P-47/51 deflection shots into the belly of the German tanks,reality

Subject: P-47/51 deflection shots into the belly of the German
tanks,reality
From: (Drazen Kramaric)
Date: 9/6/03 2:17 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id:

On 21 Aug 2003 21:04:25 -0700, (Kevin Brooks)
wrote:


Odd how Art subscribes to this position in this case, but whenever the
subject of folks serving in the combat support/service support arenas
pops up, he lays their lot in life solely at their own discretion.

You guys fired a lot of flak towards Art, but from what the veterans
of E company, 506th regiment, 101st Airborne division said to mr
Ambrose and he used in his book I concluded that combat soldiers did
make a difference between them and the service troops. There was a
difference between the risk of being front line infantryman and mess
orderly.

Yes, the war couldn't have been fought without service troops, but it
was the front line soldiers that put their lives on risk on daily
basis and had much bigger chance never to come from the war alive.

The guys from 506th who volunteered to serve as paratroopers did not
want to be mess orderlies and openly said so. Art says that as well
and is castigated for stating what his generation thought and
believed.


Drax


Thank you. Reality counts for a lot in war.

Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

Guy Alcala wrote:

"Paul J. Adam" wrote:

In message , Mike Marron
writes
In other words, maybe squeezing a few hundred rounds of .50 caliber
underneath a German tank was an exercise in futility as you say -- but
then again -- maybe it actually worked just as Art et. al. said it
did even if it was only a fluke and didn't always kill the tank as
advertised every single time.

I can easily imagine "worth a try". Especially because many "suspected
Tiger tanks" were actually much less well-protected vehicles, which
_were_ vulnerable to .50" fire. Try identifying road vehicles at a mile
with the naked eye: even standing still on a good day, it's hard to get
much more than colour, size and general type. Pilots were doing well to
find targets and hit them, let alone precisely identify them not only as
"armoured vehicle", get beyond that to "tank" and further to pick out
the differences between a Tiger and a PzKW IV.

Okay, so a Tiger would actually pretty much ignore being shot up by
fifty-cal (or 20mm, for that matter) - but the half-track or truck you
might actually be strafing would be much more affected if you hit it,
regardless of what you'd identified it as. Be a shame to let killable
targets get away because a pilot mis-identified a half-track as a Tiger
tank and pulled off his run.

snip

Of interest to this discussion is the following site:

http://www.geocities.com/spades53.geo/prodocs.htm

and go down to the "Firing Trials of 20mm H.S. Ammunition" section. Armor
penetration of homogenous plate at 200 yards and normal impact is described, as
well as various other targets representative of parts of a/c. These are static
tests, so penetration should be boosted somewhat for a moving a/c attacking a
ground target. Even so, it does give a good idea about the chances of 20mm
Hispano ammo penetrating rear or top hull tank armor. The chances don't appear
that good, but it is certainly possible for the lighter tanks.

Guy