The 'Oversized' British Gun That Was The Only Allied Weapon Tiger Crews Truly Feared

Описание: n the summer of nineteen forty-two, British tank crews in North Africa began encountering a new and terrifying reality on the battlefield. German armored forces were deploying tanks whose frontal armor could not be penetrated by any weapon in the British arsenal at combat ranges. The Tiger I, with its massive eighty-eight millimeter gun and frontal armor over one hundred millimeters thick, appeared virtually invulnerable to British tank guns and anti-tank weapons. British tanks that had been adequate against earlier German armor found themselves hopelessly outmatched, destroyed at ranges where their own guns were completely ineffective. Intelligence reports from the Eastern Front confirmed that the Soviets were facing similar monsters, and that the Germans were developing even heavier armor for future deployment. The Allied armies faced a crisis of capability: if they could not defeat German heavy tanks, how could they hope to win the ground war in Europe? The answer would come from British weapons designers who understood that incremental improvements would not be sufficient, that what was needed was a revolutionary leap in anti-tank firepower. What they created was the most powerful anti-tank gun fielded by any Western Allied nation during World War Two, a weapon so large that it pushed the boundaries of what could be considered a towed gun rather than artillery, and so effective that German tank commanders learned to fear its distinctive long barrel appearing through the smoke of battle. This was the Ordnance Quick-Firing Seventeen-Pounder, and this is the story of the weapon that gave Allied forces the firepower to meet German heavy armor on equal terms, and of the gun crews who served it with courage and deadly precision from the battlefields of Italy to the hedgerows of Normandy to the final advance into Germany.

The origins of the seventeen-pounder lay in the recognition, earlier than many Allied commanders were willing to admit, that German tank development was outpacing Allied anti-tank capabilities. British weapons designers, studying intelligence reports and examining captured German equipment, concluded by early nineteen forty-two that heavier German tanks were inevitable and that existing British anti-tank guns would be inadequate against them. The standard British anti-tank gun at that time was the six-pounder, an excellent weapon by the standards of early war design but one whose armor penetration was reaching its practical limits. Incremental improvements to the six-pounder could not provide the dramatic increase in performance that future operations would require. What was needed was an entirely new weapon, built around a much larger caliber and designed from the beginning to defeat the heaviest armor the Germans could deploy.