The British Gun That Terrified Tiger Crews (America Never Used It) скачать в хорошем качестве

The British Gun That Terrified Tiger Crews (America Never Used It)

The Germans had a specific order: kill the long-barrelled Shermans first. If you see one with a gun barrel that looks too long, that's a Firefly, and that Firefly has a 17-pounder that will go through your frontal armour at a thousand metres. Kill it before it kills you. That order existed because Britain built a gun that could do what no American tank gun could do in 1944 — penetrate the front of a Tiger. And America never put it in a single one of their own tanks.To understand why that refusal was such a betrayal of their own crews, you first have to understand what the Western Allies were actually driving towards in the summer of 1944. Because it wasn't just hedgerows and machine gun nests waiting in Normandy. It was the most heavily armoured fighting force any army had ever confronted — and nearly every gun the Allies carried was useless against it.The Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger I carried frontal hull armour one hundred millimetres thick, set at a near-vertical angle of roughly ten degrees from the perpendicular. Turret front — also a hundred millimetres. No clever sloping. No fancy geometry. The Tiger's designers trusted raw thickness, and that thickness was devastating, because in 1944, the overwhelming majority of Western Allied tank guns couldn't get through it at any range where a crew could reasonably identify a target, aim, and fire. For most Allied tanks, the Tiger's frontal profile was functionally invincible.And the Panther was worse.