Sniping tank drivers through vision slits before tanks had armoured glass vision ports .

Factual Questions
1

Has there ever been a reported case of small arms fire successfully taking out the tank driver or hull machine gunner either at a distance or at close range ?

This could include machine guns also .

I know that it was quite common to shoot tank commanders when they had their heads out of the hatch, so this is outside of the question .

If this has happened I would assume that it would be most probably in WW2, but any conflict will do .

Tried Googling it with unsatisfactory results , probably because it is an involved question to put into the search engine and I didn’t frame it right .

2

Er…didn’t tanks usually use periscopes?

3

I think the window on this was pretty short; maybe WWI and a few years afterward for US/British/German tanks.

However, a common tactic in WWII for dealing with Russian KV-1 tanks was to get on the tank and fire a submachine gun through the turret vision slit.

4

Some of the World War I tanks were produced with vision slits instead of periscope viewports, but by the end of the war I think most of them had switched over to periscopes. By World War II periscope viewports were definitely the norm.

5

I used to own a tank periscope. I believe the myth is that sniper could shoot the top glass and have the bullet ricochet through the scope just like a beam of light and smack the peeper in the head right at eye level. Being a WWII+ item, it was essentially a steel box with mirrors at the angles and a thin piece of glass apparently designed to keep out the weather but not much else. The lenses were easy to remove & replace, suggesting breakage was not only possible, but anticipated. Not bulletproof by any means. If Muthbusters were to go after this one I think they might call it ‘plausible’ as long as the bullet didn’t just pass right on through the first mirror.

6

In the panic following the German invasion, the periscopes in many Soviet tanks had to use polished steel in place of glass for the mirrors. Mind boggling how crude that must have been.

7

In fact the first tanks were designed and built by The British Admiralty. They were called land-ships though the codeword for them was tank.

A periscope is entirely expected. They later developed amphibious versions with periscopes and snorkels.

8

I don’t think they shot the periscope in hopes of hitting a human, they shot it to break the prism and render the tank blind. It was enough of an issue that tanks carried a few spare prisms just for these eventuality.

ETA: they used mirrored prisms, not plain mirrors. They weren’t exactly thin, they were typically 2" thick and while they wouldn’t stop a bullet they could certain slow the bullet down and ruin the trajectory.