I always wondered about the capture of this seemingly intact Tiger. Makes sense now. Unable to move because the driver was probably injured/stunned and unable to fight with a disabled turret there was little to do but dismount and seek cover.
far as I know the crew kind of panicked when the turret jammed, they all bailed out. I wonder why they didn't destroy the vehicle. We were thought to blow the machine up if we had to leave it, if not enough time to do that the commander is responsible for denying the enemy the ability to use the gun. If the driver is injured so much he can't carry his tasks, he will be replaced by another crew member and the machine will either keep fighting or will be drawn back for repair. I think after they realized they can't return fire, they bailed out. Not throwing a bunch of grenades in, on their way out is the real head scratcher for me
@@hanzkammler6388 You said the likely reason, they panicked. Maybe trained to destroy the vehicle if bailing out, but it's hard to really think logically under such an extremely stressful situation.
@@zuthalsoraniz6764 They had no way to know it was an extremely lucky hit. For all they knew, something just penetrated their armor, and if it did it once, it can do it again in matter of seconds, and this time they may not be lucky enough to survive. As for why they didn't destroy the tank, it might be they expected to recover it later. Tank was disabled, but not scrap. I imagine at that point they could not afford to destroy equipment unless they were absolutely certain they won't get it back. They took cover with friendy forces, but ended up cut off from tank when frendlies pulled back.
@@hanzkammler6388 there isn't a lot of cover in the desert and a burning tank would have lit them up. Better to leave the tank intact and escape than to destroy it and be killed.
Real life tank crews: Oh No OuR TuRrEt Is JaMmEd We GoTtA bAiL WT tank crews: our engine is on fire, I just watched half my crew get disintegrated, I'm now the gunner, and theres only 2 of us left but dammit, I'll keep on fighting
This is exactly why I went Airborne. The thought of armour coffin just didn't appeal to me at all. 1/504th P.I.R 82nd Airborne. Happy New Year to all of my veteran brothers and sisters out there!
Do one for .50 cal bouncing off the ground and hitting the Tiger's floor armor. A lot of people think that's a legit way to knock out tanks. It's not, of course. But there's an old interview with a pilot who described such a means being used to knock out Tigers, and people still like to quote it.
there was one tactic where P-51 pilots would shoot the ground, so that their bullets would ricochet off and hit underamor. would be interesting to see that one tho.
@@Punisher9419 Of course it's not possible. I, however, would like the sim as a visual to show people who keep quoting that pilot who says that's what they did.
@@ralpjirehg.jaravata9300 I think we have all heard tha tmany times but it still doesn't make it even remotely possible. Soldiers and piltots say the strangest of things sometimes. Like the whole winter coats stopping bullets thing.
In all of your videos the spalling or seemingly small chunks of metal that penetrate don't seem to be so harmful, but then I remember that these are quarter sized chunks of metal flying at high speeds into the soft meat targets of the crew. Really goes to show how one shot, seemingly harmless, takes out a machine and its crew.
There was a round called the HESH ( High Explosive Squash Head) round, that was designed to induce spalling - basically, the shell splatted a lump of HE on to the target, this detonated to produce a shock wave to turn the inside of the AFV into a mincing machine. I don't know if it used anymore, as most people just seem to mention HEAT and APFSDS rounds nowadays.
From what I read: 1. The first shot deflected from the gun mantlet into the driver hatch, jamming the horizontal turret drive and wounding the driver 2. The second shot hit the elevation drive 3. The third shot hit the driver hatch, sending shrapnel into the turret. The crew bailed and take their wounded, leaving the incapacitated but otherwise still driveable tank behind.
People have this false perception of tank warfare that these German tanks could just shrug off rounds. In battle, if an important part of the function of your tank is broken, you literally cannot use the tank. It doesn't have to blow up like a video game to be put out of use.
I've seen this very tank in an armored vehicle museum video. Apparently the crew bailed out as soon as the main gun could not traverse. One of the better surviving Tigers I am told.
I think that the projectile fired into the German Tiger tank did not rotate exactly along the central axis, so it is possible that there was a double ricochet on the barrel, when the first touch caused an uncontrolled rotation of the projectile even more. What caused such a ricochet. it's not just the luck of the crew who shot this Tiger tank, it's a mega golden shell!
ARMOR SIM IDEA The side skirts of the later Panzer 3 and 4 models were designed to stop 14.5mm anti tank rifles from the sides, which would be a really cool spaced armor demonstration (showing what would happen without and with the spaced armor side skirts) I'm pretty sure the entire concept here isn't to add more raw thickness to the sides since the side plates were probably really thin, but to damage and throw the 14.5mm projeciles into a tumble causing them to not be able to penetrate, which would hopefully show really interestingly in a test like these.
It was a 75mm at gun, so the shot would more likely be traveling from the floor upwards, hitting the barrel. m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7xzG_rRngs8.html
I am fairly certain that The Tank Museum has come on record to state that they now believe that Tiger 131 could have been knocked out by a captured 7.5 cm Pak 97/38 utilized by the 2nd Battalion Sherwood Foresters on 24 April 1943 on Point 174. The video is called "Tiger 131: A Twist in the Tale | The Tank Museum" on The Tank Museum RU-vid channel.
And in a subsequent video it was shown that while an AT gun was used by the foresters, it was the Churchill reinforcements which dealt this immobilising shot: "Tiger 131: Inside & Out" (near the beginning they show a plaster cast of the impact as well as a 6pdr round)
The 3 vulnerabilities areas of the Tiger Tank. That was one of the weak spots on the Tiger where the Turret Gap. The other was the belly and the rear end. A lot of aircraft would purposely aim beside of the tank for cannon round to ricochet into the belly.
And that ricochet thing is just false... Any kind of machine gun used on planes would pen the belly of a tank by ricochet with the ground and I'll tell you why......the ground is not regular neither hard, a bullet would smash into the ground or ricochet with a lot of its momentum lost because of the sand/dirt/grass where it ricocheted...with the ricochet the bullet doesn't have enough momentum nor strength to hit a plate of steel at angle (because of the ricochet not going literally 90° up to the belly of the tank) and pen... It would get destroyed against the plate or ricochet again and then go to the ground again
Pretty cool sim, but I don't think it's quite right. I've been on Tiger 131 and have examined the danage at close range. After watching this I checked my pictures and there's no 45 degree angled surface on the bottom of the mantlet so the round should not deflect down as much as it does in the sim. I got the VIP tour at Tiger Day in April 2019 and was one of a small number of people who got into Tiger 131. I was on the front hull inspecting the damage and I saw no penetration of the hull top. And I was close enough to touch the mantlet and turret ring. I wish I could post a picture to show how close the sim is to reality and where it differs. After glancing off the barrel where it left two score marks the round took two divots off the bottom of the gun mantlet pretty much as the sim shows, except the mantlet front is vertical and stepped, not angled where the round hits. The round does not seem to have deflected much and continued on until the round partially penetrated the turret ring, not the hull deck, where the main part of the round makes a bigger divit and two fragments either of the round or torn from the gun mantlet make a smaller pair of divots on either side. We got the new (as of 2019) revised version of the capture of Tiger 131 at a lecture by David Willey and as I understood it the 6 pdr round lodged in the turret ring preventing rotation which is why it was abandonned.
Hi, its really cool that you got to go in tiger 131 but i can assure you that the deck armour was penetrated. Since then the hole has been welded over -this can be seen in various photos and the restoring Tiger 131 blog details the damage to the hull. In regards to the mantlet, while there is a small step there in reality, there is also the 45degree angle part (both of which the shell impacts). This was accounted for in the sim but the mesh size meant that the step is barely visible. Regardless, if you look at the geometry from the side, there is no way the round could hit the barrel, mantlet, and get lodged in the neck without bouncing off the hull roof. At the end of the day, a simulation is just an approximation and some things cant be accounted for properly. In this case it is the second divot along the barrel, which may have been from the projectile spinning off axis
Good detective work.... thanks for posting it. Jamming a turret by hitting the turret ring or roller-race-way was a time-honored method of knocking out a tank. It is difficult to repair in the field, too, even back at a depot-level facility with the right equipment, depending on whether the turret and hull were equally-damaged or only one or the other.
That impact doesn't tally with the scars on the tank. I've rechecked my photos and can't find any impact mark on the hull roof near the driver. It's possible such damage was repaired, but that seems unlikely given how carefully preserved the rest of the damage is. The simulated shell also fails to find the impact point in the turret ring where, according to the accounts, it jammed the traverse.
The hull damage was repaired and the hole has been welded over, there are images available of this. As for the neck damage, that is exactly where the shell gets stuck at the end of the video so I'm not sure what's wrong about it
@@SYsimulations The only information I can find for the hull roof was a reference to it being "depressed" rather than a hole being made. Relook at the simulation, after the shell strikes the roof. The fragments bounce up and strike the upper half of the ring rather than making an intact impact to the point between the turret and hull where the original impact carved a chunk out of the turret an inch or so deep and roughly three inches across, where it jammed the turret, something upward travelling shrapnel would not cause. Maybe the simulated roof is too soft, or the shell too brittle, or both, I don't know. Either way I'm not seeing a consistency with the physical evidence after it glances off the mantlet. It's close, very close but not quite there.
Have a look at this blog here to see the roof damage more clearly: "Tiger 131 Restoration: Part VII battle damage" And I see what you mean about the neck now and you are right; the simulation is not perfect but its as close as I could get it. This shot was so hard to replicate and simulations are only an approximation of real life anyway.
@@SYsimulations I see what you mean about the roof. I'm not sure what has happened there. It would be interesting to see what that looks like from inside the tank.
The gun was disabled by having its elevation jammed, turning the tank into a fire power kill, potentially injuring at least one crew member and causing the crew to abandon the tank, ergo, it was knocked out.
Just recreated this shot in war thunder using a Churchill VII with m61 shot and it actually works!! .....but the angle has to be perfect, doubt anyone actually trying to do this in a match would ever pull it off, let alone in real life. Incredibly lucky!!!
I think "lucky" is an unfair choice of a word. The Churchill tank crew must have trained very hard to hit an enemy tank so although the actual shot was fortunate to hit where it did the crew of the Churchill Tank deserve a good degree of recognition. That said I think your channel is excellent 👍
I agree tbh, they did well to hit it so many times but their guns could only penetrate a very small portion of the tank...let alone the TINY portion of the mantlet that they deflected off, which was both fortunate and lucky in my opinion
That actually happened to me in War Thunder. I know, I know, it's a game and all of that, but just imagine the amount of luck that you need pull of something like that. And for anyone that is interested, it was a IS-2 that actually knock-out my Tiger tank
Interesting… do tank designers ever take these shots into consideration when designing protection in new generation battle tanks?? Very interesting to see these videos!
They somewhat do, but shots like this are so rare and can never be fully prevented. Also modern projectiles are a lot less likely to ricochet like this so it's not as big of an issue
Always wondered how that worked... Which could you simulate how a Sherman M4A1 could bounce a Tiger's 88? How it is theories it could be done by extremly angling the front armor to the point they might as well shot your side... Tactically you could have just rotated at the last secound and I do it is world of tanks but IRL I don't know still would be nice to see your take on it!
The photos of the real damage and the simulation don't add up it seems to me. For example, the place where the shell penetrated the roof is far forward of the hit area in the simulation. Also, why is the armour in the hit area half the strenght of the rest of the roof? I would suggest it was two shots, as indicated by the skid marks on the barrels underside. One shot penetrated the roof, the other slammed into the turret ring. One shot doing both damages doesn't have the energy nor integral sternght I would assume.
Now we can clearly see why the engineers creating improved versions of the Panther, introduced in the later Ausf. G a new angle in lower part of the frontal turret armor plate, the older one could ricochet a projectile in the upper hull armor plate, as in the case of the Tiger 131.
Is this commonly known as the way the tank was disabled? I watched a video about this tank from the tank museum just today where the curator said that it was unknown as to why the tank was abandoned. The video in question was from 2017 tho.
m.ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fhj9Mzp0-eA.html This is the video you're probably referencing. The curator says it was a mystery at first, because the Germans were ordered to destroy all their tigers when they had to abandon it. After that, they start talking about the forensics analysis, and mention this shot in particular. This is all said around the 2-3 minute mark
Never heard anyone say hull roof was penetrated or had spalding off the interior of the panel..... Still not worth leaving the tank to the enemy even with wounded crew..... Jammed turret to me means it's now a tank destroyer per say. But oh well.
@@peterlustig6888 well consider that the crew only knows 4 things: Something just shot their tank The turret is now jammed Something may have just penetrated the tank You have no idea where the shot came from, but you can be certain more are on the way. Are you going to sit there and wait for next shot, which very well could penetrate the tank and kill you? Or are you going to get the hell out of their and come back to recover the tank later? It was common for disabled, but not completely destroyed, tanks to be abandoned by their crews until a recovery effort could be mounted later.
There is another Tiger 1 that is still operational, its in the US and owned by a private collector, difference being his will still fire whereas the one depicted likely will never fire again with current barrel and parts
I can assure you there is no other working tiger one. if there was another that would be ground breaking news, so where is this other tiger one/who is the guy?
I missed the part where the turret drive is actually damaged? It appears that the shell only penetrated above the driver and hit nothing else. There's only a small dent into the turret ring which wouldn't have effected the inside area at all other than making a loud sound for the crew
BLLX. The round glanced off the underside of the barrel, lodging itself in the turret ring (jamming the turret traverse) but did NOT penetrate the hull armour.
Same problem with the panter and maus, the panther's turret in the gun mount its too angled when shot there is a big chance it could deflect it and hit the driver, with the maus same area with turret gun mount near the engine but its mostly not shot in the particular area and the engine may set on fire and heat up the crew causing suffocation
Just curious..... What caused the second impact/strike along the underside of the barrel as the simulation only shows four points of contact. Barrel, mantlet, upper hull and turret ring yet there are 5 impacts on the vehicle.... or am I just missing something in the sim?
I'm guessing it had something to do with the round wobbling furiously after the first contact with the barrel, after all those rounds spin rapidly due to the guns rifling, and if something disrupts them they can start wobbling or tumbling. the first strike on the barrel knocked the nose of the round down which started the wobble that caused the front of the round to go up and contact the gun barrel that second time
And people in War Thunder be complaining about lucky shots... It's just incredible how lucky shot this was to penetrate the roof under such weird angles. Unbelievable.
Re: "It's just incredible how lucky shot this was to penetrate the roof under such weird angles. Unbelievable." Well, it is lucky, which is also another word for random, but strange shots like this happened enough times during the war that they were known to exist by engineers and designers. Statistically-speaking, the longer a given tank remains in action and the more enemy counter-fire it faces, the higher the probability of an odd hit gets. I'm going on memory here, so cut me some slack please, but I recall reading about an American M8 Armored Car which knocked out a King Tiger heavy tank in the Battle of the Bulge, by deflecting a 37mm cannon shot shot down through its thinner top armor. Skeptics have questioned whether this incident, which happened near St. Vith, could have occurred.... but it is possible, at least in theory. And there were eye-witnesses to the event. The late Roscoe C. Blunt, of the 84th Infantry Division, U.S. Army, speaks about it in his memoir "Foot Soldier," published in 1994. Even if such shots did occur, they were noteworthy for how infrequently they happened and how difficult it was for under-armed infantry and other light forces to deal with heavy armor. The U.S. bazooka, which was a 2.36" bore rocket launcher firing a 3.5-lb. rocket, was an effective weapon, but less-so against the newest and heaviest German armor later in the war. Many U.S. soldiers got around that problem by snapping up discarded or captured Panzerfaust one-shot disposable anti-tank weapons. These were found to be very effective against their former owners. The efficacy of shaped-charged weapons, like the bazooka and Panzerfaust is directly-proportional to the diameter of the warhead, which -among other things - determines the strength and duration of the molten jet which penetrates the armor. The larger the warhead, the greater thickness of armor which may be penetrated. And shaped-charged weapons work best hitting at not-too-acute angles. If they impact at too-severe an angle, say on sloped armor, the jet often deflects and does not focus properly for optimal effect.
The history being written from one extremely lucky shot from a war thunder low tier player who kept shooting the front of the tank instead of flanking it.
Unrelated, but I managed to make a shot like this, but on the Panther A/D mantlet barrel cover with Sherman APHE M61 or M62... I Accidentally found out you can do it on Tiger II H's Gunmantlet (Warthunder) wanted know if it was possible in a more realistic sim
Imageine the churchill crew. Everyone knew the reputation of the tiger front armor. They just engaged a tiger knowing that it is one of the last things they do... This cruel moment of knowing what happens next. And suddenly the Tiger stopped moving...
I don't think that I've ever heard of the roof armor of getting penetrated like that. Ive been to the museum and see 131 many times, im not 100%, but fairly sure the roof armor is fine. The angles must've played out tiny little bit differently. But if they were this close from penetration, even tho for the crew it was incredibly unlucky shot, it could've been a lot worse.
Those Su-152 tank destroyers-self-propelled guns were nicknamed "Animal Hunters" by their Soviet crews, for their ability to knock out Tigers. A shell that large, even if it is slow-moving enough not to penetrate the armor, can cause such spalling inside the tank upon detonation as to disable/kill crew members and/or disable the tank. Burst welded seams, etc. The impact concussion alone must have had horrific effects on the men inside the tank. As Allied naval and aerial bombardments showed, even the largest tank gets tossed around like a motor car in a hurricane, if you land a big-enough bomb or naval artillery shell near or on it. An eight-inch shell from a cruiser's main guns would ruin your day, let alone one of really huge 14-16" guns from a battleship.
You would think this simulation is inaccurate, because the simulation shows one glancing blow to the tank barrel, when the tank barrel in the photos shows two, one glance and one grase for say... or a glance and a nick maybe. Then ricochet off the turret mantlet then down to the crew compartment??? You would think the simulation would show something like that????
