The Bouncing .50 cal - can it kill a tank?

[McIvan]

I was watching a clip of a Thunderbolt strafing some German armour, with an old pilot doing a voiceover claiming they were Tigers and they knocked them out by bouncing .50 cal rounds off the road into the belly.

I had a think about this, which seemed an excellent idea in principle, and decided it was bogus. Even if .50 cal AP bounced in the first place, would it, presumably tumbling, misshapen and with much less energy, be able to pentrate any sort of armour plate at all, let alone 20mm(?) at what must have been a very shallow angle?

Apologies if this has been covered before but, if not, what do the grogs think of these sorts of claims?

[JonS]

Yes, covered before. Yes, bogus.

Interesting clip nonetheless.

[John Kettler]

McIvan,

Pilots doing surface attack think they see all sorts of things which simply aren't true. The easiest examples of this are Pacific War airstrikes against naval vessels. There, the breadth and depth of misidentification, not to mentioned botched BDA, is simply astounding. Destroyers become cruisers, transports aircraft carriers, course and speed are way off, target location's not even close, force size is 2-3X larger than in reality, etc.

Likewise, when a P-47 comes roaring in on a strafing dive, perhaps dodging flak, with all eight .50s chattering and putting concentrated tracer laced fire on the target, from the pilot's perspective the ground explodes and maybe the target with it. If the tank (which odds on isn't a Tiger and may not even be a tank) does die, though, it's not from ground ricochet. It's from AP and HEI wreaking havoc on the engine compartment and ventilators, demolishing everything topside and possibly setting crew sleeping gear and the like on fire, not to mention chopping anybody apart in the hatches at the time and potentially exposing stored ammo to high velocity interior strikes. And this is perhaps charitably assuming the tank isn't carrying ammo or grenades in crates outside, the detonation of which would add to the excitement.

Even when things look good visually, this doesn't mean much. Tanks can take a lot of punishment and still fight. My favorite example is of a Tiger tank atop a ridge in Germany which was the subject of a napalm strike which left the tank burning for a time, blackened and apparently dead. I say apparently because when the advance resumed after the threat was presumed handled, it came to life and exacted a fearsome toll before finally being killed in actuality.

As for resilience even when hit hard, if you go to my last post in the 2pdr thread, you can read for yourself how a Panzer III took four clean ATG penetrations which wrecked the tank's ability to fight but still left the crew unscathed and the tank driveable.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Broompatrol]

If a .50 round bounced off the ground why wouldn't it bounce of the tank? Unless the underside of a tank is made of cheese. Perhaps he meant to say he bounced some .50 rounds off the tank and penetrated the ground

[Guest Mike]

Depends on he cheese. Some of those smellier ones could turn a .50 at 200 paces!!

[McIvan]

No, he meant to say they knocked em out that way (edit: I have no idea why I missed the obviously tongue in cheek nature of your comments ). In addition, iirc he was convinced that they knocked out Tigers (everything was a Tiger in that clip) by flaming the fuel trailers they were towing.

[ February 12, 2007, 06:56 PM: Message edited by: McIvan ]

[Guest Mike]

did Tigers tow fuel trailers?

I know Churchill Crocodiles did.......

Should this be in the "blue on blue" thread in the GF??!! :eek:

[dieseltaylor]

I had a halftrack get a kills on a light armoured car and a MkIV in a recent game. Very impressive.

[birdstrike]

A little off topic, but seeing the picture:

I always wondered how vulnerable such a fuel trailer was in combat. I mean, compared to a Churchill's armor, it should have been quite easy to take the trailer out, rendering the FT useless, or am I wrong?

[SgtMuhammed]

You have to be real careful about your approach angle. I would guess that they only really pulled the thing up when they could approach the target square on and so shield the trailer with the tank. To be honest I haven't really read a lot of combat accounts of those things.

The .50 is one of those weapons that has achieved a mythical status all out of proportion with its actual capabilities. I believe there was even a report that they could sink destroyers. While in a big war with tens of thousands of encounters there are bound to be incidents where things defy logic it still doesn't mean that one could normally expect such things to occur. The Infantry Museum at Benning has a K-pot that stopped an AK round in Panama but I still wouldn't stick my head up for too long.

They could kill trains by punching through the boiler but that wasn't exactly Tiger armor.

[dieseltaylor]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churchill_Crocodile

800 built so more common than many german units

[Hetzer38]

Yup, bogus.

Anyway, anyone interested in actual battlefield investigation focussed on the effect of allied fighter-bombers / bombers against german AFVs / Soft skinned vehicles should read Ian Gooderson's "Air Power at the Battlefront"-case studies, London 1998.

Detailed after-battle-investigation of the following areas:

Roncey Pocket - La Baleine;

Mortain Area;

Falaise Pocket - 'Shambles' Area - 'Chase' Area;

Ardennes Salient;

...Allied Fighter-Bomber claims vs destruction attributed to various weapons...

(bombs, rockets, mg, destroyed by crew, abandoned, unknown cause)

Surprisingly, none of the investigated knocked-out german tanks had .50 cal penetrations in it's belly...

Cheers, Hetzer38.

.

.

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"The only thing I fear while in my Tiger is.........the .50 caliber."

- Michael Wittman

[ February 12, 2007, 11:29 AM: Message edited by: Hetzer38 ]

[MikeyD]

Off the CMSF chat site. 12.7mm hvy mg chewing up a truck (at remarkably close range!). Note the occassional bullet ricochettes off the asphalt in front of the truck.

Hvy mg footage

About lucky .50 cal knockouts - some tanks have wimpy belly armor - like 15mm or something? One supposes a Thunderbolt coming in VERY low at a VERY shallow angle and firing on a tank from VERY close (in an overflight attack) one or two of the several hundred .50 cal rounds raining down on the tank might find themselves rattling between the pavement and the thin belly plate.

[McIvan]

Originally posted by Stalin's Organist:

did Tigers tow fuel trailers?

I dunno....I doubt very much that they did in combat, but I was quite prepared to accept that on their way to the front they might well have towed trailers with extra gas. It sounded quite a sensible idea, but I have nothing to confirm it one way or the other (not that I looked).

[MikeyD]

I've seen photos of them on the Eastern Front with big fuel drums strapped to the engine deck. I couldn't imagine they'd be foolish enough to go into combat that way. I have seen photos of PzIVs towing fuel drum trailers behind them, though. The Russian steppes were very big with few petrol stations along the route.

[dieseltaylor]

Interesting linkies Hetzer38. There has always been a vocal minority saying the kill factors in CM are overstated for tanks however to achieve the effect of abandonment which the game engine cannot mimic I think it is a fair result in game.

As for shooting up soft targets it is interesting to see how effective it was - if admittedly away from an actual battle where BF's airpower does turn up.

[McIvan]

Originally posted by MikeyD:

About lucky .50 cal knockouts - some tanks have wimpy belly armor - like 15mm or something? One supposes a Thunderbolt coming in VERY low at a VERY shallow angle and firing on a tank from VERY close (in an overflight attack) one or two of the several hundred .50 cal rounds raining down on the tank might find themselves rattling between the pavement and the thin belly plate. [/QB]

Thing is, 15mm isn't really that thin. That's quite a solid chunk of steel. Even if it wouldn't stop much hitting it head on, the point is that it's not actually going to be hit head on. Rounds rattling between the pavement and the belly aren't going to beat 15mm or more of plate. It seems to me you'd be more likely to get rounds through the top armour than the bottom armour, if at all.

[The Schwabian]

i remember reading this topic somewhere.

i think the finishing arguement that settled the entire bounce-off-road-into-bottom argument was this:

how is a bullet supposed to not have enough force to penetrate concrete but then somehow penetrate steel?

but i believe in that video the pilot said that tanks would sometimes carry fuel tanks behind them (as was said) and that the pilots would also aim for those.

~Schwabian

[JasonC]

It is all pure bilge - they didn't destroy jack, even with rockets.

Trucks, railway boxcars, sure. The odd locomotive (big enough, and a derailing hit will wreck it). Total German AFVs KO'ed from the air in the west were between 50 and 200, with the lower end of that range far more likely.

[Guest Mike]

Now now Jason - check out the page linked by Hetzer above - it gives a few more than 50 confirmed ....

[JasonC]

No, it really doesn't. 50 is the confirmed by OR total, and 200 is the highest estimate that can be justified by known causes of loss reported by the Germans rather than claimed by the pilots. Pilot claims are uniformly high by a factor of 50.

[michael kenny]

If you can spare the time read more detail here:

http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000010.html

[Soddball]

Originally posted by JasonC:

It is all pure bilge - they didn't destroy jack, even with rockets.

Trucks, railway boxcars, sure. The odd locomotive (big enough, and a derailing hit will wreck it). Total German AFVs KO'ed from the air in the west were between 50 and 200, with the lower end of that range far more likely.

However, the interdiction ability of the fighter-bomber is consistently underplayed by you. Reducing the mobility of the enemy and keeping him off the roads, as well as hitting his supply lines, disables his armour and his attack strength just as surely as hitting the armour itself.

[Broompatrol]

I know the rockets carried by Typhoons had the warhead equivalent of a 6in. Naval shell. I would think a direct hit from one would do a fair amount of damage to an AFV?

That being said I realize I don't know if they made AP, HE, HEAP, C or whatever....does anyone know?

[Guest Mike]

Originally posted by JasonC:

No, it really doesn't. 50 is the confirmed by OR total, and 200 is the highest estimate that can be justified by known causes of loss reported by the Germans rather than claimed by the pilots. Pilot claims are uniformly high by a factor of 50.

Jeez - you're right - I count 47 comfirmed kills in that report only, but didnt' count the possibles.

Broom the rockets have to hit first - they are not very accurate.

I used to have a report generated by the USAF on P-51's firing rockets on a range vs a T34 in Korea - IIRC teh chances of a hit from a full salvo was about 8% - that is 8% chance of getting 1 hit.

this was agaisnt a stationary tank in the open in known conditions with no incoming flak.