Testing WWII Exploding Ammunition

hey guys thanks for tuning in another video on in range Karl and I were doing some reading for our work on the Z f41 and we came across this really interesting little science subject that I think a lot of people either don't know about or actually think is a total myth that is the use of exploding ammunition by Russian and German snipers on the Eastern Front during World War two yeah it was ammunition that wasn't designed initially for that purpose it was designed to help zero machine guns on aircraft or as a replacement to tracer rounds out of a belt-fed so that you aren't necessarily making a bi-directional identifier from where you're firing from but when it strikes something hard enough it's a hollowed-out projectile with a percussive explosive charge at the tip and then another projectile within it and when it strikes the inertia hits the explosive and it detonates yeah it's kind of like a little inertial firing pin inside the bullet and all over enemy a sniper on the Eastern Front he talks about using this for his definite kill need shot shots yeah so yeah the really interesting thing we ran across was kind of late in the war there actually we found that German orders authorizing snipers to use this ammunition only on Russians if they went to the Western Front they had to turn it in and give it back you can't use it on you know French or British or Americans but they didn't really care about the Russians it was kind of a different war out there yeah so so what was happening is in at least in this book the the Germans were using captured Russian ammunition for this purpose and then kept asking we need this for our German guns and they did they came out with B patron right and issued them B patron I should say and it was actually a specific order from Hitler to only allow it for use on the Eastern Front so there's kind of a question as to how this started and what seems most likely is that individual soldiers and small groups on both sides started using this without authorization at first and that led to both sides claiming that the other side had started it which kind of was true and so then both sides officially allowed its use and kind of a nasty thing well these the the the notations of it in that book specifically discussed some of the wounds yeah and if this works the way the book says it does it's impressive yeah so we went and we found some we got our hands on a couple rounds of original World War two German PB patron and also a few rounds of original Russian World War two it's a P Z ammunition um 90 try and pronounce the Russian words that that stands for but it's the same stuff it's exploding ammunition so we've got a standard 91 30 and basically standard K 98k we're going to do some test shooting with this stuff because we want to find out how well it actually works yeah so so what we have here is we have ballistic soap yep and we also have ballistic soap oh here show and we have a couple blocks of ballistic soap that has a deer speck scapula scapula embedded within it so what you got here is a simulant of meat muscle and a bone so the book kind of references a point when he was aiming at an enemy soldier that he would aim for bony areas to ensure detonation of the round he doesn't say that he infers it but that makes sense and so we have a bone here inside of a ballistic gel or ballistic soap we're going to try and recreate that we're kind of curious if if these cartridges will detonate on hitting just plain ballistic soap which would be the equivalent of a flesh wound will that set off the bullet or not and in case it doesn't we of course have this to authentically simulate hitting a bone and we're pretty sure that'll set it off I hope so we had there we'll get the quote specifically it or maybe I'll embed it in the video but there's a point where she's aiming at a rush and I believe it's an officer but he specifically aims at the pelvis and he says that in the book so that's why we're coming to this conclusion so a little bit gruesome but really kind of an interesting subject something that hasn't been covered very well I've never seen anyone cover this before I mean I've heard of it but never seen video and ever seen coverage of it and hopefully we're the if not the first ones maybe were the first ones to bring it to you guys so all right well we're going to start out we make sure we know the exact zeros on these two rifles so that we don't want to waste any of this stuff by missing it was expensive yeah so and then we're gonna try it out first on the bear soap and then on soap with bone and hopefully with some slo-mo footage do oh yeah we got that slow-mo camera out for this guy mm-hmm all right well let's get to it let's do it all right we fired our first round of beep patron into this ballistic soap we did see a puff of smoke indicating what seemed to be a detonation now that being said there's not a huge explosive hole in the soap but at the same time the actual entry and exit hole in the soap seems to me at this moment a little larger than I would expect from just a standard ball round so without hitting bone my theory at this moment is that we did see an effect greater than that of ball ammunition but we're going to see a greater effect even greater effect on bone I think we should fire one ball round into this and see if the the wound channel is similar or different my premise is that it's going to be a much smaller wound Channel all right let's do it okay this is standard Yugoslavian surplus 196 grain ball nothing special about this we're going to punch another hole through the soap and see if it looks the same all right clear let's go take a look all right my theory was completely debunked 196 drained ball ammunition and the bee patron exact same entry and exit wound channel no difference at all in fact the ball looks a little larger so if it detonated it may have detonated behind the soap or if it detonated in the soap it didn't do anything so there may have been enough of a delay that it detonated absolutely and we need it behind the soap yeah I really think the bigger difference is going to be on the bone which we're going to find out in a minute but between ball and bee patron on a flesh wound no effect nothing all right let's move on to the bone yeah let's do it all right we just put a 1939 round of B patron through ballistic soap with a bone and there was another puff a blue smoke just like we saw with the soap alone but the wound channel is absolutely unaffected it looks like standard ball ball ball ammo simple entry hole simple exit hole directly through bone I mean there couldn't be a more Center shot on that bone and we saw the smoke it was very clearly indicated on the video it was it was there it definitely acts differently when you see it hit but when you see the impact on the ballistic soap and the bone then the way you did anything frankly it looks like we could have been ball ammunition I don't know what to make of that considering what we're reading in that book so this is original World War two German ammunition on bones and it smokes but nothing all right well yeah we have the big block of gel that is we we may want to save that a nice big thick chalk a ballistic soap maybe these are just too thin although in the book he referenced is someone getting hit in the wrist and it exploding and blowing their hand off yeah not according to this I don't see it let's try the Russian and see if it performs any different I'm starting to wonder if soldiers in the field we're attributing magical attributes to this cartridge when it really a ball around would have done the same thing yeah well let's find out all right so we got our shot with the Russian ammo entry hole looks pretty much the same as the German but the exit hole is definitely bigger and it definitely fragmented that bone it did some nasty stuff there it definitely detonated we saw the same little bit of puff of smoke I think what we're going to do next is put a ball around through the bone like right up here and see how that injury compares to this guy that should give us an idea of just how much effect we actually get from the exploding bullet all right so this is our exploding round or peasy round this is plane ball and see the entrance wounds look pretty much identical when we turn it around we definitely have a larger exit wound from the exploding mo and what's even more interesting to me as you can see that the bone down here is fragmented into a bunch of small shards the bone up here just has a clean hole through it can you see that yeah so the Russian explosive ammo is is definitely having an effect here a fairly significant effect I'd say that's throwing shards of bone around in a way that the ball ammo doesn't do at all now it's interesting when we bought this ammo a couple different collectors that we talked to who had actually used it told us that the Russian ammo was a lot more effective than pretty much anybody elses but definitely more effective than the German and that fits exactly with what we're seeing so far so what do you think Carl would he want to do next do you want to put a German round through that big huge block yeah let's put a German round through the giant block and see what we get for when we have more penetration yeah base more space for the bullet to do something all right so far everything we've done was on a relatively thin piece of ballistic soap and we thought the bone would be the agent that would cause the round to detonate now this was a German round and at first glance and Ian said all you hit low and the cinder block exploded I did not hit low now this penetrated the ballistic soap and after two three four inches of penetration it absolutely exploded it exploded in the soap you can see the trajectory it did not yawl into the concrete which is one of my suspicions it did not it detonated in the soap and when it detonated in the soap it made this concussion blast which subsequently broke the concrete so well bullet hole in the concrete is no bullet hole in the concrete it did not you will take some stills to prove it did not y'all in fact when we came over here it was still smoking so now that we see this let's we Rican clued some other conclusions were fast ah I have to suck it up this was me I was operating the slow-motion camera and we did not get this shot on slow-motion so we're going to try it again we're going to run around through the jello this direction and make sure we get slow-motion coverage of this one totally kicking myself that we didn't get this shot round two on our last round of German beat patron we did the same thing into the jail or into the soap and we wanted to get a really dead center shot actually previously you may not believe this I shot low and left trying to conserve the ballistic soap for another round turnout I shouldn't have done that because it went off so this time we went red dead center you can see the entrance wound and this is perpendicular to the previous shot it is perpendicular this is a de Seine block of soap but nowhere near the original impact you can see the entrance wound is here standard entrance wound this thing went off it still broke the cinder block it absolutely did not yah because the exit wound is contained as a consistent circle there is a bigger than fist sized cavity in this block of ballistics soap and a bulge on the left this would be call your temporal wound cavity right this is your permanent one I guess whatever I'm not a balloon position ballistic soap retains the permanent cavity so this is retains the temporary cavity perfect okay so this is temporary cab regardless it's bigger than a fist in the centre of this ballistic soap this is way way more than ball ammunition impact capability this the shock wave alone fragmented the cinder block and you can see again a fist-sized hole in this ballistic soap and we should point out when we first came up right after the shot there was still smoke whirling around and inside the block and you could smell the explosive compound so we've come to learn is it's not bone related maybe bone could help it is just penetration related and when it goes off it ends your day that is pretty horrific yeah it's truly horrific yes did this this does match the descriptions in the book of this ammunition and its effect on soldiers we're going to read a few little bits out of it later but I'm going to rescind what I said earlier there's nothing magical about this the Russian stuff on the bone did do more but when you get just enough penetration it it's devastating devastating all right we got one more we need to put a round of Russian through a nice thick pieces we're going to put around a Russian through what we're going to do is we're going to take a couple of the blocks and just put them together so we get enough density and we're going to probably see I'm hearing from what you're saying even more significant effect so let's find out all right so we put these back together in the configuration that they were when we fired the round this is our initial entrance hold the the bloom here has flattened out because this fell on its side so we have that for the entrance that's the exit just like our first round through a thin block this didn't do anything in particular in this distance this is only about two inches here's our second hole our second block there's our entrance there's our exit at this point it's starting to get a little bit bigger and we have this black residue which I believe is explosive residue is detonating so this about half way through this is when the round actually detonated which would explain why on the first round with just the thin block we had it detonate after it had left the block of gel that's our second here's our third this is where we really get the actual catastrophic effect that's our in entry hole that's our exit gaping I don't even know what to call that crater the bone has been shredded there's bits of bone in there we can see more of the the black explosive residue and you know obviously if there had been more past this it would have been even more catastrophic the target this stuff is was advertised to us as being more effective than the German and thinkin that's fairly accurate it's easier to detonate it did actually detonate on a bone the first time and it has a pretty horrendous wound channel there conclusions conclusions are we were confused at first because when we fired on the thinner ballistic soap with the bone inserted I was quite certain the bone would make the difference and it wasn't and so that's why I made the statement maybe they were attributing mystical qualities to this ammunition but when we fired into the larger ballistics of getting about four inches even the German stuff to say devastating described it doesn't it under s it really under describes what it did yeah yeah in fact it's not it's interesting that the the problem we had detonate n't really with the sensitivity maybe of the the firing mechanism in the bullet the problem was actually that the time that it took for the inertia to have an effect to actually detonate them we mentioned earlier in the video a feast on the couple first rounds we fired where it went off and we said maybe it went or postulated maybe it went off after it went through the soap right still flying through the air and I'm pretty sure it did yeah what happened is it hit it was going off and as it exited it detonated behind yep there's that little time frame required for the firing pin to strike the primer compound in the bullet right now and that starts as soon as it hits the gels but it doesn't actually explode too so what I think we found today and this is not conclusive but I think the German stuff is a little harder to detonate yeah but once they detonate the damage was pretty much the same a giant this size or larger wound cavity yeah the Russian did detonate on the ball yep the German did not but both of them after just about four inches of ballistic soap went off with impressive results so I I have to say it's real I don't want to get hit by either one there's nothing to do with magic here I said earlier that maybe they were they were attributing magic to it and the ball I mention would've done the same no no this stuff is absolutely everything he said about it and more on the soap I mean it blew off and destroyed a cinder block next to it yeah so and that wasn't the bullet hitting that's I think some people aren't going to catch that maybe the first time we go through it that was actually the shockwave of the explosive shattering the cinder block which that this gel was sitting on we did that twice one time I shot low and left trying to preserve so which was ridiculous because when I detonated was no preserving it anyway but we thought well maybe a yard and hit the cinderblock but we looked and it did not yeah but we did another one anyway to prove that and did a dead center shot on another big thickness of soap and it definitely did not y'all in fact the you can see the exit holes the size of what was a six-inch access huge yeah something like that and the cinder blocks still fractured underneath it from the shock wave right so devastating in fact we shot some steel just to look at it and you can see it's kind of got a lot of the e coyote Looney Toons explosion on it but it's that's a r500 steel and it not still right over and it made it impressive smoke cloud yeah so it's real well yeah so we got a couple things first off we know for an absolute fact that this am you know ammo it's real ammo it's not this isn't ordinary ammo and this is authentic wartime production for both the Russian in the German we know for a fact that these were used in combat we haven't found documents in for Russia but we have actually found reproductions of the documents for Germany authorizing use of this ammunition and we know for a fact that it actually worked it did as much or even maybe more than people said yeah there's a couple little snippets here from sniper on the Eastern Front in this instance he's go ahead let's just clear this to make sure people may not be aware sniper on the Eastern Front as a memoir written bicep Allen burger yep it was the second highest scoring Nazi sniper in the Second World War for a mock sniper baby yeah hair yeah at anybody he was authentic been there done that sort of guy again from his book it's a couple snippets here so in this instance he was actually observing from a different location where there was German prisoners and the Russian was getting ready to start just killing the prisoners he decided to engage them and in this instance that the soldier that was captured the German infantry as the Russian lunge with a final deadly thrust his face passed momentarily into my crosshairs and I fired the German inferred infantryman stared almost incomprehensible at the burst head of the Russian destroyed by the explosive round bone fragments and strips of cerebellum and sprayed the Germans face in uniform a combination of fear and relief at his unexpected salvation sees the man that's what that was exactly what would happen if someone got hit in the head with it we have one more guy right it does get gruesome and horrific but it's it's accurate see if I could fry those little okay with regard to the ports of the task in hand I decided to expend one of my precious explosive rounds I prepared the weapon and waited my chance for the final shot at one hundred twenty twenty metres distant the target had filled my sight the shot rang out and hit through our respective optics the NCO and I saw the white fur cap swell like a balloon and burst like an overripe watermelon that's pretty horrific again but that's pretty accurate too that big chunk of ballistic soap was still the density or size of a head yeah and the hole that the cavity that we formed in there was bigger than a fist much bigger yeah the whole inside of that block was holiday that memoir absolutely corresponds with what we experienced today with this ammunition so I'm gonna if there's no magic here this is real the stuff is absolutely everything he said it was yeah so you were saying earlier that you're glad that they're not using this in war anymore I want them using it on me well I wouldn't want to be shot with a 22 and true oh you know that's interesting thing you know these this kind of stuff is outlawed I guess by I guess you could say would be the Geneva Convention a law pax Hague yeah Geneva all that stuff that gets blended they can't anything that's going to prohibit you from using a hollow-point is definitely going to have some issues with using so what we're using open tip match that's different regardless but that being said I don't know what to say about that that's a philosophical statement but you know on the Eastern Front it was the concept of total war it was and but you know what's funny about that is I don't know what the difference is between war and total war when you're a victim in it so much I don't know that it matters and things like the The Hague and the Geneva Convention are niceties that attempting to civilize something that's just not civilized to begin with doesn't make sense to me so we can have a difference on that one I don't see any reason why not to use it you're fighting a war and you're shooting somebody your goal is to kill them and that's what this stuff did yeah yeah anyways you guys can have that debate later thanks for watching guys hope you enjoyed it tune back into n reign for more real world testing you

Channel: InRangeTV

Views: 1,004,622

Rating: 4.913198 out of 5

Keywords: Exploding Ammunition, World War II (Military Conflict), Germany, Russia, USSR, CCCP, Soviet, PZ, Bpatrone, B-patrone, beobachtung, WW2, WWII, sniper, Finn, Simo, Haya, Hahya, Soviet Union (Country), explosing, Geneva, high speed, slow motion, ballistic, gel, soap, bone, wound, kill, snipe, eastern front, Mauser, K98k, Mosin, 91/30, war, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, forgotten weapons

Id: AXaaybiRiYY

Length: 21min 37sec (1297 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/Genchri]

Some time ago we had quite a few discussions about low calibre HE-rounds, namely the MG 131.

Now in the video, the rounds used are not from an MG 131, but the German 7.92 mm B-Patrone, which we also have in game, in the German 7.92 mm Machinegun default, universal and stealth belts. I thought this might give people a bit of a point of measure when talking about smell HE-shells.

[u/KriegerKojote]

I've heard Finnish sniper Simo Hayha took a Soviet 7.62mm PZ to the face, but "merely" slipped into a coma for the rest of the Winter War. It's usually been referenced that he was shot by an "exploding bullet" from a counter-sniper, and PZ fits that description. That man was one tough cookie.

[u/EVFalkenhayn]

Didnt even see the vid, its InRange!!!!!