Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Rock Island Auction Company
taking a look at the anti-tank weapons that they're going to be selling
in their upcoming December of 2017 Premiere auction.
Specifically, this is a British PIAT (P I A T), and that stands for Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank.
The British started World War Two with an anti-tank rifle, as did many of the nations of that period.
They had the Boys anti-tank rifle. It was a .55 calibre, bolt-action, magazine-fed
repeating rifle, and it was apparently unpleasant to shoot,
and well it was effective on small tanks up into the very beginning of World War Two,
and definitely on light armoured vehicles, by the mid-point of World War Two it,
along with pretty much all of the other anti-tank rifles out there, were pretty much obsolete.
The armour on new tanks was thick enough that you could sort of get mobility kills,
maybe, if you were lucky, but you weren't going to be piercing the main armour on a
modern tank with an anti-tank rifle by that point. So the British had to adopt something else
and this is what they adopted. It's kind of a unique weapon.
Certainly looks unique and there are maybe some good reasons why nobody else did the same sort of thing.
That being said it was actually, while terrifying to use, a very effective anti-tank weapon.
Now this began as the brainchild of one Stewart Blacker in the late 1930s,
and ... by the beginning of World War Two he was putting this together as
a British Home Guard kind of improvised light grenade launcher. It was called the Blacker Bombard.
And he eventually was transferred into a different position doing ... a different type of work
and the project was ... passed on to another British officer by the name of Millis Jefferis.
And it was Jefferis who took the Blacker Bombard and developed it into its final form of the PIAT.
This was initially adopted in 1942, and it first saw combat service in Sicily in 1943.
Now, the way this thing works is it's basically a spigot mortar.
Now the concept of a spigot mortar is: if you want to fire a very large diameter projectile,
well, if you want to have a traditional firearm where the projectile is inside a barrel,
and there's a sealed charge behind it, the powder explodes
and the pressure builds up and throws the projectile out the barrel. That's a typical firearm.
To do that with a very large diameter projectile requires a very large barrel to match,
and that device is going to end up weighing quite a lot.
The idea of a spigot mortar is that instead of guiding the projectile by having a barrel on the outside,
instead you guide it by having a small rod right in the centre of the projectile.
This is kind of like you would see with like model rockets, where there's just a launch rod
that you slide the rocket onto and it takes off off the rod.
Where the Americans would develop a rocket- propelled Bazooka, the British adopted a spigot mortar.
So there is a centre stalk [spigot] right in here, and the projectile sits on that.
It's nested down on top of that, and that's what guides it. So this trough just holds it.
This just prevents the projectile from falling out if you happen to flip the thing over somehow.
And this allowed them to have a rather large projectile, it was an 83mm in diameter shell, that's 3.25 inches,
without having to have a tube that big around, and all of the extra
stuff required to make that kind of firearm work.
Instead of being propelled by a rocket engine like the US Bazooka,
this is propelled by a two-part combination of a really big spring
in the body of the weapon, and a blank propellant cartridge charge, very much like
you would have with a rifle grenade, inside the projectile itself. The idea is you cock this thing
and the way you do that is actually by standing on the base plate,
or on your back with your feet on the base plate, and then pulling up on the top end of the weapon,
and there's a plunger inside that cocks this huge spring
(it's a 200 pound main spring by the way), cocks it all the way back. And when you pull the trigger,
the spring is released, it's going to come up through the centre spindle here.
You're going to impart a lot of inertia into the projectile from that 200-pound spring.
And then the firing pin at the tip of this spigot is also going to detonate
what is basically a blank cartridge in the base of the projectile.
That's going to detonate and the pressure developed by that is going to assist in throwing the projectile out of the PIAT.
There are some pros and cons to this system. Now the cocking system is definitely one of the downsides,
because it's awkward. It re-cocks itself upon firing ... most of the time.
Exactly how often it didn't is a bit speculative, it probably worked the vast majority of the time,
and it didn't work just often enough to really annoy the soldiers who had to use them.
So that's a downside. ... The other downside is that this thing has a really quite short effective range,
Nominally on paper the maximum effective range is 115 yards.
That's not very far. If you are going to be shooting at something like, let's say a
Panther tank, and you have to let it get within 100 yards of you, that's a bit nerve-racking.
And to make it worse, in practical terms you were really better off at about half that range.
You really had to let a tank get right up on top of you in order to be effective with this.
Now that wasn't because of the explosive charge, these used a hollow charge style of
warhead that was equally effective regardless of the velocity it was travelling at, but
you needed the accuracy, and the muzzle velocity on this thing was not very high.
It was, I think, 260 feet per second, that's like 80 metres per second.
You can watch these projectiles in the air. They just kind of go bloop, and they don't go very far.
As for the upsides, well, it's very effective on armour. This would go through 3 to 4 inches of armour,
which is a ton in 1942 or '43. ... Really to the end of the war this was effective on really any tank,
you just had to get really close. Now the reason for that is that they used a
... hollow core charge. Didn't rely on velocity, this wasn't like an anti-tank rifle bullet,
where you had to have a very dense projectile travelling very fast to just crush its way through armour.
Instead this created basically a jet of molten metal that would burn through armour.
And ... in theory you could run up and hit the warhead on the side of a tank
and it would be just as effective as if you'd fired it into the tank at 260 feet per second.
So that's definitely one of the pluses. Now you did have to get a pretty much a square hit,
because of the shape of the projectile and the detonator on the front.
If you got a glancing blow the shell would just bounce off and not be not be triggered.
And this ... could be defeated by, like, extra armour skirts set away from the hull.
Because it was a hollow-core charge, ... you know, it had a penetration distance
that was kind of set, and if it burned through air then that was that much less distance
that it could go through steel. So if you had logs on the side of the tank
or if you hit a spare bogie wheel that had been strapped to the hull or the turret
or armour skirting, those sorts of defences could defeat a PIAT projectile.
But if you hit the main armoured body of the tank or the turret,
very good chance you were going to burn through and disable the vehicle.
One of the other advantages to this is that there was no back-blast and no muzzle flash.
Because it didn't have a rocket motor, it didn't have a pressure building barrel,
you were actually able to be a bit stealthy when shooting one of these things.
That may be small consolation, but you know, boy, if you're 50 yards from an enemy tank
every bit of being able to hide definitely does help.
So the spigot here is currently in the fired position, all the way forward.
As you cock the weapon the spigot is actually going to retract backwards.
And then when you pull the trigger on this thing, and the spring releases it, it snaps up into this position.
You can see there is a fixed firing pin on the front, ... I suppose you could call this an open bolt spigot mortar.
Loading procedure was simply to cock the weapon first,
and then you could drop a shell in here. It would slide down on to the spigot,
and then drop in under this guard in the front, and then you're ready to fire.
So I'm not going to cock this fully because I don't want to leave that mainspring under tension,
and I'm not sure how safe it is to dry fire these things. But in order to cock it
(I'm doing this backwards so that you can see, you normally would rotate it so this went out away from you),
but you rotate that and then pull this, and you can see the spigot dropping there.
Pull weight on this is 90 kilograms, so that's about 200 pounds, and you would need to pull it
about 12 inches, I believe, to fully cock the thing.
So you can do that standing up or you can lie on your back if you need to do it in a concealed position.
Once it's cocked, you load the shell in, line up behind it. You've got sort of a
quasi-padded canvas butt pad on there. Grip here, trigger.
The trigger does nothing right now because the weapon's not cocked.
But that's gonna fire the thing. You do have this nice handy single, like, square footed
monopod which can be extended or shortened. So you've got a bunch of little notches on there.
You can set this at whatever height is convenient for whatever sort of cover you're trying to hide behind.
You have a fairly rudimentary rear sight here with three notches. Those are 50, 80 and 110 yards.
Flips up for use.
This is not quite secured in place very well right now. You have a bubble level back here
and this is just set up to allow you to determine what angle
you are positioning the weapon at and adjust the trajectory accordingly.
You then have a matching folding front sight. That folds up, and then line up your sights,
front post goes in one of the rear holes like that, set it on the tank and fire away.
Recoil on this guy was apparently pretty substantial, so that's definitely something that makes
it even less fun to deal with shooting. But you do have a safety at least, safe and fire.
And you do have this nice canvas cheek rest, to relax against I suppose.
Ultimately ... these would remain in British inventory until the 1950s.
They would ultimately be replaced with, like, the M20, the US 3.5 inch Bazookas,
and other rocket launchers, and then eventually guided missile systems.
The PIAT did not last very long in British inventory.
It was a weapon that did the job fairly well when it was needed.
It was absolutely better than a Boys anti-tank rifle. You know, the Boys rifle is not that much different in weight
and doesn't really do the job. You may be able to fire from farther away, but if it doesn't defeat the tank,
what's the point of even carrying the weapon and trying, so.
The PIAT worked, you had to be a very courageous man to effectively use it,
but the British Army had plenty of those guys during World War Two.
If you'd like to add this to your own collection, it is a registered destructive device
here in the US, ... it is transferable. You'll have to go through an NFA
transfer process to take possession of it. But they are pretty darn cool,
and there are not all that many of them out there.
Take a look at the description text below
and you'll find a link to Rock Island's catalogue page on this beast.
That has their pictures, their description, paperwork, price estimate, all that sort of stuff.
And you can come here and participate in the auction live,
or you can place a bid over the phone, or through their website.
Thanks for watching.