The “Spring Powered” British Weapon That Destroyed Tanks Without Gunpowder

Описание: In the desperate summer of nineteen forty, as the last British soldiers scrambled aboard evacuation ships at Dunkirk, they left behind on the beaches of France virtually every piece of heavy equipment the British Expeditionary Force had possessed. Tanks, artillery, vehicles, and crucially, anti-tank weapons were abandoned in the retreat, now in the hands of a triumphant German army that stood poised across the English Channel contemplating invasion. Britain faced a stark reality: her army had escaped with their lives but had lost the tools of modern warfare. And as intelligence reports confirmed that German tank development was accelerating, that heavier and more powerful armored vehicles were entering production, British military planners confronted a terrifying question: how could infantry soldiers, the men who would have to hold defensive positions against German armor, possibly stop tanks when they had almost no anti-tank weapons remaining? The answer would come from British engineers who developed one of the most unusual and controversial infantry weapons of the entire war, a device so mechanically unconventional that it seemed almost primitive, yet so effective that it would serve throughout the conflict from the hedgerows of Normandy to the rubble of Berlin. It was called the Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank, known universally by its acronym PIAT, and this is the story of the spring-loaded weapon that gave British infantry a fighting chance against German armor, of the soldiers who struggled to master its difficult operation, and of the desperate close-range battles where this strange device proved that sometimes the most effective weapons are not the most sophisticated but simply those that work when everything else has failed.

The crisis facing Britain in the months after Dunkirk was absolute and undeniable. The British Army had evacuated over three hundred thousand men but had left behind in France over two thousand artillery pieces, sixty-four thousand vehicles, and virtually all its heavy equipment. The army that returned to Britain was an army of men without the weapons needed to fight a modern war. Among the most critical shortages were anti-tank weapons. The standard British anti-tank gun at the time of Dunkirk was the two-pounder, an adequate weapon by the standards of early war armored vehicles but one that existed in woefully insufficient numbers after the losses in France. Even more concerning was the complete lack of effective man-portable anti-tank weapons that could be issued to infantry units and used at the section or platoon level. British soldiers facing German tanks would have little more than rifles and determination, and everyone from private soldiers to generals understood that determination alone would not stop armor.