How did tank guns get so deadly? | Evolution of Firepower

armor fatah Mobility this is what we call the on triangle the essential components of the tank [Music] please remember to like subscribe or click the little notification Bell if you don't want to miss out on these videos and I'd just like to say thank you to all our patrons for making this possible please join them if you can in this episode we're going to be looking at the evolution of Firepower from the first world war up the present day and specifically the main gun the main Armament of the tank it's a history which mirrors the changing role and requirements of the tank on the battlefield from supporting Infantry to fighting other tanks now this is a massive complicated subject and all we can give you here is an overview so if there's anything you think we've missed out or anything you'd like to hear more about please leave a comment below [Music] the beginning on the Som in 1916. a stale mate of trench warfare demanded an Innovative solution machine guns and barbed wire resulted in huge infantry casualties in no man's land that's why we see the invention of the tank first used by the British Army in September 1916. they were to provide close fast support for the Infantry smashing through defenses and barbed wire so the troops could follow in behind and exploit the gaps the tanks have made British heavy tanks in the first world war and this is the last surviving example of Mark one which is the first type of tank ever to see action come in two types there are males and they're females and they're designed to solve two different problems on the battlefield now the females are machine gun armed first of all Vickers guns then Lewis and then Hotchkiss um they're different weapons the uh Vickers gun is belt fed the other two are magazine fed the thing they've got about them is they've all got roughly the same rate of fire roughly 450 to 500 rounds a minute now I have a bus like that hits you at close range it will more or less cut you in half females were effectively mobile machine gun nests designed to pour fire on the enemy defending their trenches the males are armed with six pounder guns like this a Hotchkiss qf6 pounder and the job of these males is to knock out German concrete fortifications originally used on warships these fired a semi-armor-piercing round that weighed six pounds or roughly two and a half kilograms um now we call in the British army we call this a six pounder that's the actual weight of the shell it fires but the other description would be a 57 millimeter gun and what that is is the diameter of the bore of the barrel so you can either have a six-pounder or a 57 mil they're exactly the same thing inside the tank the Gunners one on each side use body weight to Traverse aim and fire the gun maximum range was supposed to be 5000 yards that's about four and a half kilometers but you wouldn't stand a chance of hitting anything at that distance actual range was more like 200 yards yards um that's less than 200 meters and if the tank was moving it'd be a lot less the six pounder Gun Barrel also had to be shortened by just under a meter as the longer Barrel would plow into the ground as the tank moved but this didn't impact accuracy to any great degree at Short ranges while the story of the tank in World War one isn't one of universal success there are a good many instances where they perform superbly at a tactical level supporting infantry from their first use in 1916 when a male tank neutralized a machine gun position that was preventing the Infantry securing the village of Fleur at combri in 1917. where the tanks knocked a hole in the Hindenburg line six miles wide and three miles deep and during the spectacular British and Commonwealth advances during the last 100 days of the war which opened the door to Ultimate victory but before the war ended there'd be a battlefield encounter that would show the way that Wars would be fought in the future in April 1918 British mark IV male encountered a German a7v storm Panzer in the first tank versus tank engagement after some maneuvering firing the mark IV was able to score three hits on the a7v which killed several crew members and caused the rest to abandon the vehicle it's worth noting the mark IV had to stop in order to fire accurately and this is probably because the Gunners weren't Adept at firing on the move they certainly weren't trained to fire a moving Target and definitely not another tank lessons would be learned [Music] by the time of World War II the role of the tank has changed it's not just about supporting infantry knocking out fixed fortifications now tanks have got to be able to fight other tanks tank and anti-tank guns were designed specifically to destroy enemy armor they were designed to fire an armor-piercing round usually at the stage solid shot at High Velocity to punch through the armor of an enemy tank in response tank armor was made thicker and in response to that guns had to become more powerful to penetrate them and this went on throughout the war explaining why there are so many different types of tank designs emerging and falling out of use between the mid-1930s and mid-1940s and you can see this in our World War II Hall in the early part of the war quite a few British tanks like this Matilda II like the Valentine were armed with the two-pounder tank gun and this is the round that it fired um it's actually not quite as bad as it looks this is a high velocity armor-piercing round and this will penetrate up to two inches of armor up to about 500 yards and that actually Compares pretty favorably with some of the other weapons of the period things like the pac-36 the German anti-tanker and the French 25 millimeter Matilda was really rather loved by a cruise thick armor um good protection and she could deal with the Enemy tanks of the early War period things like Panzer one two three um that Italian 1340 over there um the problem starts when bigger tougher enemy armor starts turning up and we're talking about things like the Panzer four that inflates is the point where the poor little two-pounder has had its day with so many British tanks armed with this gun there was an attempt to make the two pounder more effective this is a piece of Kit called the Littlejohn adapter it's an extension to the barrel it uses a technique called Squeeze bore this increases the pressure behind the round when it's fired to almost double the velocity at which it leaves the muzzle increasing its ability to penetrate armor it was a bit cumbersome to use and required its own ammunition so it didn't really take off and the two pounder needed to be replaced the Matilda was too small and too slow to be upgunned so after a moment of Glory in the western desert Matilda was obsolete by 1942. however it's contemporary the Valentine was able to be upgunned to carry the six-pounder a number of Valentines were also converted to carry the 17-pounder anti-tank gun as Valentine archers where their effective Life as a tank was over of course there are quite a few examples of Tanks being successfully up gunned I mean you can think about the Panda 3 uh the fans are four here and I suppose probably most famous is the t-34 and that gets a bigger turret a bigger gun and the t-34 76 is transformed into the t-34 85. throughout the war there is still a major need for tanks to be able to support Infantry most of the 50 000 odd Shermans that are built uh were equipped with this this is the M3 75 millimeter gun that's a good weapon in many many ways it's based on the French 75 millimeter field gun from the first world war um and in terms of supporting Infantry it's very very good at firing the 75 millimeter high explosive shell foreign with ap it can also deal with quite a number of the earlier German tanks I mean certainly Panzer III Panzer four things start to get a bit sticky when it encounters the heavier German armor of the latter part of War I'm probably thinking about Panther and tiger here the heavy Reliance on the Sherman tank by the U.S and British armies made this a major issue the US Army would eventually upgun their Shermans with a more powerful 76 millimeter gun the British army wanted to get something in place before D-Day so their solution was to shoehorn The Proven 17-pound anti-tank gun into the Sherman turret this was incredibly difficult as the 17 pounder was a much bigger weapon and it involved chopping the back off the turret and Welding on a bustle and the breach had to be redesigned to open sideways rather than vertically and the crew had to drop from five to four but the result was the Sherman Firefly which would far a 17-pounder armor-piercing round which will penetrate up to 162 millimeters of armor at up to a thousand meters and it is extremely bloody heavy I really don't know how in the confines of that turret you could load this into the breach of the gun around 2 000 Shermans were up gunned as fireflies the British Commonwealth and polish units and deployed as one per troop of conventionally armed tanks it's a solution famously demonstrated near Cong in July 1944 when a firefly of the northamptonshire Yeoman Rim destroyed three tiger ones in 12 minutes five rounds now the tiger itself was built to pack a punch Tigers famously designed around the camphavagan konona 36 tank gun and that itself was derived from the flak 36 anti-aircraft gun that had been used with great success in the early stage of the war in an anti-tank role because it's got an enormous muzzle velocity just about a flat trajectory now a big gun needed to be mounted in a big tank so here you have an instance of a proven anti-tank weapon influencing the design and the final size of the vehicle that is mounted in and this is the ram that it fired this is the 88 millimeter and this was capable of spoiling the day of lots of Allied tank crew I'm feeling really quite privileged to be sitting here in the Gunners seat of tiger 131 next the breach of the kwk 36 gun the 88. um the whole thing here is that as guns improve naturally so does gunnery ranges increase so in World War one you're looking at 200 yards maximum to achieve a hit on the target probably rather Less in World War II that's going up to in some cases over a thousand yards um although in combat positions it's generally the average is around about 500 yards uh but 10 points okay cool things like turret Traverse times are improving as well we're looking at perhaps 15 to 20 seconds for a full 360 degree Traverse we also have improvements in things like gun stabilization it won't get to the stage during World War II when it's possible to accurately far on the Move that's going to happen well post-war there's also other things I mean things like improvements in gun sites and particularly German tanks things like the Panther and this tiger magnificent Optics adjustable magnification and graticules that are make it possible to accurately gauge range and obviously that's extremely important in terms of accurate gunnery as tank guns grow bigger and more powerful their appearance starts to change now this Churchill is mounting a six pounder gun and on the end there's a counterweight and that's a very simple piece of kit it's a heavy weight and all it does is to balance out the gun so that it's easier to elevate and depress manually something you do find on a lot of tank guns are fittings like this now this is called a muzzle break and what that is it's all to do with dealing with recoil now remember Newton's third law bit of physics for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction so the shell goes that way the gun jumps back if you've ever fired a rifle you'll know it kicks back into your shoulder but if you scale that up to something like a tank gun that can be a big problem because the amount of force coming back at you is enough to damage the gun and its mountings now what a muzzle break does it's just a very simple fitting but it's got vents at the side facing slightly backwards when the gun's fired some of the muzzle blast comes out sideways as I said slightly backwards and odd as it may seem that is enough to damp down up to 50 of the recoil the rest of it is dealt with by the hydraulic recoil cylinder on the gun mount itself World War II is the period when the tank as a weapon system really comes of age and you've only got to look at the contrast between this early War Matilda one and this late War Comet to understand that the other thing is that even by the end of the war we haven't come up with something termed the universal tank and that's a tank that's capable of fulfilling all necessary roles whether it's fighting other tanks or infantry support or whatever [Music] will be dominated by the main battle tank tanks that can engage a variety of targets from armored to soft skin Vehicles infantry buildings and fortifications inside both this this is the chieftain main battle tank from the 1960s and later on the Challenger one was the royal Ordnance factories l11 120 millimeter gun it was regarded as the best tank gun in the world when it was introduced and it certainly brought with it some Innovations in fact a challenge one mounting the l11 gun holds the record for the longest tank on tank kill knocking out an Iraqi t-55 at a range of 5100 meters I'm here in the loader operators position on the left-hand side of the turret of one of the British Army's Chieftain tanks and this is the breach of the l11 gun now the l11 um is a rifled gun 120 millimeter gun and it can fire armor piercing rounds it can fire high explosive rounds um it can also fast smoke now the armor-piercing round most common use in Modern Warfare is one of these and this is apfsds what that means is of a piercing fin stabilized discarding Sabo uh it's a bit of a mouthful so we quite often call it a thin round just for short what it is is Central bit is a DOT of a very very dense material something like um tungsten alloy or very often depleted uranium that is enclosed by a Sabo what that is that's a jacket that actually guides it down the barrel when it leaves the barrel the Sabo falls off and the dart continues on to the Target Dart is traveling at up to 1 800 meters per second or four thousand miles an hour and the effect of this slug of extremely dense material traveling incredibly fast produces catastrophic amounts of kinetic energy the round will penetrate tank armor fragments of Armor Plus the round itself will shred just about everything in the Target area crew systems you know it depleted uranium is also pyrophoric meaning that white hot fragments of the round ignite were there burn out the vehicle interior if your vehicle is hit by an apfsds round chances are you'll be shredded incinerated or both now you'll see that this is a very confined space and owing to the increasing size of modern tank rounds what we do these days is to split the round and the propellant into two so you learn the round to begin with and then you load something called a bag charge and this gives us a bit more flexibility because this this is a half bag so this is what you use with something like a hash round long low LOB and then this one is obviously drill Chargers this is a full bag so that's the maximum amount of propellant and that is what you'd use with a fin round with apfsds because that's going to have maximum force behind it increasing ranges and you know we're talking well over two kilometers here but the need for better technology togs the thermal observation and Gunnery site used on Chieftain and Challenger one enables enemy assets to be targeted at night in poor visibility and at extreme ranges it's obviously a great advantage in tank combat to be able to far on the move but what do you need for that what's called a fully stabilized gun took an awful long time to get right and first uh British designers and then so yeah techno designers came up with a stabilization system the stabilization system uses gyroscopes and Servo Motors but if you keep the gun straight and level as the Tank's moving but if you couple that with laser range trying to say and a Gunnery computer you have got a weapon you've got a tank that can fire and hit another tank while both the target tank and the firing tank are moving when you start looking at modern tank guns like the l30a1 on this Challenger 2 main battle tank there are even more humps and bumps um now to start off with if you look at the jacket around the barrel that is thermal cladding and it's a bit like lagging around a hot water pipe or something like that um what that's all about is if there is um some sort of external Factor like an icy Breeze blowing from One Direction or Fierce sunlight it might cause the barrel to warp slightly now this is going to be submillometric but if you are aiming at a Target that might be a few kilometers away that is enough to to make a difference you then got the big bump in the middle that's what we call the fume extractor now when the gun fires the barrel will fill with poisonous fumes if you open breach they'll flow back into the crew compartment that's not very good for the crew so what the fume extract is all about are inside it there's a circle of holes actually drilled down into the barrel when the round comes up the barrel the vacuum created pulls all the muck into the fume extractor and that acts as a reservoir when the round leaves it flows out at the end uh it's pulled out by vacuum and you can see this if you watch a tank gun firing the gun will Recall come forward and there'll be a little puff of smoke at the end that is the fume extractor venting itself then you've got the little cap right at the end of the barrel now under that there is a small mirror this is what we call the Mrs the muzzle reference system now the reason we got that is that tank guns and sights need to be very precisely aligned quite obviously and they can be knocked out but using the Mrs the Gunner can look through his sights and adjust the sights accordingly so that the gun and the sights are in precise alignment the Challenger 2 gun can fire APF SDS and can fire smoke or can fire these this is Hesh high explosive squash head what this is is Dustbin load of he fired with a half bag charge and a long low LOB now what you quite often use this against is structures soft skin vehicles but you can use it against enemy armor as well a hash round impacts on the armor vehicle and detonates the transmitted Force blasts a very nasty and destructive scab of metal off the inside of the armor and sends this flying into the vehicle interior the only thing about Hesh is it has to be fired from a rifled gun and that's why the British army almost uniquely at the moment still fits rifled Ordnance to its tanks everybody else has gone smoothbore because you don't need a rifle barrel for um APF SDS you don't need it for high explosive anti-tank um I mean what rifling's all about is um their grooves cut down the barrel they describe a quarter turn on the way down and what that does is it spins the round and it makes it more accurate more stable in flight however it's expected the British Army's Next Generation MBT Challenger 3 will mount a smooth ball gun put it into service later this decade finally bringing the British army into line with other NATO countries in this video we've seen how the far power of the tank has become far more accurate more devastating much more sophisticated the science of tank Gunnery has come A huge way since the mark one the first world war almost sort of point and go techniques right the way up to that long-range Gunnery feat achieved by the Challenger one in the first Gulf War [Music] as Battlefield technology evolves so will the need to come up with even more new and ingenious methods of destroying enemy targets if the tank is to remain relevant for another Century I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please like and don't forget to subscribe [Music] 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Channel: The Tank Museum

Views: 1,626,544

Keywords: Bovington, Dorset, Tanks, Tankfest, tanks, tiger, chieftain, tank museum, second world war, world war two, top five tanks, tank chats, david fletcher, british army, tiger 131, royal armoured corps, tank regiment, RAC, tank museum bovington, tanklife, bovingtontank museum, military history, ww2, ww1, armoured car, army, veteran, wwii history, world war 1, world war ii, war history, royal navy, ww2 history, royal air force, wwii museum, wwi, ww2 tanks, ww2 weapons, firepower, tank gun

Id: 8XWAktvFZGI

Length: 26min 18sec (1578 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023