Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we're going to do an experiment.
We have a German Model of 1918 Tankgewehr,
we have some original German armour-piercing
ammunition for said Tankgewehr,
and we have a replica of a British World War One tank.
Now the British of course introduced the tank really in full-fledged
all its glory at the Battle of Cambrai in 1917.
And this led to a bit of a panic in the German army.
They needed some sort of weapon that could deal with
these giant lumbering armoured behemoths.
And so in a bit of a rushed development
they came up with the Tankgewehr, or rather the Mauser company came up with the Tankgewehr.
The Tankgewehr is basically just a huge scaled up Mauser bolt action rifle. It's a single-shot rifle.
They stuck a pistol grip on it because the stock is so big in diameter you can't really hold it like a standard rifle.
And they chambered it for a 13.2mm cartridge.
This was actually supposed to be a machine gun cartridge as well, this was the 13.2 TuF, "Tank und Flieger".
I should point out, at this point in history the German word for tank was "tank"
because they were copying the British word for tank, which was "tank".
The word "Panzer" wouldn't show up until several years later.
At any rate, this was the German answer to the British tank. The question is, was it effective?
Now the Mark IV British tank was the most common one in use. The British made about 1,200 of them.
And the Mark IV (actually pretty much all of the British tanks had the same setup),
but the Mark IV had three different thicknesses of armour on it.
It had 6mm armour covering the side of the tracks.
It had 8mm armour over some of the areas of the engine. And then it had 12mm armour over the main crew compartment.
Now 6 and 8mm armour is suitable to stop rifle bullets, 12mm is excellent for stopping rifle bullets.
The question is would it stop one of these?
Now I did some research, thanks to a couple of people on Facebook who helped out,
and found that the British spec for tank armour at this point was 450 to 480 Brinell through hardened.
So it wasn't just surface hardened, it was actually hardened all the way through the metal.
Which is important, that's what makes good proper armour plate. And ... 440 to 480 Brinell,
well what falls right in the middle of that range is 450, which is what we have here.
This is AR450, which means Abrasion Resistant, hardened to 450 Brinell, steel.
Now I got this piece of armour from MOA Targets out of Reno, Nevada.
Awesome guy he ... was able to supply me a British tank. If you have targets that you need I bet he can supply them too.
The rifle was loaned to us generously by Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage Magazine,
which is a cool resource for information on historical firearms like this.
We're gonna put this together with some original German armour-piercing ammo from Hayes Otoupalik, out of Montana,
a cool dealer of World War One curiosities and firearms and accessories.
And we're going to see if the rifle and the original ammo can go through a proper replica of British tank armour.
Alright, that is a pretty definite success.
That appears to have gone through this armour like butter. This was a square on shot at about 50 yards distance.
So, at that range if you were inside this tank it would have been a really bad day.
There is definitely some fragmentation and spalling that you can see on the inside.
And I believe what happened is the jacket shed off of the armour-piercing core,
you can see ... spatter on the front of the steel here.
We saw it throw up some material in the front of the target, and then the AP core and the contents of this hole
went flying out the back in a pattern that would have been really bad to be in the way of if you were a British tank crew member.
Let's take a look at the back of that hole.
That is nasty. This is all blown out around here.
It's interesting to note the discoloration of the steel here where the bullet came through.
That honestly looks like it was pretty easy for the gun,
so we're gonna try another shot. And this time we're gonna angle this plate at about 45 degrees,
and keep the same 50 yard distance and see if we can get through the armour in that setup.
Second shot at a 45 degree angle and 50 yards.
Fire in the hole!
Well, that was a little embarrassing. Let's see if it actually went through the target.
All right, we killed it dead. Let's see if we actually have a hole through it, or if I just knocked it over.
No hole.
There you go guys. We have a nice deep divot in it,
and you can see all the spatter of that ... hardened core, but that did not perforate the tank.
So, there's your difference. Square on it'll go through. A 45 degree angle ...
And if we do the math, a 45 degree angle is going to increase
the thickness of the steel by a multiple of the root of 2, which is like 1.4.
So we're looking at, what would that add? About 5mm, 4mm?
So at an effective armour thickness of something like 16 to 17mm, the Tankgewehr doesn't go through.
So the spalling from that bullet on the angled shot blew off, it came off the side of the plate, and hit the wooden supports on that steel.
You can see I'm quite a ways from the target now, and I found this piece of our wood here.
And then,
the biggest surviving piece of the 2x4 from that target landed up all the way back here.
This would have been really, really unfortunate for anybody inside the tank when one of these rounds hit.
People think well, it's just a solid bullet, what's it gonna do when it goes through that armour?
The answer is you've got a cloud of nasty, really high-velocity metal fragments
flying around inside that tank, and it will be a mess in there.
Thanks for watching guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope you learned something about British tanks and German anti-tank rifles.
I know I have always been curious to find out an answer to this question.
So I'd like to once again thank the three different people, all of whom helped make this possible.
Of course those being Hayes Otoupalik for the ammunition, MOA Targets out of Nevada for the steel,
and Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage Magazine for the all-important Tankgewehr rifle.
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