When a tank is hit does the crew burn alive?
There is a youtube video of a t 72 tank is syria getting hit with a rpg 29 anti tank rocket - YouTube after it gets hit a crew member comes running out from a escape hatch with his clothes burned off him. I can only imagine that the other crew members who didn’t have a escape hatch got burned alive, is this correct?
Depends on the tank and it’s armor, what it’s hit with and the interior layout of the tank.
Remember that in some (all?) tanks the various crew members aren’t actually in the same compartment at all.
Nobody could live through that.
Some may get killed immediately by the initial hit or the resultant explosion/pressure.
Burning alive is more common in older tank designs and Russian designs. Older designs would sometimes not provide much isolation between the fuel tank and the crew compartment. Russian designs often lack much separation between the ammo and the crew compartment. NATO designs (and perhaps recent Russian ones) store the ammo in an armored box with a blow off panel which directs the ammo explosion’s blast away from the crew.
I spent some time on a M41 tank. Yeah, it was a long time ago. Biggest fear was an armor piercing round entering the tank and touching off the 90mm rounds inside. The tank commander on top, may escape, if the top was open. But, a fast escape was not possible for the rest of the crew.
Pretty much, yeah. Military service drastically increases your chance of dying horribly.
If they were lucky there was spalling that killed them first. Tank warfare is thoroughly unpleasant.
The tank in the video was a russian made T-72
Sherman tanks during the war were notorious for ‘brewing up’ (catching fire) when hit, so much so that they were nicknamed ‘Ronsons’ or ‘Tommy Cookers’.
As stated it depends on the tank. An M1 has an active fire suppression system, it’s ammo is behind an armored door except for the brief time it takes the loader to extract a round and the top of the turret has blow off panels that are designed to channel the blast if it’s a hit to the ammo compartment. It also has a hell of a lot better armor than a T72.
It’s pretty much certain that a T-72 wouldn’t put much emphasis on crew survival after a hit that was strong enough to take out the tank. Especially the variants the Soviets exported which tended to be one notch below the variants of the same model they used i.e.: the export T-72 wasn’t as good as the T-72 used by the Red Army.
So, yeah, get knocked out quick by the hit/explosion or burn alive (or be really lucky like that guy. I wonder what crew position he had).
I think some weapons are specifically designed for this.
I remember seeing a show on the military channel that described an anti-tank weapon that had an explosive flatten against the tank before detonating, the idea being that the explosion would not penetrate the tank but would cause a “scab” to peel off the interior and send shrapnel throughout the interior.
At least it gets it over with quickly.
High explosive squash head. The counter to this is anti-spalling liner which T-72 might very well have.
In any case, RPGs don’t use squash heads*. Against tanks, they pretty much only use HEAT rounds.
*That I know of. It seems like a squash head would require a large explosive charge which a shoulder weapon couldn’t deliver.
A HEAT round would send a jet of plasma inside the tank, hence the likelihood of burning. A kinetic round would be more likely to send shrapnel or ricochet inside the tank, shredding crew members.
If the kinetic penetrator is made of depleted uranium you also get a fire/exposion:
If the first part of the video is linked to the second part (and what’s the point of putting them together if they aren’t?) then it isn’t a kinetic energy round. RPGs don’t get sufficient velocity to have effective KE rounds.
Those other two tank commanders are horrible - how long did they just sit there in the open after the hit, they should have been moving almost immediately. Lucky for them the “rebels” didn’t have a couple more RPGs.
To add, the advertising slogan of the Ronson lighter was “always lights first time”.
And as a general rule, yes. If you survived the initial hit but didn’t make it out of the tank in x number of seconds, you weren’t going to make it out and would burn to death.
When an RPG detonates, there is a shaped charge that projects a hypersonic jet of liquid superheated copper straight through the armor. I imagine anything this touches will be lit on fire with a quickness.