Deadliest gun or tank

[Veho Nex]

This is a small thread asking peoples opinions on the deadliest gun or tank towards its crew and the enemy.

My money would have to go on this mortar(artillery) that the Japanese used(can't remember name right now) where the average crew had a life span of 4-6 rounds because each round weighed about 600 lbs. Several of these were posted on Iwo Jima but were never used for lack of man power.(You can read about these in a book called Storm Landings

[English assassin]

????

Toss up between most deadly or most useless, but the RAF started WW2 with an antisubmarine bomb that had to be dropped from such a low height that there was a very high chance it would "skip" off the water surface and explode in mid air....right underneath the bombing airplane.

[Randarkmaan]

Well, if it's talking about deadly to the operator, I'd say the Sten gun may get a nomination. A friend of mine is English (half-english) and when his grandfather fought in WWII a friend of his got shot in the head by his own Sten gun when their truck drove over a bump. The safety was on (if the Sten gun had a safety that is).

[cunctator]

Atomic Annie


Maybe even deadly for it's crew if the wind blows them the fallout into the face.

[Veho Nex]

Atomic Annie


Maybe even deadly for it's crew if the wind blows them the fallout into the face.

Ok maybe the not the smartest weapon but sounds like fun though i thought it was called big bertha or am i thinking of something else

[Mithradates]

Nah thats a short range nuke they developed after the war. I would say a prety deadly weapon would have to be the german 88" It was originaly anti aircraft gun then just went on to be an anti tank gun then they even mounted one on one of them king tiger tanks!

[Spino]

You know what? I really need to read the initial post more carefully. Ye gods, what a waste of typing that was!

[The Spartan (Returns)]

M1903 Springfield rifle
and other snipers (rifles) decimated infantry

i'd rather talk about strongest artillery.

[TinCow]

On the topic of deadliest to its own crew, I'll throw in the Me163 Komet. An interesting plane for military historians, but an absolute nightmare for pilots. They were pretty much ineffective as an offensive weapon and could only achieve success at the hands of a very experienced pilot. The plane was designed to fly ridiculously fast (for the time) to extremely high altitudes in a short period of time. However, the cockpit wasn't pressurized, the pilots didn't have pressure suits, and they often operated at such high altitudes that there was a risk of passing out during flight.

On top of that, it combined two elements that made it absolutely deadly to the pilot: It used extremely volitile rocket fuel and it had no landing gear. A rough landing on the skid would often ignite any remaining fuel, causing the plane to explode. If by some fluke of luck, the plane didn't explode, the fuel tanks could rupture and spill onto the pilot... literally dissolving him alive. The pilot was lucky if he could even get the thing onto the ground, since the incredibly aerodynamic body would often put it airborne again at even the slightest bump while skidding in.

So, the only way for a pilot to have any reach chance of surviving a landing was to totally empty his fuel tanks first and then glide in. This left him completely vulnerable to Allied fighters, who invariably shot them down during this phase.

The stats don't lie on this one. About 80% of all Me163 losses were due to accidents on take-off and landing. 15% were due to other malfunctions in the air. The remaining 5% were lost in combat, and I suspect that nearly all of those were while gliding in on an empty tank.

[Veho Nex]

On the topic of deadliest to its own crew, I'll throw in the Me163 Komet. An interesting plane for military historians, but an absolute nightmare for pilots. They were pretty much ineffective as an offensive weapon and could only achieve success at the hands of a very experienced pilot. The plane was designed to fly ridiculously fast (for the time) to extremely high altitudes in a short period of time. However, the cockpit wasn't pressurized, the pilots didn't have pressure suits, and they often operated at such high altitudes that there was a risk of passing out during flight.

On top of that, it combined two elements that made it absolutely deadly to the pilot: It used extremely volitile rocket fuel and it had no landing gear. A rough landing on the skid would often ignite any remaining fuel, causing the plane to explode. If by some fluke of luck, the plane didn't explode, the fuel tanks could rupture and spill onto the pilot... literally dissolving him alive. The pilot was lucky if he could even get the thing onto the ground, since the incredibly aerodynamic body would often put it airborne again at even the slightest bump while skidding in.

So, the only way for a pilot to have any reach chance of surviving a landing was to totally empty his fuel tanks first and then glide in. This left him completely vulnerable to Allied fighters, who invariably shot them down during this phase.

The stats don't lie on this one. About 80% of all Me163 losses were due to accidents on take-off and landing. 15% were due to other malfunctions in the air. The remaining 5% were lost in combat, and I suspect that nearly all of those were while gliding in on an empty tank.

Smart wernt they?

[The Wizard]

Soviet tanks weren't the safest for their crews, either. If it's either being blown up with the tank when hit or just getting your arm ripped off by the supposedly easier or safer autoloader, it wasn't a swell prospect to go to war in one of those. Ivan was pretty darn generous when it came to spending his manpower.

Luckily for Rusian tank crews, the T-95 is rumored to have a much greater concentration upon crew protection than any previous Soviet tank (Soviet, and not Russian, since it is Soviet in design).

[Decker]

Soviet tanks weren't the safest for their crews, either. If it's either being blown up with the tank when hit or just getting your arm ripped off by the supposedly easier or safer autoloader, it wasn't a swell prospect to go to war in one of those. Ivan was pretty darn generous when it came to spending his manpower.

Luckily for Rusian tank crews, the T-95 is rumored to have a much greater concentration upon crew protection than any previous Soviet tank (Soviet, and not Russian, since it is Soviet in design).

In that case you could also mention the Sherman M1A1(?), before it was upgraded. They would just catch fire when they were hit and explode even. It was also terrible for the crews when it happened and haunted the ones that replaced them when the Sherman tank was repaired(if at all possible).

[Uesugi Kenshin]

In that case you could also mention the Sherman M1A1(?), before it was upgraded. They would just catch fire when they were hit and explode even. It was also terrible for the crews when it happened and haunted the ones that replaced them when the Sherman tank was repaired(if at all possible).

It'S the Sherman M4 or maybe M4A1. And I am fairly sure that the Shermans had a problem with blowing up and catching on fire when their armor was penetrated during the entire time that they were in use. And since their armor was relatively quickly made obsolete by advances in AT weaponry in both size and quality of shells and canon that started to mean whenever they were struck by mid-WWII. I second that nomination, though I bet some of the smaller Soviet tanks were even more deadly to their crews.

[MilesGregarius]

Shermans tended to brew up extremely easily for two reasons:

Early war Shermans had unarmored ammo bins. When hit, the the tank's own rounds would often cook off, killing the crew and earning the Sherman the sobriquet "Tommy-cooker" or "Ronson" (after the lighter). This was remedied in later models by utilizing wet storage where the ammo bins were surrounded by water, thereby dousing the ammo with water when hit to reduce the chance of a fire. Models with wet storage were indicated by a "w" as in M4A3(75)w. 105mm versions didn't use wet storage but had armored ammo bins, smilarly reducing fires.

Being powered by aviation gas (except for the diesel powered M4A2 version used by the USMC and Lend-Lease), they would catch fire far more quickly than diesel powered tanks. This was never fixed, though it was less of a problem than the ammo situation since the fuel wasn't in the crew compartment like the ammo was.

Also, the earliest Shermans had only a commander's hatch on the turret, no loader's hatch. This meant that when bailing out, the loader had to wait for both the commander and gunner to escape first, then duck under the main gun's breach to get out. Combined with the ease with which the tank burned, there wasn't much hope for the loader in an early war model. Late war models had a separate loader's hatch, which improved both survivability and comfort.

As to the OP, I'd vote for the man-packed flamethrower, essentially an unarmored can of napalm strapped to its operators back.

[The Wizard]

Agreed on the Sherman's weakness relative to other tanks, and it's true that one Tiger could engage ten Shermans on its own (where there was usually an eleventh one around to take down the Tiger )...

... but if it was so deadly to its own crew (and got taken out so often), why did the U.S.A. only ('only') suffer 400 000 casualties in the war (most of which were in the Pacific theater)?

EDIT: A (very) general question with a (very) general answer, true -- but you'd expect a death-trap of a tank that got hit hard and often would see a lot of casualties in the U.S. armored corps on the Western front. Or was it that theater's relative brevity on land for the Western Allies?

[MilesGregarius]

... but if it was so deadly to its own crew (and got taken out so often), why did the U.S.A. only ('only') suffer 400 000 casualties in the war (most of which were in the Pacific theater)?

I don't consider the Sherman to be one of the deadliest to its own crew; just expanding on a previous post. I'm actually a big fan of the Sherman, warts and all. The wet storage upgrade and the new turrets with a loader's hatch solved most of the crew survivability questions, making it no worse than average.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Agreed on the Sherman's weakness relative to other tanks, and it's true that one Tiger could engage ten Shermans on its own (where there was usually an eleventh one around to take down the Tiger )...

... but if it was so deadly to its own crew (and got taken out so often), why did the U.S.A. only ('only') suffer 400 000 casualties in the war (most of which were in the Pacific theater)?

EDIT: A (very) general question with a (very) general answer, true -- but you'd expect a death-trap of a tank that got hit hard and often would see a lot of casualties in the U.S. armored corps on the Western front. Or was it that theater's relative brevity on land for the Western Allies?

Comparative brevity played a part in our relatively limited losses. We skipped all of '39 and '40 and were only involved in very limited combat operations prior to December of '41.

I'd cite two key points in the minimization of US casualties: lavish logistics and a specific decision to minimize the infantry component of our forces.

Lavish logistics let us use a couple of hundred shells on a problem rather then sending forward an infantry unit with bayonets. By no means did this solve all problems -- we hammered Iwo for weeks and still lost a lot of jarheads -- but it did allow us to overcome a number of problems by expending munitions instead of people.

Add in the fact that we always built up (at least in the ETO) a huge pool of resources to handle the problems. Very little was accomplished on a shoe-string (we saved that attitude for the Pre-1943 Pacific). Lavish air power, supplies, and lots of equipment and support were built up, especially for the invasion of France. In part, this was built up at the expense of quite a few Soviet dead (by taking our time to do it right we didn't exactly take the pressure off of them quickly), but I suspect that neither Winnie nor Franklin sobbed very hard about that.

Also, the U.S. Army was relatively thin on infantry throughout the war. We had a total of 68 infantry divisions, 1 mountain division, 16 armored divisions, 5 airborne divisions, and 2 cavalry divisions. This from a population base of more than 130 millions.

In comparison, Germany fielded between 250 and 300 divisions (375 at their peak in 1945 though many of these were "hollow"), nearly 50 of them armor/armored infantry from a population of 70 millions [though they also drew recruits from surrounding nations as well]

Germany fielded 4-5 infantry formations for each armored formation, and carried (for much of the war) a higher percentage of infantry in its armored formations as well. The USA had roughly a 4-1 ratio, but fielded far less infantry in its armored formations than did the Germans.

We purposely put fewer boots into the line of fire. Wipe out an infantry battalion and you've caused 1k of casualties. Kill a battalion of tanks (but have 2 of each 5 bail out) and you've killed only 500 or so. Tanks represented a decrease in potential casualties.

[Decker]

The Sherman was made specifically for infantry support roles and not for tank-v-tank engagements and usually would try to pull out of the fight and let the models made specifically for engaging enemy tanks to take over(like the M-10). That is why you see the British Firefly tank with its upgraded 17pdr gun. It was also faster and its turret could turn faster than a German panzer and get more rounds down range than their German counterparts.

[Veho Nex]

Agreed on the Sherman's weakness relative to other tanks, and it's true that one Tiger could engage ten Shermans on its own (where there was usually an eleventh one around to take down the Tiger )...

... but if it was so deadly to its own crew (and got taken out so often), why did the U.S.A. only ('only') suffer 400 000 casualties in the war (most of which were in the Pacific theater)?

EDIT: A (very) general question with a (very) general answer, true -- but you'd expect a death-trap of a tank that got hit hard and often would see a lot of casualties in the U.S. armored corps on the Western front. Or was it that theater's relative brevity on land for the Western Allies?

quick thing most casualties in the pacific because each new island became an invasion of normandy again so thats why alot of amphibious assualts

[Veho Nex]

The Sherman was made specifically for infantry support roles and not for tank-v-tank engagements and usually would try to pull out of the fight and let the models made specifically for engaging enemy tanks to take over(like the M-10). That is why you see the British Firefly tank with its upgraded 17pdr gun. It was also faster and its turret could turn faster than a German panzer and get more rounds down range than their German counterparts.

the M4A3E2 was upgraded with a new engine and a 76mm anti tank gun desinged to be more AT role in infantry support`

[The Wizard]

Hmm, so one could argue that, due to the relatively higher mechanization of the U.S. forces compared to those of others, it suffered less casualties? Not to mention that they fought with allies all around, unlike the Germans or the Soviets. Interesting to note with that comment is that the U.S. suffered most of its casualties in the one theater where it fought mostly alone: the Pacific.

But as for the rest, a very informative post which answers a question I've been pondering for quite some time now. Thanks!

[Veho Nex]

Hmm, so one could argue that, due to the relatively higher mechanization of the U.S. forces compared to those of others, it suffered less casualties? Not to mention that they fought with allies all around, unlike the Germans or the Soviets. Interesting to note with that comment is that the U.S. suffered most of its casualties in the one theater where it fought mostly alone: the Pacific.

But as for the rest, a very informative post which answers a question I've been pondering for quite some time now. Thanks!

whos that to??

[The Wizard]

Seamus Fermanagh.

[nokhor]

i have heard that due to the way the transport ships that the U.S. was using during the war, the U.S. could ship something like 4-5 Shermans for every more advanced tank that could go toe to toe with German high end tanks, and the U.S. decided to logistically go for quantity over quality in that regards.