Hi guys, thanks for tuning into another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at DriveTanks.com, down in Uvalde, Texas.
And we are taking a look at a 37mm PaK.
This is commonly called a PaK 36, but that actually was never an official designation. So we'll get into that.
If we start at the beginning of the story we're in World War One.
Germany actually was relatively slow to develop anti-tank weapons during World War One because, well
basically the first time the Germans encountered tanks in substantial numbers the tanks were pretty much a dismal failure.
And the German military command looked at this and basically said, "OK, you know
... we have very limited resources to work with. These tank things, interesting, frightening at first,
but they don't look like they're actually all that much of a problem so we don't need to worry about that."
Well the British and French spent a year or so and got a lot better at understanding
how to build and how to use their tanks, and the tanks became a much more substantial weapon.
The Germans were then trying to play catch-up to develop some sort of good weapon against them.
So, of course there was the Mauser Tankgewehr rifle.
And, frankly, the best weapon the Germans had against tanks at that point was 77mm field guns used in a direct fire role.
However, by 1918 they need something, and so they kind of go along the same route
as the French and Americans had with a 37mm little infantry cannon,
which was plenty powerful [enough] to punch through the tanks of the day.
Well, they had a gun that was developed in 1918.
It was one of those weapons like the 13.2mm "Tank und Flieger" machine gun: developed, never actually saw service.
I think with the tank guns they made 100 or 200 of them, but they never actually got to front line combat.
So interestingly those were 37mm guns that they ... made by recycling barrels out of Hotchkiss revolving cannons.
Anyway. By 1925 the German military was looking to ... continue development of weapons
that would clearly be important in future conflicts, and an anti-tank gun was clearly something that they needed.
So Rheinmetall ... started working on a design for a more modern dedicated anti-tank gun.
... Development started in '25, the guns were actually finished, ... approved and ready for production in 1927.
And at that point the gun was designated the TaK, 3.7 centimetre
(because the Germans tended to do centimetre measurements for this sort of thing instead of millimetre),
but a 3.7cm Tankabwehrkanone.
It would only be in the 1930s that the word "panzer" would actually enter the German military lexicon.
and this would change from the TaK to the PaK, the Panzerabwehrkanone.
Anyway, this gun as it was originally built had a bit of a longer barrel, it had wooden wheels, it had no suspension.
It was intended to be ... towed by one horse or its crew if necessary.
And wasn't really designed for vehicular transport, and that would prove to be a problem.
So, early on production went relatively slowly. The German government didn't want to
offend, ... was worried about violating the Versailles Treaty limitations on the German military.
And so they built guns slowly, in fact by 1932 they only had 264 of these in inventory.
Well, that's not so great for Rheinmetall because they're trying to make money,
you know, to recoup their development costs on designing this gun.
So Rheinmetall starts selling the guns fairly widely internationally.
They actually sell, or licence, them to Russia.
Russia would take this gun and use it as the basis for developing their 45mm anti-tank gun.
And a whole bunch of other countries throughout Europe and the rest of the world would in fact buy Rheinmetall PaKs, or TaKs.
It was like 1934 to 1936 that a lot of changes and updates were made to the gun.
When Hitler came to power he was not concerned about the limitations imposed by Versailles.
He started rearming the German military, and that's when production of these guys really went into high gear.
By 1939, by September of 1939, the German military had 11,200 of these guns.
So, let's take a look at how this thing actually works and what its various features are
in this World War Two, the main large scale production, version.
Alright, so mechanically what we have here fundamentally is a single shot, semi-automatic, breech loading artillery piece.
Which means when you fire this, this whole assembly is going to recoil like a lot.
It's going to come way back, the breech is going to open, the empty casing is going to be automatically ejected out.
The whole thing will then reciprocate forward, being pushed by a spring in the recoil system underneath the barrel,
and the breech is then left open ready for you to manually load another round.
At which point the breach will close and it will be ready to fire.
So this is the ready to load configuration for the gun. The breech block is open.
There are a pair of ejectors up inside here. One down there, one up there.
When I throw a round in, normally what would happen is the rim of the cartridge would catch those
ejectors, push them in, and that will trigger the breech to close like that.
I'm of course using a stick because I don't want to leave any of my fingers in there.
Now with the breech closed I can go ahead and aim. I'm gonna do that using a pair of control wheels here.
This one for traverse, this one for elevation.
The gun is fitted with an optical sight so that I can actually tell when I'm aiming at my target.
We have a little window here in our metal shield and I can open up, I can see out.
Alright, it's a little hard to see there, but our aiming point is a little chevron that acts as the reticle.
And when I'm ready to fire, just smack the big button here in the middle of the elevation wheel.
That will trip this and fire the gun.
If you look down here, you can see when I push this button
this comes out, which pushes this, which ... releases this, and fires the system.
Now in order to manually open the gun if I am, for example, loading the first round
or if something went wrong and I have to manually extract the empty case,
I first have to push this button in. This is a lock that prevents the breech block from opening.
You don't want to accidentally open it partway when you're going to fire.
So I push that in, and I'm then going to push this lever on the side
all the way in. That is going to unlock the breech block and re-cock the action.
And then I can grab this lever, pull it back, and slide the breach block open.
A few cool things to point out on here. We have torsion suspension here on both of the wheels.
That was added in 1934 to make the guns more transportable,
so they can be towed at much higher speed by a mechanised vehicle instead of just a horse.
Interestingly these also mean that when the gun fires it tends to bounce on its springs
under recoil and then come back to its original point of aim, making it much easier
to fire repeatedly on the same target, or on targets that are close to each other,
than a gun that's going to displace and actually move a bit every time you fire it.
We also have a couple of locks on the armour shield, so this thing is actually a convertible.
Pull this down, that snaps down.
It's held in place right there.
And I can go ahead and do the same thing here. I'm first going to remove two pieces of cleaning rod.
That goes down, and that goes down.
So if you want a much more open clear field of fire without having to deal with, you know,
looking through the little window in the armour shield, you can do that.
Also cool to point out we have this little storage box on the armour shield. I open that up, we have the rest of the cleaning kit,
these are both reproduction parts, but you have a bore brush and a jag for a cleaning rag.
Located on the right side of the barrel we have this cool little thing. This is actually a recoil indicator.
There's a lug on this surface way up at the front that will slide backward and push this brass block back whenever the gun fires.
So you can keep an eye on this and tell exactly how far the gun is recoiling. If you're running low on,
well, if your recoil system is getting weak the gun will start recoiling too far,
and as long as you're watching this you can fix the problem before it actually causes any damage.
So the shell that this fired was a 37x249mm rimmed brass cartridge shell.
I have a cutaway example here. This is pretty typical for 37mm guns of this period.
I also have a cutaway projectile. This is an armour-piercing tracer projectile.
So the hollow void in the centre there would have been tracer material that would burn off as the projectile went downrange.
But that gives you a pretty decent idea of what the cartridge for this looked like.
In general the 37mm PaK was really a very good gun. It was very complex,
especially compared to something like the American M3 37mm,
but it was effective, it got the job done, it was accurate, it was reliable, it was a good gun.
And that is reflected in the widespread usage that it got around the world, especially in the Soviet Union.
Now because it was 37mm it was big enough that it did have high-explosive rounds as well as anti-tank rounds,
so it was a bit of a multi-purpose gun.
As I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of the war the German army had a little over 11,000 of these.
By the time they ended production they would have 16,600 and change.
But that was not very long after the beginning of the war,
basically, they decided to stop producing this in 1941, the very last few units were built in 1942.
And the reason is, this while ... effective and adequate as an anti-tank gun in 1939, by 1941 it just wasn't.
And the writing was on the wall that tank armour was only going to get heavier and heavier, this thing wasn't gonna cut it.
In fact the colloquial name that this was given was the "Panzeranklopfkanone", if I'm pronouncing that
anywhere near correctly. Which is to say, translated into, the tank knocker gun or the "door knocker".
You know, you alert the tank crew to your presence with a loud clang as the 37mm shell from this bounced off the outside.
Now they did have a plan to try and fix that.
In 1940 they developed a new armour- piercing projectile with a tungsten core
that did increase this thing's armour-piercing effectiveness.
And then in 1941 they introduced the Stielgranate 41.
This originally was a 19 pound shaped charge, and this could go through virtually anything.
This thing was capable of penetrating 180mm of hardened armour plate.
But there were a couple downsides to it. So,
this obviously isn't gonna fit down the chamber, this is actually run over the bore like that,
and it is, in fact, in practice, a giant rifle grenade.
So it's not rifled, there's nothing engaging the actual rifling in the barrel. The fins are straight fins.
So the accuracy of this was pretty significantly limited.
From what I've read about 300 metres is the best you could expect to actually get a hit on target with this,
because it's just not accurate enough to hit a tank.
The other problem with this was the fusing. In order to detonate it had to actually hit and press in on that little fuse there.
Well, the problem is if you're shooting at sloped armour and you, say, impact here,
and well, the shell will simply skip off the side of the tank.
Never penetrating because it didn't explode because nothing actually hit the fuse.
So you had to get the right angle of shot on a vehicle to be able to actually get the thing to detonate.
So these were used initially by the Fallschirmjäger, but they weren't really a solution to the
limited potential, limited capability, of the 37mm gun by 1941.
In fact by late 1941 the problem with increasing tank armour was such that not only was the 37mm gun abandoned,
or put out of production, but so was the PaK 38, the 50mm anti-tank gun.
And the German army opted to move to ... 75mm guns for its anti-tank work.
I'd like to give a really big thanks to DriveTanks.com for giving me the opportunity to
come down here to Uvalde Texas, take a look at their 37mm PaK,
show it to you guys and do a bunch of other cool stuff at the same time.
If you're interested in shooting a gun like this, driving a tank, shooting some machine guns,
they have a fantastic rental, range and driving course system set up here. Highly recommend you take a look at it on their website.
Thanks for watching.