That’s not an isolated example, either. Consider the Sherman tank, the most common tank used by the US Army. Compared to the German panzers it was up against, or even the T-32, it wasn’t that good a tank, but what it lacked in quality was made up for by quantity.
Dunno, and I don’t think that anyone honestly knows. Radiation is one of those hot button issues where both sides are wont to fling lies with equal abandon. I know that some researchers suspect that burning DU shells is the cause of some cases of “Gulf War Syndrome,” though AFAIK, no conclusive proof of this has been established.
True, but then there’s also the fact that the Japanese War Crimes Tribunals weren’t nearly as intensive as the ones at Nuremburg, even though the Japanese were equally guilty of atrocities as the Germans were.
Well, Cecil’s column only mentions that they gave off X-Rays, which IIRC, can be produced by vacuum tubes without a radioactive source.
You’re right there. I think the link between Uranium dust and “Gulf War Syndrome” is claimed more for heavy metal poisoning, than actual radiation effects, but I’ve not been paying that much attention to the research in those areas.
BTW, the Museum of Quackery has an online exhibition, including the Shoe X-Ray device.
You’re right there. I think the link between Uranium dust and “Gulf War Syndrome” is claimed more for heavy metal poisoning, than actual radiation effects, but I’ve not been paying that much attention to the research in those areas.
BTW, the Museum of Quackery has an online exhibition, including the Shoe X-Ray device.
Not in the sense that we know it today. I doubt, for that matter, that what they did was “invented” in ww2, just implemented in war for the first time. They essentially just used IR floodlights and IR optics to see at night, not the same at all as modern night vision.
I’m not sure this quite makes sense. The armor piercing rounds were basically a chunk of pointy metal, just as they’d always been. Sure, they made some big ass guns, which were capable of piercing lots of armor, but that was just scaling up traditional technology, not inventing new technology.
The British 17 Pdr gun had APDS rounds.
This is the 1 hour history channel documentary version of WW2 and it’s pretty wrong. The US played up the effect and importance of strategic bombing because for a long while it was all it was really doing towards the war effort in Europe. However, strategic bombing was more of a fairly minor nuissance to the Germans than a war winner. Some limited campaigns like the oil campaign of '44 or the transport campaign in France did significant operational damage to German forces, but the general attacks on German industry were largely ineffective in doing any long term damage.
So even if you had a ton of ME262’s and hypothetically stopped the US from using strategic bombers completely, you have little affect on the war overall. Germany might’ve put up a harder fight during the France breakout due to having more transport, or perhaps been able to mount more operational counterattacks due to having more fuel, but it wouldn’t win the war for Germany. At best, the Germans hold western europe more tenaciously and post-war Europe becomes even more dominated by the Soviets.
This is also the kind of glossed over 1 hour history channel documentary version of it. The Sherman was actually a very good tank at what it did. People imagine the main job of a tank in WW2 was to fight massive battles with other tanks, but that’s an inaccurate view, especially on the western front. People like to think of Tigers facing Shermans on an open plain and slaughtering them as if it was typical and then dismissing the Sherman as a bad tank, but really that wasn’t common at all. Shermans did infantry support, breakthrough of static defenses, exploitation, pursuit, etc. pretty well. They were more well equipped to deal with their common threats (anti tank guns, infantry with HEAT weapons) than the german counterparts to some degree, cheaper, and easier to build.
I didn’t mean to imply that the Sherman wasn’t an effective weapon system. What I meant was compared to comparable weapons it wasn’t as good as them. However, plentiful numbers of a decent weapon are far more effective than isolated examples of a superlative weapon. Which is basically what I get you’re saying, too. 
There’s two types night vision in use these days. Active and passive. Active uses an IR emitter to illuminate the area, which is then picked up by the dectector. Passive simply magnifies the ambient light, which is too faint for the naked eye to see. The military uses both, but generally prefers the passive system, since the active system is easily picked up by someone wearing a passive system, and they know where you are. However, passive systems won’t work if there’s no light, so if you’re crawling around in an underground bunker, you have to use an active system if the lights are out and you don’t want to bump into things.
If you’ll read Capt B. Phart’s link, you’ll see that it was the same size as rounds commonly in use, and the Allies had nothing as capable as that round. So had Hitler been more willing to use the round, it could have had a devistating effect on Allied emplacements.
Right, but according to German Secret Weapons of the Second World War they weren’t as well developed as the German versions and weren’t as widely used.
The numbers helped, but it was superior to the tiger (for example) in a lot of the roles it was asked to perform. The sherman had better operational mobility, which is to say it travelled further on it’s gas tank, required drastically less maintenance, was able to go longer distances before tread replacement, etc, which made it far more suitable in an exploitation role. It was generally superior in an infantry support role, having more machine guns and ammo, and better anti-personel shells. It was faster, had lower ground pressure, and was well equipped to perform most of its tasks.
It wasn’t designed to take out enemy tanks at a long distance like the tiger was, and so it wasn’t superior in that aspect, but when comparing tanks, western front combat didn’t often feature such battles. It was far far more likely that a tanker would have to support infantry, attack strongholds, exploit and persue, which it was well suited for. Tank on tank battles on the western front were simply fairly rare and it was well suited for the sort of combat it generally did see.
You’ll hear stories about how one tiger took out a company of shermans, or whatever, and that happened, but people get the impression that this was the norm, and only by throwing mass numbers of our crappy tanks could we get anywhere, when this is a really distorted and inaccurate perspective.
I know, I was just clearing this up as passive night vision is what most people understand to be “night vision”.
Was the technology for infrared optics really developed during WW2, or was it just applied there for the first time?
Ah, I misunderstood what you were trying to say. It’s a specialty artillery shell, not a tank gun shell. It’s a seige weapon - you’d never see it used in some convoluted scenario in which it just happens to be in exactly the right place and right time to pierce a bunch of tanks which were conveniently lined up.
I may be wrong on this but I don’t believe any of the main tank or anti-tank gun armanent on production guns was APDS. They had tungsten cored rounds that were very effective, but so did the US and commonwealth. Which guns does it say that APDS ammo was made for?
I actually saw the plans for how they’d intended for Panzers to use night vision…each tank would have the passive IR equipment, and they’d be accompanied (not super closely, I wouldn’t think) by a halftrack with a large IR floodlight mounted on the back, that would light up the battlefield.
Not the kind of job I’d like to have.
Eh? Dresden? Hamburg? Berlin, even?
That, I don’t know for certain. The only text I have handy which mentions it merely says, “While Germany developed many infrared devices, it left the production of a night sight until late in the day, and very few of these reached the hands of troops before the war ended.”
I’m not aware of any Allied devices of this type, but I’ve not really studied that, so I can’t say for certain.
True, but had it gone into widespread service and the war still gone south for the Germans, they no doubt would have used it against tanks, since at the end, they were literally throwing everything they could get their hands on against the Allies.
The tungsten core was for the taper bore and squeeze bore guns (which weren’t used much, since tungsten was scare in Germany). The Panzerbuchse 41, the Pak 41 and the Panzerjager-kanone 41 used the tungsten cored shells. The anti-aircraft versions of the taper and squeeze bore guns weren’t perfected before the end of the war.
There’s not much discussion of the German sabot shells for artillery as far as caliber goes, though Hogg mentions that they’d use the sabots to fire an 88 MM shell from a 105 MM weapon. He focuses a lot on the anti-aircraft and naval guns. The primary projectile was a 12.8 CM shell, saboted so that it could be fired from a 15.2 CM gun. The anti-aircraft sabot shells were mainly for the 10.5 CM Flak 38 and 39 guns, using 8.8 CM flak shells as the sub-projectiles.
You’re correct.
http://www.linux-penguin.org/achtungpanzer/articles/ir.htm
I was just clarifying that it wasn’t the same sort of thing that most people think of when they think of night vision.
You make it sound like some superweapon that Germany could use to smite her enemies, when the reality is that at the very best it would be a last ditch weapon with extremely limited effectiveness. It doesn’t fit in within the theme of the thread.
Guns of greater than 21cm bore that could launch the shell were also pretty rare and valuable and would likely not be wasted on an implausible and ineffective task like tank defense.
The only reference I’ve found suggests that the pak 41 shot tungsten cored rounds, but nothing about APDS. They’re totally seperate things. It also appears to be quite rare, the pak 41 - the pak 40 is much more common and I believe also could fire tungsten-cored (pzgr 41) rounds, just with no squeeze bore.
I wonder why they would design discarding sabot anti-aircraft rounds, very strange. The velocity of the shell when it reaches the point where it explodes is irrelevant - it’s the explosion, not the impact, which causes damage. A non-DS 88mm AA gun can easily reach the height of B17 formations, not needing extra velocity for that, so I have no idea what the motivation would be for an discarding sabot AA gun.
Well, I mentioned tanks because I couldn’t remember exactly what the shell was for, but I knew it was capable of puncturing something pretty decisively.
Well, the Pak 41 was just a Pak 40 with a barrel attachment, and once they ran out of shells, they scrapped the attachment. Very few of them survived the war.
Higher velocity means that it gets to the target faster, they also have a flatter trajectory than non-DS rounds.