"tanks - moving fire?" Topic

I was watching one of those Tank Battle progs on the TV this evening and a question arose in my mind that leaves me unsure.

While modern tanks have gyro stabilisers (or something similar) to assist in firing the main gun while moving, could WWII tanks realistically do the same? I am sure they could fire at very short range while on the move but would they commonly have to come to a halt to fire at any enemy tanks at any longer ranges, for example? I assume a tank may want to keep moving to make themselves a more difficult target and if it fires it might be more in hope than expectation, perhaps?

Just curious how accurate moving fire was likely to be, all other things being equal.

Mike

When I did Infantry Officer Basic in 1970, we were told that if tanks are moving they are utterly inaccurate.

Check out this article in Popular Science from Sept 1944. Page 82 :).
link

And Page 45 here talks about the M3 Stuart having one.
link

And from IIRC the M4A3 Sherman had one too
Robert

Thanks – am on a Blackberry at the moment – will look tomorrow when have the use of a screen that does not frazzle my eyesight :-)

Mike

No

Your welcome.I think they will tell you how well. IMO I would say no though. Robert

This Life magazine from 1943 talks about it too,
link

And page 87 here. M4 Sherman at War
By Michael Green, James D. Brown
link

Also know as, the Universally-Disabled Gyro-Stabilizer.

Firing on the move was wildly inaccurate. Most such firing was done from the short halt-stop as fast as possible, wait for the tank to stop bouncing on its suspension (more or less), and then gun it to avoid return fire.

doc mcb that was true in 1970.

As others have said, short halt was the order of the day

Some of the disadvantages that have been pointed out before on another site from TK-525 Operation and Maintenance of the Gyro-Stabilizer. Chassis Group, Tank Department, The Armored School, Ft. Knox, KY. (2-16-44-500). Robert

The gyro stabilizer took at least 5 minutes to spin up before it could be engaged.
Once it was spun up, the gyro stabilizer could not be left running for extended periods of time because of wear and tear on the system.
Before the gyro stabilizer could be used at all, it had to be calibrated. This process took a trained gun crew about 20 minutes to accomplish.
Calibration of the gyro stabilizer had to be performed at least daily, and more often under conditions in which temperatures were very low, very hot, when they changed much during the day.
Fine tuning the calibration could be done only when the main gun was fired.
Depending on many variables, fine tuning might require the discharge of one to three rounds on average.
Once the gyro-stabilizer was fine tuned for HE rounds, for example, it had to be retuned to use a round of different weight like shot or smoke.

I found this too,

FM 17-12 presents some interesting advice on the use of the Sherman gyro stabilizer:
"FIRING WHILE MOVING"

"Firing with the 75mm gun while moving is inaccurate and causes an uneconomical expenditure of ammunition. Do it only in an emergency and at ranges of 600 yards or less."

Even with a gyro stabilizer 600 yards is about it, and misses are expected. The 600 yard range may be based on a reasonable hit probability given the initial range estimation (which may contain some error), and the small angle errors that will occur with a stabilizer.

"Firing while moving requires close teamwork between driver and gunner. Drive at a constant speed: acceleration and decleration upset the action of the stabilizer. Drive in a straight line, otherwise the gun yaws as the tank turns. When going over rough terrain, do not fight the gun (attempting to keep it on target by spinning the elevating handwheel) but wait until a constant speed and regained and the action of the stabilizer has smoothed out."

"The stabilizer will not lay the gun. It merely tends to keep the gun where it has been laid: that is, it eliminates extremely jerky movements caused by the movement of the tank. Even with a stabilizer, the gun does not hold constantly on the target. Watch the swing of the gun through the target and fire as the proper sight setting crosses the target."

True shoot on the move is a very recent thing, late 80's/early 90's for the genuine article we see today.

The US first introduced stabilisers as we know it. Apparently the first models had up/down axis stabilisation only (but tanks pitch side to side as well). Many crews took them out as they were unreliable as well, and they wanted the extra space in their tanks.

In the honey/m3 stuart, this allegedly gave enough room for the hull machine gunner help with loading the main gun by selecting and passing shells to the turret crew.

The British used a shoulder pad to control elevation on the tank 2pdr, so dampening the movement was done to some degree by the gunners legs. Many other nations used similar. As guns got bigger, this disappeared as the weight of the larger pieces made it impossible.

The Germans developed their complex overlapping wheels suspension (panther, tiger etc) to give a much smother ride and so a stable gun platform across poor ground (yes, there was a reason for that suspension other than technical virtue/showing off)

All seemed to my understanding as to be about as effective at each other, in managing to turn the hitting something while on the move from utterly unfeasable to something vaguely possible at a slow speed (almost a crawl) and short range.

Some accounts (as I understand them) describe advances as bursts of speed before almost coming to a stop to shoot and then followed almost immediately by another burst of speed. As a unit advancing, almost playing leapfrog with each other (advancing in bounds, like the fire teams in an infantry squad). Often it seems as if hitting the enemy was not the actual intent of the shooting, but rather dropping rounds close enough to put his shot off. Though dashing to dips in the ground or cover to effectively gain hull down protection was preferred.

How else to you explain tigers mixing it up with t-34s and t-70s at ranges of 50m or less,resorting to ramming etc.Rommel stated that the only reason to move the tank was to obtain a better firing position…that view ruled tank warfare until the 70S.

The US Army manual on Tank Gunnary in the 1970s had a section on the accuaracy improvement of gunnary.

It stated that in World War 2 a stationary Sherman firing at a target 500 meters had to fire 13 rounds at the same target before it would even reach a 50% chance to hit the target.

Boy would such a low percentage chance to hit drive wargamers nuts over all of the misses.

Blimey Rudy, I can't really believe this is true for a stationary tank. It does seem to contradict memoirs etc where the impression given is that firing from a stationary Sherman in action is quite accurate.

Any more details? Is the target especially small, or moving quickly or something?

Agree though that when moving accuracy was indeed awful

Accuracy tends to go down when the target is shooting back

IIRC British tank gunners were trained to fire on the move in the early war period at least, hence the shoulder pad arrangement that allowed to 2pdr to move freely in elevation.

Here is a copy of the FM 17-12 1943 (OBSOLETE) : Armored force field manual, tank gunnery. Robert

link

My understanding of the gyro-stabilizer was to keep the gun pointing in the correct direction while the tank moved to a new firing position, and the crew therefore required less time to engage the target when a quick stop for firing was done.

Mike

It stated that in World War 2 a stationary Sherman firing at a target 500 meters had to fire 13 rounds at the same target before it would even reach a 50% chance to hit the target.

Boy would such a low percentage chance to hit drive wargamers nuts over all of the misses.

I've seen that in a manual as well. I'm not sure where or what is being included as 'the target'. If it is vs. a hull up stationary tank target with a zeroed gun it is clearly false. If it includes moving, stationary, hull up and hull down and/or hidden or unknown and AT guns then maybe it is valid.

John D Salt may have to chime in on this. Robert

The US Army manual on Tank Gunnary in the 1970s had a section on the accuaracy improvement of gunnary.

It stated that in World War 2 a stationary Sherman firing at a target 500 meters had to fire 13 rounds at the same target before it would even reach a 50% chance to hit the target.

Boy would such a low percentage chance to hit drive wargamers nuts over all of the misses.

Sounds like the standard stuff the Army puts in its manuals to "talk up" the current equipment. If that figure was true a tank would use up all its ammunition on two or three targets. Considering the fact that Sherman gunners had a technique for killing Panthers by hitting the base of the curved mantlet and thereby directing the round through the thin armor on the top of the hull, and the fact that late Panther Gs had a lip put on the mantlet to stop it, well that seems more accurate than the Army claimed. Indeed in the book "Commanding the Red Army's Shermans" the author mentions how much the Soviets loved the Sherman because of the accuracy of its gun.

So my guess is that its either standard Army "look how much better the new equipment is" or possibly based on some of SLA Marshall's flawed "research". SLA Marshall had a habit (especially with the infantry) of claiming that he spoke with more people than he did, or discounting battlefield reports that disagreed with his theory that the US produced lousy soldiers. Marshall wrote that Easy Co, 506th, 101st AB used 195 men in the attack on Brecourt Manor. I don't know if he wrote about armor but it sounds like it could be one of his "facts."

What Mike said.

And regarding tank movement, a tank in combat is either traveling at full speed, or full brakes.

We were trying to write micros armor rules in the 80s and we often debated die roll modifiers for moving tanks. One of our club members was in the ROTC and he called me to tell me that he had done an experiment. He drove his M60 down a road and tried to hit a bed sheet target at the end of the road a few hundred yards away. He said they couldn't hit it even at 3mph! Then an M1 crossed the road going full speed and fired broadside and nailed the target dead center.

Yes, but the Abrams has the equivalent of a battleship's stable-vertical fire-control system.

Do WW2 wargames rules tend to reflect this utter inaccuracy when moving? Or is it conveniently over-looked? Or is it 'assumed' that the tank stops to fire?

It is Goundhog Day all over again!

I wonder how many times this will be rehashed?

Speaking of the inimitable John D. Salt – here is a relevant section from his most excellent compendium -

WO 291/1202 Tank armament stabilisation: User experience and the present
situation
Westinghouse hydro-electric stabilisation on the Stuart, Lee and Sherman stabilised the main turret
armament and co-ax in elevation only.
"Owing to the limitations inherent in the system, it was used very little operationally. It gave slightly
better results when shooting on the move than could be obtained with a shoulder-controlled gun; but
the chances of hitting when using it on the move were so small, compared with firing from the halt, that
users preferred to engage their targets from the halt rather than on the move with the stabiliser
working."
In Italy, the stabiliser was used as a shock-absorber on 76mm Shermans, as the big gun subjected the
elevating mechanism to large shock loadings when moving cross-country.
"The Westinghouse stabiliser was so little used during the campaign in NW Europe, that servicing and
repair of the equipment ceased after the liberation of Belgium. Replacement vehicles were sent forward
classified as "fit", regardless of whether the stabiliser was in working order or not."
Trials with the Metrovick electrical two-axis stabiliser on 20-pr Centurions at Lulworth showed accuracy
with AP 70–75% as good as at the halt, and with HE very nearly as good as at the halt. A second trial
produced results slightly less favourable.

By the way, 6pdrs were also free in elevation with a shoulder pad harness for the gunner.

Interesting bit on the Centurion III, I had seen elsewhere (Profile, model kit instruction sheet?) that during trials a Centurion III had hit 16 of 17 momentary targets while on the move. Might have been the HE.

Someone (S&T article, Tractics design note?) wrote about running a trial using a camera in his car. Went around a curve at various speeds trying to take a picture of a target. Could do it at speeds up to 7 mph, then no go.

As I recall Tractics had a fairly low modifier up to 7 mph and then reduced the accuracy by about 75 percent.

Interestingly the 7 mph would work out for I tanks being able to fire while traveling at what many games feel is their top cross country speed.

To echo the comments above, the Royal Tank Corps (and RTR) trained pre-war to fire on the move and it was one of the design pre-requisites for tank procurement.

They were evidently quite good at it.

During the war as the army expanded, casualties took their toll of pre-war regulars and equiment changed (hard to do free elevation with a 6pdr or 75) they moved to the German system of firing from the short halt.

wrt rules, rules which allow tanks to move and fire without penalty drive me potty, however it does depend on level of representation and turn length. There are various ways to model it with varied move distances and firing penalties/rof reductions or whatever. Some 'move and firing' may actually model firing from the short halt within the turn duration.

AHGCs Tobruk only allowed you to move or shoot,which seemed to work very well.

Firing on the move with a "stabilized" gun remained problematic for the US Army right up to the M60 series. The stabilization system would keep the gun pointed in the immediate target area to avoid the gunner having to reacquire it, but that was really the best you could hope for. At low speed, you were better off using the short halt technique. But like Tuscaloosa said, a tank should be either stationary or moving very fast. A target moving 5 mph is almost as easy to hit as a stationary one. The M1 was our first tank with a true "shoot on the move" capability.

Firing on the move was wildly inaccurate. Most such firing was done from the short halt-stop as fast as possible, wait for the tank to stop bouncing on its suspension (more or less), and then gun it to avoid return fire.

Keep in mind that a tank should not be able to barrel along at top speed one turn and then stop and fire accurately on the next turn. If you're going to have to stop to fire, you should be moving slowly.

And here is John's summary of the War Office report for firing on the move -

WO 291/90 Firing on the move from tanks
"With existing British tanks the effectiveness (hits per minute) of shooting on the move is never greater
than 1/2 that of stationary fire under similar conditions and is often 1/20 or less. The Westinghouse
gyro stabilizer produces some improvement".
The "Movement is armour" argument was held to be confuted by results from a trial by gunnery
instructors at Lulworth shooting at a target at 800 yards and obtaining 62% hits on a static target and
64% hits on a moving one. It is pointed out that the smooth, steady movement necessary to gunnery
on the move does little to make the tank harder to hit.
For MG fire, "…the number of machine gun bullets per minute that will come dangerously close to an
anti-tank gun crew from a single tank firing on the move is very small." The best MG results, using the
shoulder-controlled mounting in the Crusader and an expert crew, showed a reduction of one-half in
hitting rate. "For average gunners factors of 1/4 to 1/20 or worse would be expected."
For the main armament, it was found that "…a comparatively high percentage of hits can be obtained
with a light gun in a free elevation mounting but that the rate of fire is greatly reduced by movement."

Note that the report also analyzes COAX MG fire on the move as well. One would presume that with a more limited traverse/field of fire a hull mounted MG would be even worse.

On the other hand it would be of interest to have the data on the contemporary accuracies for tanks at the halt (don't recall seeing anything that early in John's summaries). Half of 75 percent could be worth attempting – half of 3 percent less so.

@donlowry, that would depend somewhat on turn length and the rate of fire for the ruleset. 5 minute turn not so critical, 25 second turn rather more so.

I have served on the:
M48A5-no stabilization. All firing from a short halt.
M60A3-early stabilization. It was a pain to get going and set up and could not run all day. There was only one speed that it worked at. Other than that, the picture shook. For most tanks it was around 7 MPH.
M1-great stabilization. You could do anything and shoot.
I was a gunner on the M60A3 and the M1.

In the 1970s in my Armored Cavalry platoon, I had a section of 3 x M551 Sheeridan Armored Recon vehicles with a 152mm gun. We rarely trained to fire the gun (and never the missle) on the move.

I make this comment because the M551 used the same V gunner's sight as they used in WW2. When you add the lack of stablization to the V sight, it was not hard for me to understand the problems with hitting enemy targets stationary or on the move.

I had vehicles similar to Jimmy as an Armored Officer. Though i never had any M48A5 (USMC?), I did have jun jeeps, M106 (mortars), M113s, M113 TOWs, M577s, M60A1, M60A2, and M1s. I was transferred to the Quatermaster (loss of hearing) when the unit got Bradleys.

T-55s should have done wonders against the Israelis.

T-54B (1956) had two-axis stabilized 100mm D-10T2S.
T-55 (1958) and T-55A (1961) also used same 100mm D-10T2S and STP-2 "Tsiklon" (Cyclone) stabilizer as T-54B.

Did they have those in the 'export' versions?

"T-55s should have done wonders against the Israelis."

I remember one intel briefing that said a lot of the Israeli success was due to the Centurion being able to get a better hull down position reverse slopes where the T-54's an 55's were unable to depress their guns sufficiently to engage. Don't know how true this is though.

The hull-down issue is accurate; the western tanks used by the Israelis were able to get better hull-down positions than the Soviet ones used by the Arab nations, as their guns could depress lower than those of the Soviet vehicles.

The source for this was my uncle who was an Israeli tank officer and fought in 1967 and 1973.

On the other side of the gun elevation factor, just saw the 'Great Tank Battles' episode on the Golan Heights battles. Apparently the Syrians were also caught on the road up to the heights and couldn't elevate their guns sufficiently to return fire on the Isrealis above them.

Goragrad is right I was fortunate to attend a lecture at the Armor School given by the Bn compander of the Isreali tanks on the heights.

I was the S4 of the MI Bn at Fort Riley Kansas. As a reult I was hand receipted for a large number of soviet gun, artillery, a BMP, a BRDM and two tanks T-54 and a T63 IIRC.

Shooting on the move vs an identified target or on a shooting range is one thing.

Acquiring a target in combat is something else entirely!

Does anyone know if there are documented instances of Abrams hitting targets at speed in combat? Given Concerns over fratricide it seems almost foolhardy to zoom around a battlefield shooting like this.

In Gulf War I several AFVs were killed by friendly AFVs due to IFF issues.

Wartopia

Excellent point.

Of course, fratricide almost never features in wargames rules though… not sure why as it is an important factor in 'modern' warfare.

I would consider the penalties for shooting during movement not so much a reflection of inaccuracy but rather the fact that fewer rounds are going out. Unless you're playing a system where one die roll equals one shot, the roll is being made for the combined number of rounds expended during the time frame of the movement phase. The more rounds fired, the more chance of success. It can be assumed that the AFV is stopping to fire,then moving,then stopping to fire again. Only a movie director would have WWII tanks firing while on the fly! I wonder if Mikebrn was watching Soviet footage of T34s "charging" Germans. The Soviets did allot of re-enacting battles for propaganda films.