Why Tankers preferred 75 over 76mm

okay hello everyone we are today here with Josh at kaneo at the reenactment and he's an expert on what the to our a talk and we're standing in front of a 105 Sherman and what often comes up is usually that people complain why the US forces didn't went into Normandy with a 76 millimeter gun mainly employed and he brought up some very interesting data that actually the troops for the most part preferred the 75 millimeter correct so there's a there's a little bit of information there to unpack the 75 millimeter has some very interesting attributes that the troops actually preferred and thought were really cool if you wanted to engage enemy armor obviously the 76 millimeter would be the one to use for it they found in North Africa when it was on the ballistically identical 3-inch gun it could penetrate the front of a tiger one from a distance of about 1,300 1,500 yards that's in both ballistics reports done by the middle of the US and the British and then it's also in after action and combat reports by US tank destroyer battalions so the 76 millimeter 3-inch gun was a very good gun at least in terms of a 1943-1944 gun for anti-tank use but when they tried to offer it to the tankers that were going over into Europe a lot of them were not interested in it and there's a very intriguing reason why a lot of that has to do with target analysis so in 1951 there was a study done it the document is Aurra t 117 it was done taking a look at comprehensive results of tank combat during World War two and as part of that they studied what were tanker shooting at and they found some very interesting statistics one of the big ones was that during world war ii they found in the eto only about fourteen fourteen point seven percent of the time were they actually shooting at enemy tanks in enemy armored fighting vehicles most of the time they were actually shooting at everything else fortifications bunkers infantry so on and so forth so basically a lot of times we always think to do various computer games and those movies that tanks were finding tanks all the time but with you which is inaccurate and also the behemoth is always portrayed as this mighty force with Panthers patrols in 1944 they had way less already also a logistical situation due to interdiction everything was quite different so US troops are mainly fighting infantry and 45 positions well they were fighting some tanks but what were they for what they were fighting and what they were you know what was heavily armored to be an April 'm was not nearly as what you think when you take a look at say like how many tiger ones were deployed in in in hot zones that had tigers for examples the lobo quotes and patents in the pant versus the Panzers he thinks about 60 tigers at any one time in North Africa and Italy which they had several battalions deployed over there and you look when they work when they were deployed like for example in Sicily they deployed 17 tigers and they lost them literally in the space of the energy so basically a tiger heavy battalion was about 45 tanks nominal strength how many then were operational is something completely different again so if you're fighting like two or three battalions at most you have 90 to 135 Tigers at most right opposition well then yeah it's becoming less right and if you take like the Panther which was one of the other significant threats they think about 300 to 450 Panthers were actually operational in the European theater of operations still running the numbers on that one but of those we have to ask how many of them were actually able to show up for fighting so if there's 350 to 400 different Panthers in in theater some of them are gonna be in maintenance Depot some are gonna be held in reserve some are gonna be on the frontline some of them are gonna be being repaired how many are actually gonna show up in battle especially when you look at the u.s. logistics and realize that about on some days they were they were fielding as high as like 2,000 Sherman tanks per army group so if they could show up and contest an area of ground with the tank they'd win by default I mean who shows up with tanks is gonna win but to that point there's an interesting thing that a lot of people forget about when it comes to us faint guns so in 1946 they did a a look at us entered us high-explosive artillery which is interesting because around 80 percent of the rounds fired during World War two were high explosive either smoke or high explosive and that was all sites us British Canadian German they were all shooting a lot of high explosives yeah and if you wanted to sling a chi at somebody which tink gun would you want in the background here I have a 105 millimeter and obviously that would be the one I would totally want but why why would I want that so if you take a look and you run the numbers of that the study took and they took an artillery shell they put it in the centre of a testing range they blew it up and then they counted in a 20-foot radius all the shrapnel that could produce a casualty and they counted it up and there was some really interesting takeaways of it so obviously if you wanted to cause shrapnel casualties you would do so with 105 millimeter they had around one thousand and ten shrapnel pieces that they were able to count and say that these could produce a casualty in the 20 foot radius that's why the hundred and five was so successful against say I anti-tank guns because you hit anywhere close to it you're obviously going to kill off some of the crew but the surprise second place comes into the 75 millimeter because it's also a howitzer it's a short barrel low velocity gun you can have a larger longer shell that holds Morici filler and that one came in just behind the hundred and five millimeter at nine hundred and fifty pieces of shrapnel in that twenty foot radius now they obviously tested other guns too because they were curious about this when a nine he came in in third place at six hundred and seventy two pieces of shrapnel in that twenty foot circle and the worst performer out of all of them was the 76 millimeter which came in at five hundred and sixty pieces of shrapnel sixty less than half of that of the of the 75 millimeter so if you're shooting at what the normal target was for forests or a tanker of World War two you're gonna be shooting at you know enemy vehicles half-tracks you're gonna be shooting at soldiers fortifications bunkers the gun that you wanted in most of those cases was probably going to be the 75 millimeter or the 105 millimeter not that the 76 wasn't a bad gun it's just it was more designed to defeat the armor armor that theoretically was or was not there in the numbers that might some people might think about yeah I mean I know that the British did in the tank platoons to edit one usually with a Sherman fire flower along if the US forces did the same not in the not in the same way that the Firefly did they did try and reload our rearm people with the 76 millimeters but then they also had support with the tank destroyer groups so the tank destroyers were designed to be kind of held in reserve now obviously no plan survives contact with the enemy so they found in you know Normandy they were short of tank so let's use tank destroyers it looks like a tank it clanks like a tank it you know putts around like a tank those commanders are like let's throw it into frontline combat in the in the hedgerows of Normandy didn't turn out so well yeah I made a video about that one right right it didn't turn out so well but it was still successful in that role and they did have that if they needed a little bit more oomph in order to do that and that's not to say that they didn't react to that in the meantime they were testing as early as 1942 they were testing mounting a 90 millimeter anti-aircraft gun onto a onto a a platform that they could use which didn't see fruition for many reasons one way or another it didn't see fruition until 1944 when you had the m36 jackson now obviously the ideal for the tank destroyer was one of the other vehicles we have in the collection which was the m18 hellcat which had the 76 millimeter gun again designed for that fast can go up to 55 mm or 55 miles per hour in combat conditions has portion bar suspension made by Buick apparently they made more than just cars but it was kind of the ideal that the Hellcat or that the tank destroyer branch was looking for so and also we should not forget you also have hollow charges as you pointed out before you can use the hollow charge shell on the 105 of course it it has several disadvantages because hollow charge usually has a very high a part yes deep arc of trajectory and everything but the penetration value is also very high yeah and one one issue they didn't realize is because these are howitzers there's still a rifled barrel they didn't realize at the time that you kind of diminish the hollow charge effectiveness if you impart spin to it yeah so they kind of fudged themselves a little bit now that's not the best not to say that they didn't have success with it they found out when they were testing it in in combat there are or there are examples in late 1944 of the howitzer arm tanks taking out a Panther frontally I believe they hit it like either in the front or in the mantlet and that was about six to eight inches of armor it had a very very effective heat shell yeah and also if heat shells I mean this is pointed out in a in the stork in the best suits Luke's core video that the Chairman's noted okay the disadvantage is the hot snip trajectory but you can also use a heat shell against the infantry to a certain degree because those explosive high explosive anti-tank as the name yes lies so which also fits there so in in doubt you shoot Dan you probably killed something or damaged something correct and actually there's a there's an interesting story about a cheat so in Africa North Africa most of the British tanks up to that time the they had the two pounder gun which is a great gun and it had an 80 shell but it wasn't commonly used and if it wasn't commonly used it wasn't actually issued a lot apparently was enough that people from from World War two thought it was fairly rare or they hadn't seen it if you look at the if you look at memoirs interesting enough one of the first vehicles to introduce that was the m3 Lee which was armed with the same 75 millimeter gun which gave them tremendous AE capability which they used in that same thing they were able to take out anti-tank guns from a fair distance away without fear of reprisal like they had it previously because you had to have a direct hit if you have a solid AP projectile yeah you have to hit on the shield or you have to hit somebody with an H II actually gunnery mannose from World War two teach a near-miss is almost as good you can actually skip a shot yeah so you can do a super quick fuse or you can do a timed fuse a time delay yeah and if you aim short you can skip the shot up and have it burst yeah yeah yeah and actually they taught that it there's a fair amount of almost field artillery usage that's taught to the tankers of the day and it's interesting I mean this is very interesting I did a on on my chairman Robert or Terry tactics video basically they had two bouncing shell as well of course it's more of artillery part and also like for the stronger shoots they know that in instructional if land use delayed fuse ideally and mine effects basically yes the the shell penetrates and explodes - I found to be less effective now statistically speaking that same study looked at earlier which was orti 117 they found that hollow charge only counted for about seven and a half percent of German armored vehicles that were recovered the startling interesting piece about that too is that was about the same number that aircrafts accounted for everybody thinks of these fighter bombers not gonna die on tanks but they didn't they they found that about 40 percent were knocked out via gunfire and about 40 percent were either scuttled or abandoned and lost because the Germans lost control of the battlefields yeah yeah basically the the fire bomber move this is actually a back and forth to my pieces that the main effect was was the psychological effect already in in 1939 and 1940 the Germans know that I'm against artillery the French artillery that the destructive effect of their spooker attacks was limited is that the physical effect was limited but I pointed out the suppression effect is devastating so basically that because he has reported had a major impact yes I'm not on the destructive side of his sometimes see in movies and computer games because wow there you have to do something more for the effect basically or for the gameplay mechanics but in morality morale is usually not very well for trading computer games for understandable reasons yeah well as we pointed out earlier if you can show up to a battlefield with the tank then you can contest that battlefield if you show up with infantry and your enemy shows up with tanks it's not going to be much of a contest that being said one thing the airport air support was very effective in was as you mentioned interdiction of supplies moving on on the fields they were under harassment constantly they were blowing up locomotives they were strafing the the the fields now they didn't account for that many knocked out you look at the British reports they did one where they you know took a stationary Panther and they blow it up with a Hawker hurricane and and missed it like a lot of a hundred times they hit it three times yeah yeah David really talked about this event we were to take more money I think he mentioned something along the lines he also had a bunny inside or something right and he was is the ended then they looked at the body of the body was just munching your all along so so this is this is quite interesting to see but the funny face recently I talked with dr. Roman temple and he knows it's something that with the cannon-armed planes they actually might more hits than originally thought but so it's like I see this more and more this move you know there's the counter move and then you look again and then oh there's actually some more detail to it right but but I'm not sure on this yet well I think we color already a lot of ground yes thank you so much so thank you very much Josh my pleasure thank you so much for taking the time to work with us today thank you very much and be sure to check out your home page and probably a YouTube page at one point absolutely thank you so thank you for watching and see you next time bye this video was made possible by warming transported me to the event and provided accommodation and further support throughout my time there especially by touching me to Nikolas the chieftain Moran thank you for your excellent support

Channel: Military History not Visualized

Views: 771,403

Keywords: Military History not Visualized, Military History, mhv, Why Tankers preferred 75 over 76mm, Sherman 75 vs 76, Hellcat, Sherman 105

Id: -ZKxmlpbwqk

Length: 14min 6sec (846 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DatGuyDestroyz]

Cause it was good against infantry and could pen the pz4 as good as he could pen the sherman. We know