dangerous to the operator than the target.

In Max Hastings book 'Overlord' he tries to give the impression that the American Airborne troops (82 and 101) had no faith in the Bazooka, but thought they could kill tanks with GG/SBs. He even relates the story of some American officer who thought he killed a German tank by bouncing a Bazooka round into its underside.

Not the way Bazookas work, and hardly an issue on the ex French and ex Czech tanks in the area in question.

But, it shows that the 'Fog of War' is for real.

The U. S. troops did have little training, or understanding, of how the Bazooka worked, and why they should have left the Sticky Bombs behind.

Henry Hillbrath

H'mmm...I hope Henry will forgive a correction on Brit weapons terms here: the Gammon Grenade is not the same beast as the Sticky Bomb.

The 'Gammon bomb' or 'Gammon Grenade' was essentially a stockinette bag with a fuze attached, into which one inserted lumps of plastic explosive to suit the task envisioned. It was issued to both British and American parachute troops, and continued in use AFAIK until the end of the war. There was nothing 'sticky' about it.

The 'British Sticky Bomb' was a different weapon. This consisted of a charge of P-E in a bag covered in birdlime, the whole surrounded by a thin case in the form of two hemispheres which was removed before use. This weapon was improvised by MOD 1, 'Winston Churchill's Toyshop', rather than by any official ordnance procurement organisation. It was AFAIR devised around 1940, when plenty of improvised gadgets were being devised as anti-invasion stopgaps. The first demonstration apparently saw one of the developers place the bomb on the back of the target tank and *walk* away, in order to demonstrate that, because of the lack of fragments, it was not too dangerous to the user as long as he remembered to leave the handle pointed away from himself.

I believe both weapons were very effective against WW2 tanks, albeit requiring the user to get within touching distance of the target. As the sticky bomb was a thoroughly unofficial weapon that met almost no existing safety standards, the official ordnance folks quite understandably withdrew it from the inventory as soon as decently possible.

What is normally thought of as HESH, that is, a gun round, was first developed as the 'wall-buster' shell for the Burney series of recoilless guns, developed at the end of the war. None of these saw service in WW2, but they were later developed into the BAT/Mobat/Wombat/Conbat series of 120mm RCLs fielded buy the British army.

Henry and I are currently having a gentlemanly disagreement about HESH effectiveness. As he mentions above, he believes that HESH was developed as a response to German face-hardened armour; Ian Hogg's account in 'The Guns' makes me think it was invented, as the name 'wall-buster' implies, without originally being intended as an anti-armour round. Certainly by the time HESH came into service, face-hardened plate had become a rarity.

All the best,

Hogg (ever he be praised! He's the best author on Artillery development in the 20th Century that I've come across) goes into considerable more detail in his excellent book 'British and American Arillery of Wordl War Two'. You are essentially correct. The Burney series of gun were designed originally to allow the mounting of very large, bunker busting guns for direct fire support in the beach assaults of D-Day. The HESH round was designed primarily as an anti-concrete round. Its effects on armour plate were only noticed later. As you suggest by late 1944, when Burney had finally perfected his guns (taking into account the problems of the wear at the chamber 'throats' of his multi-venturi guns), face-hardened armour plate was indeed a rarity, so perfecting a weapon to defeat it was pointless.