This affected both the equipment and the organization of the German infantry division, which during the September campaign of 1939 consisted of 3 infantry regiments, each of which was divided into 3 infantry battalions, an artillery company and an anti-tank company. Adopted by the Japanese in 1944 it was first used against American armor in Leyte Island in the Philippines.The decisive influence on the shaping of the organization and tactics of the German infantry before the outbreak of World War II was, on the one hand, the experience of the previous World War, but also theoretical works created in the 1920s and 1930s, which often emphasized the need to perceive the German infantry as a tool waging an offensive war. The Imperial Japanese Army called upon its soldiers to use the Shitotsubakurai Lunge Mine, a suicide weapon that was little more than a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) charge on a pole. The Soviet effort to employ dogs as suicide bombers wasn’t the only extreme attempt to destroy enemy tanks in World War II. As a result, some of the dogs ran towards Soviet tanks! Another problem was that the Soviets trained the dogs using their own diesel-powered tanks while the German tanks ran with gasoline engines. The use of anti-tank dogs was largely unsuccessful as the dogs often only ran near the enemy tanks, while the Germans learned of the threat and shot any dogs they saw.
A wooden lever extended out of the pouch and would strike the tank, activating the mine. The animals were trained to run towards and then under tanks while fitted with a ten to twelve-kilogram mine that was carried in canvas pouches on their backs. A similar semi-automatic version – the Simonov anti-tank rifle ( PTRS-41) was also employed during the war.īoth rifles were still superior to the Red Army’s efforts to employ dogs to destroy German tanks. It could do damage to early-war German tanks or other thinly armored self-propelled guns and even half-tracks but proved inadequate against the armor – especially frontal – of later war era tanks. As the name suggests, it was a single-shot weapon that fired a 14.5x114mm round. It was also used by the Haganah in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, while some accounts suggest the Indian Army employed a PIAT during the Battle of Longewala in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.ĭuring the Second World War, the Soviet Red Army lacked an actual rocket launcher – and instead had to rely on oversized anti-tank rifles including the PTRD-41 (Degtyaryov Single Shot Anti-Tank Weapon System Model of 1941). The PIAT remained in use with the British military until 1950 and was used in the Korean War. This particular gun is part of an interactive display at the Museum of Army Flying, Hampshire, UK.
0 kommentar(er)
