Tank Chats Special | Pak 43/41 Anti-Tank Gun | The Tank Museum

if you do like these tank chats do please subscribe to the tank museum's youtube channel today i'm standing by the pac-4341 what i'm going to talk about first is the origins of this gun how it got from the camp to the museum the pack 4341 by the side of me started off life when it arrived in allied hands as a gate guardian on one of the mod sites the problem with gate guardians is that basically they're standing outside to all elements we see this with afvs we see this with the anti-tank guns and what happens is the rain the snow etc sits in pools on the actual carriages on the actual guns itself and we get a lot of rust so when this was given to us this has probably been sitting outside for 30 plus years so the team really led by uh les wilkins up at the workshops really made a five-year effort to put this back and restore it back to this fantastic condition that he's in um and it really is a a a proper restoration it also adds another element to our story we're used to seeing the tanks the ant um the armored fighting vehicles but this really shows an anti-tank gun that could hold its own in terms of firepower at that time with the with the tanks that are being developed and it shows the scale of the guns that were being developed as well because this anti-tank gun if you came across it on the battlefield would deal damage just like the king tiger let's talk about the history of the pat-4341 before you get the anti-tank gun you get the arrival of the tank on the battlefield so 5th of september 1916 battles of battle of florical select you get c d companies of the heavy branch the machine gun corps with their mark 1 tanks attacking the german lines now the german soldiers never seen anything like this they don't know how to attack these lumbering beasts that are coming towards them the german field gunners who are effective in the elite unit they treat it as another target they use their fill guns their 7.7 centimeter field gun artillery piece over open sight and start engaging these tanks that are moving at two to three miles an hour and they knock some of them out so for the german field gunners using their artillery piece this is the first incident of anti-tank gunnery it is not a designed anti-tank gun but is capable of engaging the tanks and with their 12 millimeter armor they're over matched by that 7.7 centimeter shell so the first case of anti-tank guns was more by necessity it wasn't a design gun when we get to the battle of comrade 20th november 1917 we are starting to see the development in the german army of actually training troops their field gun troops to engage tanks to be one battery and one commander and specifically a gun effectively stole the advance of the british at the battle of combre and again that wasn't by luck and that wasn't using anti-tank guns that was done by training and knowing how to not knock the tanks out and learning how to do it we also at that time get the development of the um anti-tank rifle the tank gever the germans have seen more and more of the british and the french using um tanks mass use of tanks so they start developing weapons for their units to actually start engaging with so by the summer of 1918 we've seen the tank compare the anti-tank rifle being developed now this will fire a 13.2 millimeter cord round into the actual tank it's basically an upscaled mauser and gives the infantry something to actually use against the tanks coming towards them and these would have been handed around to units during that summer of 1918 it has an effective range of about 200 meters and unless it hits something vital or an individual in the tank it can't do too much damage it's not like the 7.7 centimeter round it can't do that level of damage we really then have to jump up to the sort of late 1920s early 1930s where we start getting the development of dedicated anti-tank guns what happens is though the scale of the actual gun the caliber of the gun actually comes down and you're seeing these guns which with the germans becomes the pac-3536 it's a 3.7 centimeter gun being developed um along with at the same time you start seeing the british two pounder and the french hot 25 millimeter gun now these guns are dedicated anti-tank guns they're very small so you'll get a shield about this high a small gun here and the ability to fire upwards of about 15 shots a minute so they're they're designed to engage um enemy tanks of the time for that period of the the late 20s and into the 1930s these are light armored tanks you're not seeing heavier armor than say 20 30 millimeters of armor and so the anti-tank guns are designed to knock out those types of tanks and they can penetrate roughly around about 40 odd millimeters at say 500 meters that's not fantastic but it's enough to knock the tanks out at that time we move forward then to the start of world war ii and the germans have stolen a march really on especially the british and french they've not only developed their panzer force they've developed this anti-tank their tank hunting capability so they have these anti-tank gun companies being developed you'll have a battalion of them up to 36 of these guns in the battalion and they will be in the vanguard of things like their their panzer divisions there will be the only motorized troops in their infantry divisions at times because you need them to move around the battle because if there's a breakthrough by enemy tanks they can be deployed against them so the germans have really looked at this so you get to um poland in in september 1939 and you get france 1940 and these are effective they can engage the allied tanks that they're coming across and they're able to knock them out they have a four to one advantage in terms of anti-tank guns versus british and french tanks the problem is what you'll start seeing is that gun that 3.7 centimeter gun on the path 3536 is obsolete and so they've started already in the late 1930s and early 1940s to develop the pac-38 this is a five centimeter gun when you see the germans attacking into russia the soviet union on on june in june 1941 you're going to start to see um the germans deploy most of their patent 3536 and starting to introduce these pac-38s because what happens with pat 3536 it becomes known as the door knocker and that just keeps bouncing off um the um the service tanks the t34 the kv-1s the pat3536 weighs about 435 kilograms we then go up to the pack 38 with the 5 centimeter that's now basically doubled in weight that's over 900 kilograms approaching a thousand kilograms almost a metric ton so you're getting a bigger gun but you're getting back to better capability and it's the gun that you will see on things like the panzer 3 l that we have in the museum it has a potency but that lasts only for a short while the problem is is what's happening at the same time is armour's getting thicker on the tanks so you're going to need a bigger gun after that so the pak 38 really comes in in 1940 you're really looking at it around about 1942 43 where it's obsolete again so the pac-40 which has also been developed this really is the gun that you start seeing on the um the panzer iv the later in the later version so the h onwards this is the one where it's really going to have that penetrative power it's going to be able to knock over 100 millimeters of armor at about a thousand meters so it's starting to actually engage things like the shermans and and the 234s at longer ranges the previous guns the pak 3536 and pac-38 have been designed to ambush they were easy to conceal and hide they'd wait till you got close into them and then fire at you the pac-40 is used at longer ranges so they're starting to engage on the front at far longer ranges than they have before and so they're using these guns in a far more aggressive but defensive manner so they're knocking out tanks a thousand meters rather than waiting for a few hundred and so the pac 40 becomes the gun of the sort of german anti-tank troops and that will weigh about 1400 kilograms so you start needing proper prime movers to move it around what you start seeing of course though is the germans are putting these guns onto far more self-propelled platforms as well as their tanks and that means that they've got more mobility the problem with the anti-tank guns is is that they can get out flanked and they can get overrun and it's very hard to actually get the the guns back so with the pak 4341 it actually if you look at it it's actually its lineage it goes back to the flak 88 now that goes back really to the first world war and the german navy the german navy were um had already in its inventory an 8.8 centimeter gun and the reason why they chose 8.8 centimeters is because of the size of the round it was one piece ammunition and the loader could load it without getting too fatigued it was easy enough for one man to to lift if you go up to the 10.5 centimeter gun that's that that round starts getting bigger and you start getting two piece ammunition takes longer time to actually use them the german army in 1916 likes this gun because they are looking at anti-aircraft guns so basically they're looking at the 8.8 centimeter gun as an anti-aircraft gun and that's how it stays it becomes in part of the german army moving forward and so 1920s 1930s you have these flak units being held capable of engaging aircraft at high altitudes what you start getting though is that you start developing in the 1930s as a capability of engaging enemy ground targets so that has that capability the problem for the flak 88 is its height a very high gun you're looking at eight nine man crew it's on this cruciform turntable so it's got 360 degree turntable again for engaging aircraft targets but it gives it a very effective um platform and that gun the the 88 centimeter gun which is an l56 it's the same one on the tiger one effectively it allows it to engage targets at far longer ranges um that we've seen before so when you're getting into campaigns of 39 and 40 the germans are able to use these if needed to engage allied armour that is heavier than the pac3536 can defeat so basically these are able to be used especially like by bromwell's stem firm panzer division at aras along with the artillery they are able to stop the matildas that are coming towards them and this will burst a round through you at 1500 2000 meters and they developed the panzer grenade round the the 39 round which is basically their anti-armor round and that has a small explosive charge just behind the cap so it basically penetrates through your armor and you get an explosive charge into the actual crew compartment so it's a devastating round when it hits you so the flak 88 exists but as we've been seeing the armor on allied tanks in 42 43 etc starts getting bigger and sloped armor coming in it's harder to penetrate with the existing guns they've got and so they're looking at a platform to take the 88 on its cruciform platform as a bigger flat gun and put it onto an anti-gun anti-tank gun platform so they come up with a pac-43 so this is crook really designing this and again it's on a cruciform platform it's got a low silhouette for the size of the gun and it's going to be probably the best anti-tank gun of world war ii especially from the german side of it it has that killing power of the l71 88 which is on the king tiger it can knock through over 180 millimeters worth of armor at 1500 meters plus so it's starting to engage targets at much longer distances and this is what the germans are doing they're building these heavy anti-tank guns and being able to knock targets out at longer ranges the problem for the germans is this gun on its platform is really good but they're getting bombed by allied bombing so basically their production line is being halted and so really what's happened is they produced a lot of barrels but don't have the carriages to put it on so they start looking around to improvise this and what they find is that they've got their 10.5 centimeter howitzer and they're looking at that and thinking actually we if we mount this gun on that carriage that could take it so they start looking at it they mount it at four points and they're able to marry those two together then they're looking around and saying what sort of wheel set could we have and we get the um the 15 centimeter howitzer and they take the wheels off of that so you've got the carriage and wheels from two other artillery pieces being joined together married together and then the barrel being fitted on along with a separate separate shield here and this is how we get this two-wheeled anti-tank gun it is not as low in terms of its silhouette as the pac-43 but the pack 4341 is a is a weapon of necessity they've got the gun barrels they just need to marry it up and this is how you get this gun so it's not the world's best design but it's improvised and it can do a job we've gone up in weight though to 4.38 tons metric tons so it's it's a big old beast it's nine meters long it's effectively two meters in height and you can see that it's about two and a half meters in width this is a hard gun to hide so when you're at the one of the crew members on here or you're the commander of a battery locating these guns is going to be difficult the weight of this this gun the the way it starts sinking in soft ground means that realistically once you've been placed it you are effectively going to struggle to actually um get it out of its position you need prime movers heavy half tracks to actually remove these guns you've got to limber it up it all takes minutes to actually basically take the gun away from its position and by that time you could be out flanked so really you're looking at these guns doing the damage at 2 000 meters plus and engaging the t3485s the is-2s etc this is what these guns are going to be doing as a anti-tank gun this was devastating this would knock out at their records of them knocking out six t-34s over two and a half kilometers away um basically if you can see it you could knock it out with this gun there are also reports of the engine block in a t-34 being knocked five meters out the back of the actual tank at 500 meters this is the power of this gun this will fire um an he round out to about 15 000 meters and the germans were by the late part of the war late 44 45 needing to use as many pieces as possible for their artillery as well so it is being used in that dual gun roll as well but because they're not motorized because they're not on their own um under their own power they are vulnerable to being bypassed and surrounded and just left it has the actual sighting apparatus here for the telescope and the crew behind this double skinned um um basically shield to protect them with you haven't got much protection the actual electric firing penalty on one of the elevating wheels is actually on the elevating wheel there for the gunner when you fire this you're going to get this traveling back about 60 to 80 centimeters that's the recall going on you've got the famous double baffled um muzzle break there to try and divert some of those gases up so you get a little bit less coming back but realistically when this is firing this gun is going to move it's going to jump effectively it's just the problematic that it is so large and it's known as the um the barn door by the german troop because it's so big the other problem you've got with these is barrel wear um the germans knew that with if you use their standard ammunition through this that with the the rifling inside the actual gun itself you would actually have about 500 rounds worth of usage before you went through it so what they started doing is in developing a new driving band on their on their rounds which was sintered and effectively that gave it a life over a thousand rounds they realize that they can't keep going through 500 you know 500 rounds and then needing a new barrel all the time because that's not where they are at that time but it is a very potent effective gun and it's the gun that we start seeing um being developed and put on things like the um the nash horn you'll see it on the elephant you'll see it on the jag panther and you'll see of course on the on the tiger too that is probably pound for pound the best anti-tank gun along with a long 75 on the panther that the germans have it has that devastating penetrative power and it can do it at long range the problem for the germans is they don't really have enough forces to deal with all of the issues that they've got which is um american and and soviet tanks coming towards them along with british tanks so there's a lot of tanks on that battlefield there's never enough guns for the germans to actually engage them all in these difficult times obviously your support is really valued so please do keep following us on social media do subscribe to our channel and and if you've got the opportunity perhaps 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Channel: The Tank Museum

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Rating: 4.9613037 out of 5

Keywords: the tank museum, tank museum, bovington tank museum, david fletcher, david willey, military tank, david fletcher tank chats, tank chat, tank chats, tank chats david fletcher, tank museum bovington, the tank museum tank chats, ww2, second world war, tank chats special, pak 43, pak 43/41, anti-tank gun, artillery, german ww2, german second world war, panzers, tiger, tiger II, king tiger, panther tank

Id: _zJTiw9enEE

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020