"Books on WWII Tank Weaponry" Topic

What's considered THE reference book for tank weaponry (not just German) of WWII? I'm looking to see if their is one master reference text that people consider the bible on the topic of effective ranges, armor penetration, rates of fire for the the various tank weapons of all nations? If one text isn't available, is there one for the Allies and one for the German's? My current reference library doesn't have much on weapon specifics and I'd like to fix that problem.

Has an exhaustive study ever been compiled?

"Has an exhaustive study ever been compiled?"

John D Salt compiled armour penetration stats from scores of sources including published books and operations research documents on weapons testing. The discrepancies demonstrated very clearly that finding one definitive source will be very hard. Sadly Johns website is long gone, but some googling may turn the documents up.

Calculating armour penetration for a given type of shell at a particular type of armour is relatively easy, there are formulas for that sort of thing see e.g. Zetterlings book on Normandy.

I want to get into and learn more about the details beyond just armor penetration. I figure that is one of really three factors that I personally believe helped to answer the question of how good is this gun versus that.

My thought is the combat effectiveness of a weapon is based on three things:

Armor penetration capability
Accuracy of the weapon
Rate at which it can be fired
(there might be more, I'm far from an expert in this area)

From what books I own that touch on these issues, I can already tell there are many varying opinions on the topic but I'd like to do the research and somewhat have a more educated opinion on the various capabilities of the weaponry.

John D Salt compiled armour penetration stats

Is JOhn still around?

Try finding copy of "World War II Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery" by Lorrin Rexford Bird and Robert D. Livingston, published by Overmatch Press. It has very detailed discussion about how different penetrators interacted with differing types of armor.

"The discrepancies demonstrated very clearly that finding one definitive source will be very hard."

That's a pity, since it's obvious that nothing makes WWII rules (or any period's, for that matter) better than masses of technical data!

Allen

There are a few factors that determine weapon effectiveness. It's a balance between gun, round, and mount.

The gun determines how big a round you can use, and how fast it can go. Fast rounds are better for hitting moving targets, and at long range the speed of the round actually means something. There is a notable delay at 2000 yards between a HEAT round and a Sabot (3 or 4 seconds). Not a big factor in a tank duel (spotting means a lot more), but it does require some predictive powers to hit a moving target at that range.

The mount determines accuracy, tracking (how fast it can lead a moving target), recoil absorption, and how easy it is to reload. There's also the optics to consider, since it's a lot easier to hit what you can see. The extremes of this are the Sherman's stabilized mount that can be reloaded while tracking the target to the T-34/85, which requires the gun to be elevated off target so that there's enough room to reload. Also note the special case of aircraft – the otherwise obsolete 37mm anti-tank gun proved quite effective agains T-34s when mounted on a Stuka, due to hitting from above and with a small boost in kinetic energy from the aircraft velocity (300 ft/s at 200 mph).

Rounds differ in trajectory and penetrating power based on their speed. Higher muzzle velocities tend to be more accurate. Kinetic penetrators (Sabot/HVAP) lose penetration as their velocity drops due to air resistance. Chemical penetrators (HEAT) maintain the same penetration at all ranges, but aren't as effective at short range as the kinetics. High Explosive is mostly for soft targets, but concussion effects can take out the crew if it's big enough (aircraft bomb, naval gunfire, SU-152).

That's a pity, since it's obvious that nothing makes WWII rules (or any period's, for that matter) better than masses of technical data!

But you also need enough charts to make proper use of them!

Griefbringer

Yes! Charts! Flow charts! Detailed charts! With hundreds of modifiers! We needs them!

Allen

Can you ever have enough charts and tables!

What do you think would be the optimum number for a WW2 game?

Oliver

I think for the optimum game play, the charts should not be directly on the rulebook, but in a separate booklet (preferably hardcover, to withstand the wear) to make it easier to find them during the game.

I think the optimum amount of charts for a game would be somewhere around 1200 grams, depending on what sort of paper you would print them on.

Griefbringer

"…in a separate booklet…"

I disagree. An appropriate issue of charts would require a 3" or larger three-ring binder, as no commercial perfect-bound or coil-bound booklet could hold them.

You would also need the ring binder to be able to easily replace data pages every two or three months, as updates are issued.

Allen

You would also need the ring binder to be able to easily replace data pages every two or three months, as updates are issued.

Updates? Must be one of those silly new things.

In the olden times, the rules were literally carved in the stone tablets, so updates would have been impractical anyway.

Griefbringer

Rolemaster WW2 ? Sweet! Sign me up

More like World War Master Standard System 2nd edition. With a supplement line featuring:

- Chart Companion I-VII
- Yankies and Tankies I & II
- Arm Wrestling Law (detailed rules for bar room arm wrestling)
- Halftrack Companion
- Minefield Companion
- Mortar Law
- Artillery Law
- Light Anti-tank Weapon Law (aka LAWL)
- Flak Law
- Tactical Air Support Companion
- Martial Law (full process resolution charts for court martials)
- Supplement Companion (complete index to all the previous supplements)

Griefbringer

Hi Cosmic Serpent. An excellent book is:
"Armoured Firepower. The Development of Tank Armament 1939-1945" by Peter Gudgin. Published by Sutton.
It discusses the philosophies of the different nations and the specifics of the guns, and all sorts. I've found it very informative.

"Armoured Firepower. The Development of Tank Armament 1939-1945" by Peter Gudgin. Published by Sutton.

Indeed, I am lucky enough to own a copy myself, very informative.

Guy

…the T-34/85, which requires the gun to be elevated off target so that there's enough room to reload.

Was this the case with other soviet tanks as well? I know that the roof the the IS-2 turret was very low. Is there a good source for this fact?

Probably the best sources for that fact would be the Soviet tankers themselves. Interestingly enough, the turrets of most of the modern Soviet tanks also require that the guns are elevated to load, but not entirely because of the small turret issue (though it remains); they also elevate as a function of the automatic loader. Accuracy becomes a serious issue if the crew doesn't time its loading in appropriate fashion.

To my knowledge, the T-64 family does not have this requirement for its autoloader, but every other modern Soviet-era Russian tank does. I include the T-55 in this; though technically the T-55 "vanilla" model doesn't include an autoloader, most of the variants do, and I wouldn't be surprised if the T-55 itself, even without the auto, had that requirement.

As for charts, any wargamer worth his salt knows that it's Ancient gaming that needs the charts. Everybody knows that Ancients gaming should be as dry as a simulation as possible, with no possibility for human error or the chaos of war, and lots and lots of modifiers and mathematically constructed army lists.

Oh yes, and they need to be specifically designed for competition gaming, the only "real" test of generalship…

-A.

There is a website, unfortunately I can't find it right now, called something like wwiiarmor.com or similar who has tables of armor penetration, etc., from a number of sources, official and unofficial as well as info on just about every armored vehicle of the war. If you can find it, it's a great resource on armor. The guy is an ASL player, which explains his fanaticism.

Wow, how quickly this thread spun out of control….

I checked that web address, no luck – if you run across it, please let us know.

I checked out the Armor Firepower book, it gets some fairly poor reviews from other people? I'm still looking, if I run across something I'll be sure to let everyone know.

Try finding copy of "World War II Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery" by Lorrin Rexford Bird and Robert D. Livingston, published by Overmatch Press.

"Armoured Firepower. The Development of Tank Armament 1939-1945" by Peter Gudgin.

I have both these books, and recommend both highly. There is no quick-and-easy answer to these questions, but these two sources are the best I have in my collection on the subject. Of the two, Gudgin's book is easier to read and follow. Bird's book is much more detailed but the information is not really organized in any way my tired old brain can discern.

As for the ultimate tank wargame rules, mine are baked directly onto clay tablets. Cuneiform is the only way to go.

The problem with changing the nationality of Nieuport sesquiplanes is that they normally wore a roundel on the lower side of the upper wings. Right smack where the struts are. I am curious how Nexus have handled these.

OTOH, quite a few exported Nieuport 17s kept their French roundels with their new owners.

Well as others have rather indirectly pointed out, I think you will likely find that most of the detail is rather less than useful in a gaming context.
The more you understand the stats the more you find the stats from each "study" cannot be using the same scientific method. If indeed they were scientific in the first place.

I have John D Salt's documents saved somewhere. Bearing in mind they were originally offered freely I doubt that there'd be much harm in emailing them to someone.

I also have that Gudgin book.
It is definitely aimed at the newbie and I would not describe it as an "exhaustive" book. I think "accessible" would be my word of choice.

From a wargaming perspective I would emphasise the following:

At least one study demonstrated that the most significant factor in ww2 tank v tank encounters was which tank fired first.

Learn all the stats then read first hand descriptions of combat.
You will notice that it wasn't exactly rare for the tanks you thought would do badly to be the "winners".
This was often due to tank crew quality.
Shermans should not do so well against panthers on paper.
Put green hurriedly trained crews in the panthers and experienced allied crews with a stack of training in the shermans and the shermans win.

In fact it's those experienced crews seem to get the first shot. Fairly often the enemy are bumbling around and don't seem to even know where they are being engaged from.

"Is JOhn still around?"

Yes, I usually meet him once or twice a year at Wargames Developments events. He always runs very inspirational games, one of the most interesting was running a modern battlegroup with all different staff fuunctions and making sure we filled in the correct forms, did the map overlays etc.

Andy's points are quite correct, whilst gun/armour type comparisons have some impact on the outcome of tank battles, it is much more about crew training, unit cohesion etc and somewhat depressingly for postwar NATO planners, often simply numbers engaged at the point of contact (which is a function of operational skill).

AONeill -

If you've got John's work and can find it, I'd love to have you email it to me? You can send it to me at ryan.przybyl@gmail.com if you have it. I'd appreciate it.

Well – I guess I'll pick up the book and read it to see what I can glean as well. I haven't seen World War II Balistics, so I'll keep looking for that one.

You guys are absolutely right – it's more about the crew than the equipment as well trained crews (otherwise on paper the Allies probably shouldn't have won). I'm trying to gather all the information, then formulate my own opinion based on research on how this all goes together. I;ll probably pick up Death Traps as that seems to be a pretty good read on first hand reports from someone who got to see what happened to the tanks during battle – the mechanics. I think it would be an interesting read as well, as I've never seen anything written from that point of view.

On it's way mate.

My advice would be to try and view stuff in terms of broad strokes rather than get mired in the detail.
I was interested in all the details whilst young, but I found that the games produced which tried to implement detail were deeply flawed.
Whilst you're wading through the numbers it is easy to make mistakes.
The guys translating club rules into Firefly messed up in several places.
This is one of the problems with bottom up design methods – and why it's gone out of favour in systems design.
When you focus on the details it's difficult to sort out the big picture. "Can't see the wood for the trees" and all that.

I think one of the books about a british tank crews experience is online somewhere. Can't recall which or where… But worth a google.

Death Traps is interesting -- but it can be a bit hard to disentangle the author's experience from the author's hindsight and bitterness.

Not too surprisingly, as someone who's job was to see all the knocked out tanks in his Division, he has a serious case of thinking the enemy weapons as better than his own. Which is often seen by soldiers, as the enemy weapons kill your friends, and you rarely see the effect of your own weapon systems on the enemy.

His take home message seems to be that if the allies had had a tank like the Panther (eg the Pershing) in June 44 then they would have had far fewer tank casualties. But, and in my mind it is a huge but, he also says that most tanks were killed by hidden AT guns or tanks -- and AFAIK most (if not all) late war German guns could just as happily kill a Panther as a Sherman (especially from flank shots which are likely from ambushes).

He also thinks that they had to spend a lot of time on maintenance of Shermans -- again I suspect if he had experience of German or early British tanks he may have thought otherwise.

Thanks, appreciate the opinions.

When it comes to games, I agree – you can get into the details and have the really complex games with a ton of charts – but the deeper you dive, the more prone you are for error in the details. In my opinion, those types of games just aren't playable either – take too long, and aren't any more enjoyable than FoW or any other more generalized game rules. I'm somewhat in the middle on rules – I like some detail, but not so much it bogs down the play or makes it unenjoyable for me – the difference is that unenjoyable part is very different for historical gamers – some find the lack of detail unenjoyable, some find having the detail unenjoyable, that's why we've got so many rule sets to choose from – a good issue to have in my opinion.

However, I'm always a big fan of understanding the facts and details, so I can be educated on the matter – which is why I'm trying to cover this topic in my library and learn a little bit more about it so I can have a more educated opinion.

Yes, one thing people often forget when reading books like Death Traps is that you're really reading someone elses' opinion – it's neither right nor wrong, just their view.

The flip side of that is these guys were actually there, and saw things first hand – so their opinion is probably far more educated than some of ours – but people often take it as gospel and say "that's the way it was" which isn't always true.

On this topic, I've been thinking of picking up a book about Kursk that is just the facts – no opinions, I think the title is something like a Statistical Analysis of Kursk or something like that. I find those books to be harder to find (everyone's got their opinion and that's typically why they are writing a book) and thought it might be fun just to sit down and review the hard numbers and see what thoughts it brings about in my own head.

"I think one of the books about a british tank crews experience is online somewhere. Can't recall which or where… But worth a google."

Tank Tracks, by Peter Beale – 9RTR – good first hand account available on line

link

Ken

OK, AONeill sent me some absolutely outstanding documented research on this topic – it's really a shame this isn't available somewhere on the web, as John D. Salt has done an outstanding job of compiling this data and I could see this being of use to anyone in my situation who really wants to understand the details.

The one thing that is also becoming obvious to me as I read this is I need to understand a lot more about the ammunition types as well (I understand the basics, AP, APC, APCBC, etc – but I don't know the details like PzGr 40 or PzGr 39TS – these seem to be german designations of some type of round)?

So, in following on the path of learning, what's the best resource on WWII ammunition? I looked at a book, but not sure how good it really is – Illustrated Encyclopedia of Ammunition by Hogg (he's the editor for Jane's Ammunition series, so you'd think he's probably a foremost expert)?

err

I wrote a very "quick & dirty" run down on ammo a few years ago that got posted up on the FoW website. Hardly comprehensive (and in some places a bit err, wrong) but not a bad place to start

link

a much fuller set of details can be found on line on the old Guns v Armour site at

link

PilGrim -

I'm looking for that next level down – I know most of the basics (I consider most of that stuff the basics of ammunition) – but need to know what they actually called each of the rounds (i.e. is PzGR 39TS an AP, APC, APCBC, etc, etc type round).

CS – the website is WWIIvehicles.com. Sorry about the confusion. As I said, he has penetration data from a variety of sources – some of it surprisingly diverse. He has it classified by caliber and type of ammo, where available. I can't remember if he had ROF, etc., but from penetration and knowing what it was fighting, effective range can be reasonably guessed at.

>"Try finding copy of "World War II Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery" by Lorrin Rexford Bird and Robert D. Livingston, published by Overmatch Press."<

Lorrin Bird used to write for my old magazine, Campaign. He did some excellent studies on the effects of sloped armor. You can find some of it on MagWeg, I believe.

How big is the document? I've got about 20 megs (actually up to 100, but hopefully document is not that large) on a fairly secure (as far as paying bills, etc, it's free for me at my university) I can spare on my web site if John would like to have it posted – he or someone else can design the pages, doesn't have to be a link to my own pages. Anyway, offer's open if John doesn't have web space anymore. I rember reading a lot of John's posts on r.g.m.h before it went to hell.
--
Tim

OK, I'll host them. I'm sure John won't mind but I'll ask him about it when I see him.

I've converted them to PDFs and put them on my website in the history section.

link

There is the one on AT weapons plus the compilation of OR stuff on weapons effectiveness.

This is the original Allied report of AT effectiveness. No Eastern Front, but the reprint is interesting from the perspective of what the Allies were facing.

1-73350 Nafziger, G. editior COMPARATIVE PERFORMANCE OF GERMAN/ALLIED ANTITANK 8.5x11, numerous charts/tables, concise comparison of German & Allied Anti-Tank weapons in WWII.1 vol, 48 pgs 2003 US, NAFZIGER COLLLECTION
NEW-softcover ……$13.00

Related: a series of Nafziger books on WWII Armored tactics from various nationalities ($20 each).

See our website and type in Nafziger in the search engine, then scroll to the bottom and work your way up through the WWII books. Nafziger books are certainly not glossy polished works of art, but the raw info within is terriffic.

Dennis From OMM
onmilitarymatters.com

I suppose, after that chuck-up from Martin, the only decent thing to do is to verify my e-mail address and make my first post on TMP.

First of all, let me say that the snippets summaries I put together are all supposed to be shared, so by all means share them.

However, it might be worth checking to see that you have the latest version of the files. The penetration file was last updated in July 06, and now weighs in at about a quarter of a meg all zipped up. It has been completely reorganised, and includes an expanded introduction including a brief discussion on penetration criteria, factors affecting penetration, ammuntion natures, and my own appallingly heretical beliefs about the purpose of Schurzen.

The number of sources used in the latest edition is some 235, but only about 125 of these contain original information; the remaining 200-odd merely copy stuff already in print elsewhere, often without accurate attribution.

If anyone wants a copy of the file, please e-mail me at jdsalt@gotadsl.co.uk, with the subject line "penfile request" so that I may prevent MailWasher slooshing your missive down the plug 'ole. Please allow a few days for the reply, on account of my personal disorganisation.

I have a few more snippets of material that I may add to the file someday, but it is now very far from being my top priority. The exercise of compiling the file has convinced me that almost all references on the subject are pretty dodgy, so there is little to be gained piling reference on reference unless one derives pleasure from contemplating poor scholarship. There are a few core texts that are worth any amount of the other stuff; Tantum & Hoffschmidt, Hunnicutt, the British official histories by Playfair and Ellis, and you have the bulk of the trustworthy material available.

I suspect that even authoritative penetration tables such as those apparently quoted by these sources are in fact based on a quite small number of experimental results. I therefore suspect that what I should have done was not to compile a list of penetration tables, but rather try to compile a list of firing trials conducted in the 1930s and 1940s.

In order to get a fair comparison of the penetration performance of different weapons, it is arguably best to proceed by calculation from a known armour penetration formula. In my opinion the best such formula is that developed by James Dehn in the 1980s (for WW2 use, at least, where we are not dealing with hyper-velocity penetrations, otherwise Alekseevski-Tate would be the one). The great virtue of Dehn's formula is that it does not involve any of the "fudge-factors" included in, for example, the De Marre family of formulae. It does, however, need you to know some of the basic material properties of armour and projectile, that is, their density and ultimate strength. The basic formula does not deal with projectile shatter, angled impacts or layered armour, but it is still much better than anything else I have met.

The section on hit probability has been removed entirely from the current version of the penetration file. This isn't because P(hit) is unimportant -- on the contrary, by 1944 British OR staff had concluded that effective engagement range for ATk guns was generally limited by P(hit) rather than penetrating power. However, we are lucky in that P(hit) is quite amenable to calculation from first principles, so long as you know the dimensions of the target and a few things about the projectile, most obviously its expected angular dispersion at the the muzzle (try finding decent sources for that!), and you either know its angle of fall or can make a reasonable approximation of the trajectory shape to find same. I have written a Python script to calculate P(hit) and graph the results out to 2000m. Again, it's all meant to be shared, so if you want a copy of Uncle John's Steam Powered P(Hit) calculator, e-mail me at the above address, but this time with the subject line "P(hit) calculator". For simplicity, please send a separate request for each thingy. I regret to say I haven't the time to give technical support to people who can't install and run Python unaided, so you're on your own with it unless you can find a way of bribing me (alcohol might work).

Finally, for completeness, I also have a file of snippets on WW2 land weapons effectiveness and another on WW2 naval weapons effectiveness, both smaller than the penetration file because they are drawn almost entirely from primary sources at the PRO rather than from secondary sdurces like books. Again, please send a separate request for each file, with the title "Effectiveness file" or "Naval effectiveness file" as appropriate. As with the other stuff, it's all material in the public domain that I have merely collated, so it is given away freely to be shared freely.

All the best,

John.

Ok – I give up.

Anyone know where I could buy either of the two books recommended above?

("World War II Ballistics: Armor and Gunnery" by Lorrin Rexford Bird and Robert D. Livingston, published by Overmatch Press. or "Armoured Firepower. The Development of Tank Armament 1939-1945" by Peter Gudgin.)

I've been googling for an hour and have had no luck at all!

Mitch.

I thought the Gudgin book ought to be easy but it's oop.
link
If you don't fancy the second hand sellers there then any second hand bookshop might have one. It's a fairly mainstream book you would have been able to buy in Borders, waterstones or whatever.

Google books

alas no previews
link

World War II Ballistics By Lorrin Rexford Bird
link

Neither link offers much other than book details

some modern books have quite a few preview pages on google books, I have spent quite a few hours just reading previews on google, plus downloading the pictures & tables

Joe D. thanks to John Salt's pdf I went looking for books by Tantum & Hoffschmidt. They are pretty easy to find in good condition. If you have an Amazon account you can second party purchase them.

I had a stack of World War II Ballistics By Bird & Livingston books for sale but I sold the last one a year ago, sorry.

The thing is the gun data in the books by Tantum & Hoffschmidt indicate the gun data by Bird & Livingston is a bit off.

Thanks Guys – more to go on than I found!

AONeill – you've just taught me that UK Amazon shows different results to the US Amazon. Being in Australia and very used to eBay I just assumed that they were all interconnected. You learn something new every day.

Mobius – I have John's PDF's around here somewhere from a while back. Reading the above again I should probably drop him a line to get the updated versions though. A search of Amazon showed a few different books from the 60's and 70's. I couldn't see anthing that looked like it covers all the combatants but is 'German Tank and Antitank in World War II' what I would be looking for?

I remember when the Bird & Livingstone book was released and should have bought it then – teach me to delay!

Mitch.

Joe D. that is the one I just received. It only has about 6 useful German gun tables but I needed to have them so I could check that against other data.

The largest set of German data I have comes from the Encyclopedia of German Tanks of World War Two. The same penetration data table are found in J. Salt's pdf on penetration. I like to know the muzzle velocity too so getting the book is useful.
(Incidentally that is design specs on the guns. Some later had reduced charges which you get when you see US or British captured data on German guns.)

Russian Battlefield had good data on Russian guns.

Right now I'm trying to sort out conflicting data from different sources. Sometimes its like the man with one watch. He always knows what time it is. The man with two isn't quite sure exactly.

Oh, I forgot, for US guns try getting ahold of photocopies of TM 9-1907. There are two editions, get both.