Model Forum / General / Models / April 2008

tanks

Would you go anywhere near one of those things if you knew it was there
and had a choice in the matter? :-D
The only thing the Soviets felt really confident in taking one on with
was the SU-152 assault gun, assuming they could get close enough to it
without being destroyed as they approached it.
Even a Stalin II or Pershing tank was a pretty iffy opponent to it.
God help you if you were in a T-34 or Sherman.
Best to stay a couple of miles away and take it out via either heavy
artillery or airstrikes.
Although American and British troops used captured Panzerfausts and
Panzershrecks to good advantage against German tanks, the Soviets seemed
particularly backwards in developing man-portable antitank weapons
(Bazookas, PIATs, hollow-charge mines and grenades, or single-shot
recoilless weapons like the Panzerfaust) until after the war...in
comparison to the other combatants...despite the fact that they lost
huge numbers of tanks to them, and technologically they would be pretty
easy to copy and mass-produce in volume in a very short period of time.
The fact that the Germans were sticking Zimmerit all over the exterior
of their tanks to defeat Allied hollow-charge magnetic antitank
grenades...that didn't exist...indicates a failing on the whole Allied
side, and the Soviet forces in particular.
The vast numbers of troops the Soviets could field in comparison to the
Germans would have made any sort of a cheap and simple man-portable
antitank weapon highly effective.
American and British forces might have been very hesitant to close to
within a few dozen feet of German tanks to engage them with such weapons
except in cases of desperation; but history shows that wasn't the case
with Soviet troops...and a massed attack of T-34s, each with around ten
troops riding behind the turret.... and each of those troops carrying a
Panzerfaust clone strapped to their back as well as their standard
weapons, could have wreaked havoc on the panzer forces during the
invasion of Germany.
Back during the Vietnam War, my older brother was stationed at a fire
base near Hue; at night VC and NVA snipers would approach the perimeter
of the base and fire into it.
They did this at great risk, as the standard response of a sniper's
rifle bullet coming into the base was a LAW rocket round heading outward
toward the sniper's suspected position.
An extrapolation of that concept during the street fighting in Berlin at
the end of the war would be fascinating to consider - with a concealed
German position that opened fire suddenly getting hit with a massed
barrage of around 30-40 Soviet Panzerfaust clones, like a subscale
Katyusha attack. :-)

Pat