128mm Flak and a question for JasonC

[Aloicious]

Were there any attempts to convert this into a weapon that could be used in the field? As in, from Flak 88 to Pak 43? Or was this weapon just too massive? Or perhaps it was just overkill and the 88's did the job just fine? And just how numerous was this weapon?

Also a question for JasonC: You mentioned the Germans using a 100mm gun in a topic on taking on KV's during the early war period. Were these Flak guns? Or were they dedicated Paks, or maybe even converted naval guns like the Russian 100mm gun?

Thanks in advance.

[offtaskagain]

The 128mm Flak was converted to a Pak gun. It's in CM as the Pak 44. It wasn't terribly useful due to it's massive silhouette and it was just plain overkill. The 100mm gun JasonC talked about is actually the K18 105mm gun. It was a long range artillery piece thrown into the AT role when nothing else could do the job. They weren't terribly common, equipping only a few battalions in the panzer divisions. The most famous example of one being used is 4th Panzer Divisions engagement with Katukov's armor brigade on October 6th 1941. This engagement is titled "Katukov Strikes Back" on the cm cd.

[Andreas]

The 12,8cm gun is in the Jagdtiger, appeared in the Maus, and there is a Pak based on it.

The 10cm K18 is a field piece that was present in the schwere Abteilung of motorised and armoured divisions, in TO&E it would be one battery of 10cm K18 replacing one battery of 15cm sFH18. The 10cm K18 had a much longer range >19km than either the 10,5cm lFH18 (>12km) or the 15cm sFH18 (>15km). As such it could be used longer when the Panzer spearhead disappeared into the green fields beyond.

You could do a search with my member number and/or '10cm K18' or somesuch, and find all sorts of interesting info on it.

There were also a lot of independent Abteilungen with 10cm K18. These would presumably often work at long-range interdiction and counter-battery.

A major drawback of the gun was its small explosive load of only ~5.5kg/shell (for comparison, the total weight of the Soviet 15.2cm howitzer was 43.5kg I believe, and payload was a lot better). The losses of 10cm K18 were high at the start of Barbarossa because they would be used as ATGs, and they really were not meant for that.

[Aloicious]

Thanks for the rapid response. Didn't realize that the 128 was actually in the game. I've been stuck on the early war period for a while, so I've not yet fully explored everything in the game. Oh how I love CMBB. Thank you BTS!

[SgtMuhammed]

Ahh the Maus. 128mm main gun and a 75 coax. Of course the thing would have to cost about 5000 points with rarity turned off.

[Enoch]

IIRC, there is a passage in Company Commander by Charles McDonald where he relates his men being tasked with taking an AAA emplacement that has the 128mm Flak guns in it. During their movement towards the emplacement, I believe the Germans were using the Flak guns in an indirect fire mode. I have no idea how common this was in practice.

[MikeyD]

Was this the engagement I read about where after the 128mm guns started firing a Private - in an example of serious understatement - yelled to this Commander "Sir, I believe we're being mortared!"?

[Bone_Vulture]

I wonder what kind of ground pressure the Maus would have? Somewhere around 1.5 in metric?

[Andreas]

Originally posted by sGTGoody:

Ahh the Maus. 128mm main gun and a 75 coax. Of course the thing would have to cost about 5000 points with rarity turned off.

Actually, I believe it is in the game and you get it thrown in for free every time you buy a conscript Volkssturm battalion. Of course, it will never show up on the map, because it bogs and gets immobilised on the way. Or there is a bridge. Or a non-tarmacced road. Or a railway crossing.

[SgtMuhammed]

Or Charles could get really evil and give us the one with the test turret and the 20mm main gun. He's a floating brain, what else would you expect?

[PJungnitsch]

Originally posted by Bone_Vulture:

I wonder what kind of ground pressure the Maus would have? Somewhere around 1.5 in metric?

The MMP ground pressure rating is high for a tracked vehicle but not any worse than an armoured car. The tracks are over a meter wide which help!

[MikeyD]

Y'know guys, we came SO CLOSE to getting the Maus in the game. SO CLOSE! Back when the game was under construction Matt leaked a list of potential vehicles to be included. The Maus was in there just for fun, like the Sturmtiger was. The armor grogs on the board then staged a revolt! Crying out that the Maus never saw combat and its inclusion would be gamey in the extreme! Matt grudging relented.

So blame the damn grogs for no Maus!!!!!!!

[Matias]

What, you didn't know about the Maus easter egg?

[Skolman]

...going back to the topic

In Vienna we had a battery of that large callibre Flak guns mounted on some buildings or flak towers and they brought the russian advance in some villages far away to a halt...i don´t know the distance exactly but i has been some kilometers...(they fired from vienna to Mannswörth as far as i know)

[Andreas]

Originally posted by Paul Jungnitsch:

The MMP ground pressure rating is high for a tracked vehicle but not any worse than an armoured car. The tracks are over a meter wide which help!

Ah - that's alright then. So that leaves only weak engines, suspension, bridges and the need to develop a pipeline trailing behind it as it goes as problems. Nothing German engineers can not overcome

[PJungnitsch]

With the diesel engine and external tank range is 160km on roads, not bad. While no Panther as far as speed goes (20km/hr tops), it could turn in place and was reputedly very manuverable, being easy to drive with a high obstacle crossing ability. No bridge could carry it, true, but it was designed for fording and if needed, submersible capable up to 26ft.

Agree though that the resources could have been better spent in other places, so cancelling the program in mid '43 was a good thing.

Still, imagine a tank with 200mm of armour all the way around, 350mm equivalent on the front plate, topped with a 128mm armed turret that could rotate in 16 seconds. What a nightmare to face that.

[JasonC]

The 100mm is the K18 cannon (FK or feldkannon, not leFH or light field howitzer), rather than howitzer, as others have mentioned. They were scarce rather than rare, in the sense that only one battery in each mobile division had them, but they were regularly available in those limited numbers. Some were also used in higher level, corps arty units, particularly later on.

Their primary purpose was counterbattery fire. They had a range of about 19 km, compared to 11 km for the 105 howitzer and 13 km for the 150 howitzer. The Germans continued to use them throughout the war. The punch was limited, yes, but when the idea was mostly to suppress a located enemy artillery battery, that wasn't all important.

In the mid war period, they made some use of long 150 cannons (rather than howitzers), but that never really took off. They used 170 cannons later in the war as their main corps level, long range counterbattery piece. A lot more punch, obviously. But there were about 3 times as many 100 K18 cannons made as 170s, and about 5 times the ammo, in raw number of rounds. That is a difference typical of divisional vs. corps level pieces.

They were used for direct fire in 1941 because they had the best muzzle velocity of any German field piece - about 800 m/s. The penetration was superior even to the 88 FLAK (only early versions of which were around in 1941, anyway). They could penetrate a KV out to 2 km, if they could see it and hit it at that range. The range was so good the danger to the gun was not terribly high.

So, when a mobile division encountered a few heavy tanks, they could bring up 88s or the single battery of 100s, or a gun section of just 2 of them if it was only a handful. Set them up somewhere with long LOS. Then drag the Russian tanks onto them, using panzers as "bait" to lure them into LOS of the guns.

128mm FLAK was roughly as common, over the whole war, as the 100 K18 cannons. Loaded more toward the later half of it, certainly. And 10 times as common as 128mm PAK, which only appeared in the late war. But the 128mm FLAK was mostly used as a flak gun, defending fixed installations. It was not nearly as mobile as the 88 FLAK, and 10 times as scarce.

The 88 killed most things anyway, even at range, so the extra weight wasn't really wanted. Only very late against things like ISUs and IS-2s would you want something even more powerful. And by then the 88 PAK was available, with more than enough punch (it is a longer 88, L71), and a lot easier to use as an ATG. There were several times as many towed 88 PAK available as 128 FLAK.

I hope that helps.

[ March 15, 2003, 03:44 PM: Message edited by: JasonC ]

[Aloicious]

Thank you all.

Enlightening as always JasonC.

[coe]

kinda be interesting though if it was modelled in the game the shock of being near the 128mm gun when it fired....I mean currently you can place

an infantry unit right in front of it....as

protection for it....I wouldn't want to be there...I'd like to know how the soviets managed to fit those big guns in tanks...while the other nations had trouble doing so....

C.