The German Tiger is an excellent WWII tank.
I was wondering, how many German Tiger tanks will be needed to defeat one modern American M1A1 Abrams tank?
If a Tiger manages to get behind a M1A1 Abrams tank and score a hit on it's backside, will the M1A1 Abrams tank become incapacitated?
Considering that any armored vehicle can be incapacitated by an RPG, anything is posible.
shareA Challenger II survived 70 RPG rounds without problem.
Rule Britannia.
"You are weak, I am strong, the protocol is obvious."
Wow, so many?
Were they all aimed at the front of the Challenger II tank?
Any side and rear hits?
And a few MILAN anti-tank missiles on top of the RPGs 👍
shareIn Vietnam, the Australian-manned Centurions were said to be almost invulnerable to RPG, whereas US M48 was far easier to knock out, supposedly US tankmen loved the huge British tank when they inspected it.
Must be something in them, Israelis in 1967-73 wars, Centurion was always the #1 spearhead, various US tanks including then state of the art M60, they felt less safe in..
Admittedly, IDF made critical improvements to their Centurions..
I think the Israelis accept what they can get and do the best they can with it. This would explain the use of and modification of their Shermans.
shareM1A1s have been disabled by RPGs.
An opinion is not offensive just because you do not agree with it.
An M1A1 carries 40 rounds of ammo for its main gun, so I would say it would take 41 Tigers to knock one out.
shareLOL
SpiltPersonality
Don't assume it's knocked out because it's out of ammo. It could just zoom back to the supply point, rearm and then zoom back to the battle before the Tigers ever moved a mile.
shareIt depends entirely on the tactical situation. A lucky, single well camouflaged Tiger could destroy a modern MBT with a flank or rear shot. A couple of dozen at long range could be easy pickings. The x number to defeat one tank stat is really a myth, including the five Shermans per Tiger claim.
The facts are that modern MBTs have a number of advantages over Tigers. They are virtually invulnerable from the front to the Tiger's 88 - both the Tiger I's L56 KwK36 and the Tiger II's L71 KwK43. The 120 and 125 mm guns of modern tanks, or even the 100 and 105 mm guns of older tanks, would penetrate Tiger IIs from any aspect at long ranges. Modern tanks have better traverse and much better optics, so they are more likely to see and engage first, and fire control systems that all but guarantees a first round hit, while a good Tiger crew would usually fire two or three rounds before hitting.
Modern tanks also have thermal imaging and image intensification sensors that make night fighting possible and make it harder for enemy tanks to hide even during the day time (why I emphasized that the hidden Tiger needs luck).
Note that modern tanks, especially those operated by first world militaries never operate alone. They operate in a minimum of platoon strength and nearly always have plenty of infantry support. This makes it very difficult, but far from impossible to surprise them.
Also note hat Western tanks are designed to protect their crews if penetrated much better than WWII tanks. A Tiger that's been hit will probably brew up or blow up killing the entire crew. An M1 that's been hit will usually have few or no crew lost. Soviet derived tanks, like those developed from the T-72, are so cozy inside that they tend to blow up if penetrated.
The x number to defeat one tank stat is really a myth, including the five Shermans per Tiger claim.
Wait...are we talking Tiger I's or Tiger II's?
shareTiger I might do slightly better than Tiger II given that it was slightly more mobile. For that matter, a 76 mm armed Sherman might do better than both. None of them have any real protection against a 120 mm M256 gun and all their guns would be equally effective (or ineffective) against an Abrams.
shareNone of them have any real protection against a 120 mm M256 gun
I imagine it could track it and have it sit there, but assuming the M1 never ran out of ammo, I'm thinking the Tigers could never kill the Abrams. It would be fully impenetrable from the front as its rolled homogeneous armor equivalent against KE projectiles is around 560 to 900mm depending on the section. The rear is 90mm sloped at 35 degrees for 157mm of actual armour, but it would obviously be even more in terms of RHAE.
All these values are based on modern rounds -- i.e., armour piercing discarding sabot. With the relatively primitive rounds fired back then, it would be even more impossible. I imagine most of the rounds the Tiger fired would just shatter, and not impart nearly as much energy as they would if they were shooting another WW2 era tank. Going the other way, with the old armour on the Tiger the M1's effective range would push out way past the ¬2000m it is today. If a Challenger 1 can kill a T55 (with comparably much more modern armour) at 5000m, then I'm sure an M1 could repeat this on an even older tank.
I'm with you, on this one: I don't think that the old 88 mm shell, even AP at point-blank range, could penetrate the Abrams' composite armor; it's a technology that WWII hardware simply wasn't designed to overcome.
It would be possible for the Tiger to DISABLE the Abrams by firing AP at its tracks (the same way that Allied tanks in WWII were capable of disabling Tigers by firing on the running gear), but I don't believe the Tiger could knock out the Abrams or injure its crew.
- You may have come on no bicycle, but that does not say that you know everything.
Only because composite armour usually contains a substantial conventional armour component. The other composite elements do little or nothing against AP rounds like APCBC or APFSDS. The armour protection is concentrated on the frontal arc of the tank rather than all round, like the Tiger. This means that an Abrams is well protected against 125 mm APFSDS rounds from the front or HEAT or HESH/HEP round from all aspects. Its not very well protected against 100-125, rounds from the side or rear. I suspect 8.8 cm APCBC or 76 mm HVAP would penetrate side and rear armour from a few hundred meters, though I could be wrong.
Mind you, getting its a position where you can make that shot given:
- the sensors available to an Abrams or a combat team with Abrams tanks in it and
- the fact that if it can see you from less than a couple of miles or so it can hit and kill you,
means that's a lot less easy than it was to put six pounder rounds into Tiger 131.
Perhaps you're right about an AP 88 being able to penetrate the rear armor at close range. I hadn't really considered it, but the ceramic/cloth layers in composite armor would function more like the logs hung on the sides of WWII tanks: protection against shaped-charge weapons like the modern RPG, not necessarily effective protection against gun rounds.
You're also right that the real trick would be to get within a mile of an M1A1 with a seventy-year old Tiger tank; the Abrams' sensory apparatus would be sure to pick it up. About the only realistic way to get that close would be to have the Tiger hull-down, and wait for the Abrams to drive past.
- You may have come on no bicycle, but that does not say that you know everything.
I think you could drive the Abrams straight to Berlin.
shareNew upcoming book on the Sherman Tank-
"For Want of a Gun: The Sherman Tank Scandal of WWII"
http://www.schifferbooks.com/for-want-of-a-gun-the-sherman-tank-scandal-of-wwii-6155.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99UaCetvfXw
Looks like the same old discredited nonsense to me.
shareAs I said back in April when someone with a different user name advertised this book:
One hopes it is better than the blurb describing it would indicate. The implication that 60,000 men wee casualties in US armoured divisions was due to tank casualties is misleading as over sixty percent of armoured division casualties were from the infantry battalions of those formations. As for the quote from the German officer, it only indicates that sending single tanks against full batteries of heavy AT guns is probably a bad idea. M26s would have fared no better, so as an indictment of the Sherman, it leaves much to be desired. The quote, incidentally is supposedly from a German officer at Salerno, a year before the weaknesses of the 75 mm gnu against heavy German armour became apparent. Indeed, the 75 mm was probably a better gun to use against AT guns than the 76 mm due to it's larger HE capacity.
Comparing these tanks is like comparing a WW1 tank with the King Tiger tank.
The Tiger was great for its time but it had 100mm of unsloped armor thickness and at best 160ish armor penetration.
Modern Abrams tanks have around 1000m of frontal armor a gun that can knock it out at any distance, better sights, speed etc...
I doubt the Tiger can even penetrate the rear/side armor. It could still cause damage to tracks and other parts but concidering how poorly T-72 have preformmed vs Abrams tanks. A Tiger would have far worse odds.
Tiger II did have slope style armor, even though Tiger I had not..Tiger II looked more like heavier PZKW V in outline ..
the funny thing is that Germans would have been far more mobile and formidable with lighter faster cheaper less complex tanks..they realised themselves that all this really heavy slow hardware is more an encumbrance than asset, except when they were in static defense.
Every offensive battle on Eastern front that they won that I know of, the key weapon was just a tin-can PZKW III.
I'm sure it's maybe a great feeling, maybe even a sexual one in some case, when you have got a dirty long great PAK 88mm that can pick off and demolish any enemy target beyond 2000 metres even, and mean meanwhile tons of 100mm+ armor that is bouncing off almost all enemy mobile weapons.When a Cromwell or Comet or wtf fires at you almost point blank from flank , direct hit on turret sides, and still makes no impression.
But it is hard to win major battles with it, let alone wars.
...Comet...
does it have a 17-pdr?
anyway, whatever they were that Wittman's Tiger I messed up several of in that village...one of them fired at him from a laneway almost point blank and bounced off like a tennis ball, they said...
Hi pf, nice to see you here. The Comet had the 77mm HV gun, essentially a shortened 17 pounder that used the 17 pounders projectiles with the shorter old 3inch gun cartridge cases.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordnance_QF_17-pounder#77_mm_HV
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
so a 17-pdr with half it's teeth pulled, effectively...so it did not have the punch that a Firefly had..
there is or was a great longish docu on Youtube about history of 5 RTR, from France to North Africa to Italy and France..in run-up to D-day, one man tells the story of them being re-equiped with the comet or cromwell...he comments..."I was aghast...and infuriated this is exactly the same stupid death-trap Cruiser III that we had gone back and forth across the desert in in 1941-42..with a little bit better gun...whoever designed this, they had not read our reports, had not listened at all...they were no bloody good against the weapons the Germans had back then, let alone what they have now! !"
he added next, that he began to make a noise about these crap-heaps and their obvious deficiences...he was told to shut it, or he would be charged...defeatist talk likely to lower morale"..that kind of thing.
In other words," keep your mouth shut, and just go out there and die"
so a 17-pdr with half it's teeth pulled, effectively...so it did not have the punch that a Firefly had..
there is or was a great longish docu on Youtube about history of 5 RTR, from France to North Africa to Italy and France..in run-up to D-day, one man tells the story of them being re-equiped with the comet or cromwell...he comments..."I was aghast...and infuriated this is exactly the same stupid death-trap Cruiser III that we had gone back and forth across the desert in in 1941-42..with a little bit better gun...whoever designed this, they had not read our reports, had not listened at all...they were no bloody good against the weapons the Germans had back then, let alone what they have now! !"
he added next, that he began to make a noise about these crap-heaps and their obvious deficiences...he was told to shut it, or he would be charged...defeatist talk likely to lower morale"..that kind of thing.
In other words," keep your mouth shut, and just go out there and die"
The 77mm was only marginally less effective than the 17 pounder, pf, and I'd have sooner be a member of a Comet tank crew than a Firefly one personally as overall it was a better armoured tank. Arguably the best Allied tank on the North European Front in WW2, IMO better than the T26/M26 Pershing.
The tank crewman was probably referring to the Cromwell rather than a Comet and he was right in many ways, the Cromwell was little better than a redesigned Crusader tank with a better engine. The Cromwell was really no worse than the standard Sherman tank though, and used the same calibre gun and ammunition with similarly thick armour. The Cromwell had a much lower silhouette than the Sherman too.
Ideally the Comet should have been ready in good numbers for D-Day and you then wonder if the battle to take Caen would perhaps been a little shorter. Most British and US tanks lagged behind their German enemy's in effectiveness and frankly this was unnecessary as both countries could have built better tanks sooner, the Comet's prototype was ready by February 1944, the T26 by about the same time. Both could (and should) have been rushed into production IMO as the Allies had examined both the Tiger and Panther tanks and knew that Allied tanks would soon be in combat with them. Instead they relied on sheer weight of numbers which was of no comfort to the Allied tank crews.
As I've said before on various IMDb boards, a Band Of Brothers style series focusing on a single tank crew of 5th RTR from France in 1940 to the war's end would be fascinating. Never ever likely to happen though!
Trust me. I know what I'm doing.
The Panther cost only slightly more than the Mark III it replaced and was a much better tank, even considering its mechanical problems. The Tiger had a particular place in German doctrine that a medium tank could not fill It's rather debatable that six thousand more Mark IVs would have been better than the two thousand Tigers actually made.
Comet firing 77 mm APCBC should penetrate the Tiger II turret from the flank at all but extreme angles. Firing APDS, it should penetrate the Tiger II turret from nearly all aspects. US 76 mm and 3 in APCBC should penetrate given a near straight on shot on the sides and rear. 76 mm HVAP would penetrate sides and rear from all angles and the front at close range.
120 mm APFSDS(DU) or HEAT would go through a Tiger II like a chainsaw through butter.
Head to head? Not until the M1 ran out of ammo and even then it could retreat faster than the Tiger could pursue. So probably no amount of Tigers could defeat one, unless it was an ambush situation.
The Tiger had a maximum firing range of ~2000 meters. M1 abrams has a maximum firing range of ~8,000 meters. The Tiger was about 15% accurate at 2000 meters against a 2.5 meter target. Abrams LAHAT is accurate at 8000 meters down to 0.7 meters.
So at 8,000 meters the Abrams would be landing perfectly accurate and deadly hits while the Tigers couldn't even shoot back at all. All the abrams has to do is drive in the opposite direction and it can maintain the proper range leaving the tigers completely phvked.
Also, the abrams can fire very accurately while moving due to computer/heat/laser assisted targeting systems the Tigers do not have.
All in all, a modern abrams would destroy as many Tigers as you threw at it, given it had unlimited ammo.
People have to remember that the Tiger was a beast of its time. It was already getting outdated at the end of ww-2.
it had a bad armor design, realtivly poor speed and cost more then twice then a Panther.
It has roughly 100mm of frontal armor and about 120mm of armor penetration up close. Maybe near 200mm with APCR etc...
The M1A2 Abrams frontal armor is closer to 1000mm in comparison. And surpasses a Tiger in every way.
So it wouldn't be much of a fight.
Are you talking about Tiger II?
The Tiger II had excellent armor. A M4 Sherman parked just in front of Tiger II cannot penetrate the front armor.
But the heavy weight meant the Tiger II can't travel fast and far.
I'm talking about the M1A1 Abrams, not the M1A2.
The M1A1 lacks the stronger DU armor present in the M1A2.
I watched a docu series called 'Nazi Megastructures"
one chapter dealt with German super-tanks, like the Maus..almost 200 tons...
One prototype they built, to their own surprise, got up to 25 going on 30kmh..they did not calculate it even that fast..and at that speed, I think it could actually blow off Tiger I and II on the drag-strip...
Ah that's an interesting series. The British weapons guy is sure enthusiastic about the stuff he describes.
Guess what! I've got a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COWBELL! -Bruce Dickinson-