Posted on 08/17/2015 7:13:47 AM PDT by C19fan
The RPG-7the fin-stabilized, rocket-propelled anti-tank launcherchanged the face of warfare when introduced in 1961, captured the imagination of game studios and became a go-to Hollywood prop.
The classic 1980s film Red Dawn portrayed ordinary American high school students blowing up Soviet tanks with captured RPGs as they shouted Eat me! You can hardly make it through a lot of video games games without tripping over the weapon.
(Excerpt) Read more at warisboring.com ...
I always thought the Panzerfaust was a last-ditch Nazi weapon but its development went back to 1942.
In Vietnam they rigged perimeter towers with `skirts’ made of chain link fence; these would snare incoming RPGs like fish in a net, before they could detonate.
A lot more than armor.
Not so much as the B-40, the Chinese copy of the earlier Soviet RPG-2. They'd cut through the aluminum *armor* of an M113 ACAV or M551 Sheridan light tank and leave them a burned out, melted-down shell. The B-40 was lighter and easier to move long distances than the RPG-7, though a bit iffy about taking out the frontal armor of an M48A3 tank.
Not that the RPG-7 *Knout* wouldn't do the job. But for a tank gunner at night, the backblast of a RPG-7 was an instant call for co-ax machinegun return fire or a *black can* or *green can* canister round. The slightly lesser firing blast from a B-40 could be mistaken for a grenade going off, and at times when LOTS of grenades were going off, that could make things interesting.
A couple of years after the *Bright Star* joint military training exercises between the US and Egypt back in friendlier days, one of the better bits of joint training was an introductory live firing of an Egyptian RPG-7 by US troops. That came to a screeching halt after one such firing ended with the expected loud bang, but on the firing line, with the immediate disappearance of the RPG, the Egyptian instructor, and the US troop firing it. Boobytrapped round, or lousy SovBloc quality control during manufacture? I have no idea.
But there is a wide variance of different ammunition variations of the basic PG-7 antitank rocket, and newer third and fourth-generation rounds as well.
Well, for now anyway. But the next one may well be a muslum.
Catching the warhead in the chain link or tightly compressed barbed-wire concertina rolls wasn't the idea. The early Soviet-supplied PG-7 rockets used the metal shaped charge warhead cavity liner as one electrical leg of the firing circuit, the other being provided by the outside metal body of the projectile. When the rocket directly struck a target, the result was the crushing of a piezoelectric crystal in the nose of the warhead, sending an electrical current to the blasting cap and detonator at the rear. A round fired into a wire mesh, or hitting a very narrow-angled glancing blow off armor would crush the outside metal body [#3 in diagram below]of the warhead into the metal cavity liner, [#2 in the diagram below] causing a short circuit and preventing the detonator in the rear of the shaped charge cavity from functioning.
It took only a very slight manufacturing change of using thin-gauge insulated wires to carry the electrical charge to improve the round's reliability.
I rode as a medic on 36 Track. We were fired on at least 3 times by RPG type rounds...fortunately missing each time. Though I’ve sure seen the damage.
Recoilless rifle could do a number too. Fortunately, they were pretty cumbersome for VC/NVA units to lug.
Recoilless rifle could do a number too. Fortunately, they were pretty cumbersome for VC/NVA units to lug.
Those 57mm Chinese copies of the U.S. M18 57mm recoilless used in late WWII and the Korean War were about as accurate as an M1 rifle, though the ammo was as you say, a little cumbersome. But the explosive charge was about equal to a 60mm mortar round, and you could certainly carry more 57mm recoilless rounds than for the then-US-issue M67 90mm recoilless.
Didn't matter much: the 57mm would go right through the aluminum M113/M557 APC side armor and then detonate inside. AS for the M67 90mm, it had the unfortunate feature of needing a 30-minute cooldown period after firing 5 rounds, though there were a couple of ways to beaty that.
On the other hand, the WP and canister rounds for the M67 90mm could be real useful at times. The Koreans, it seems, still use the things. Round on the way at 3:09.
Interesting.
The recoilless I recall was a 106, so I found looking at some of the Google pix that I didn’t really know the varieties as much as I thought.
Thanks for the fascinating info.
And it appears I should thank you for your service as well.
We had them as well, most usually mounted on the M151 Ford *improved* Jeep that had a bad habit of rolling over when going around corners. Add a high-center-of-gravity M60 machinegun, or an M2 .50, or that Gawdawful 106 Reckless Rifle, and the *Mutt* Jeeps would flip with even the faintest kiss of dew on the pavement; German cobblestones were worse.
Later in life I ran across the 106s mounted on M113 APCs, and in the late 1970s, aboard the little British Ferret armored cars, which originally had only a Browning .30 machinegun in a tiny turret about the size of a sawed-in-half oil drum.
Thanks for the fascinating info.
And it appears I should thank you for your service as well.
Well, you're welcome. Though they paid me reasonably well for a few amusement park rides for which I would happily have bought my own ticket.
That bottom pic is the 106 I remember. I think it was attached to HQ Troop (1/1 CAV, Americal DIV, I Corps).
I never understood the awe over the RPG. It’s basically a glorified bazooka.
PG-7 also had a self destruct time of 13 seconds or and something like 920 meters..... As you state the chain link was merely to crush and destroy the shape charge before it hit the barrier it was truing to defeat.
We used to shoot 7’s and 7M variants into the sky to test em ...... very few these days will not detonate , impact or not.
Also the caps would stay on when shooting through thick foliage or tall elephant grass. Saw these puppies go boom when fired in heavy rain when the safety caps were removed from the piezo .....
Crazy days......miss em bad sometimes Archy !
Note too that in Somalia, the bad guys made good effect of that feature to get RPG-7 airbursts against US helicopters, a technique developed by the Palestinians for use against Israeli Hueys. In the 1970s I was involved in getting some parts from Bell for some ex-Israeli Agusta-Bell 205A Huey Cheetahs, a couple of which were dotted with little bitty dents on the aluminum skin where RPGs had time-detonated a little further out than their firers had intended. Of course, we didn't get the birds where they had come closer....
Also the caps would stay on when shooting through thick foliage or tall elephant grass. Saw these puppies go boom when fired in heavy rain when the safety caps were removed from the piezo .....
Yep, also a design feature, not a flaw. The Soviets realized that there'd be places in the world where they might be shooting through wooden doors/mud huts/ sheet-tin sided buildings or thin-skinned unarmourde vehicles, and arranged their HEAT projectiles so that they could be used either way- even through ice, as some Finns cheerfully demonstrated to me on one well-fueled occasion.
Here, hold my Kossu, and watch this!?
As a tank crewman, I got to be a *target tank* for M20A1 3.5-inch bazooka crews firing practice rounds, as late as 1970- the Kansas National Guard still had 'em [just as the Ohio National Guard still had M1 Garands, as they showed at Kent State] We pulled off the driving lights and antennas, withdrew the vision blocks, periscopes and main gun sights, and dreove back and forth across the range at various distances [and speeds] letting them have at us. Mostly, they missed, one day we had some 200 rounds fired at us and only four smears of sky-blue paint from the practice rockets. The M20A1 was okay, though not on a windy day, and not with a well-trained crew that'd have let a 60-round burst of co-ax machinegun fire or a canister buckshot load from the main gun go ANYWHERE the gawdawful backblast from one of those things lit up, day, or night.
Other nice details about the RPG: it had both optical and backup iron sights, and the RPG-7D model [and most versions since] took apart in the middle into two short sections so that paratroops could jump with the thing like a rifle.
Like Squantos said: they figured out ways to use it against troops on the ground out beyond usual rifle range [600-900 meters] like a mortar. And now they've got all sorts of additional projectile types: antipersonnel, thermobaric, double-acting antiarmour, white phosphorous, you name it. The RPG is simple and cheap to produce [the Palestine Liberation Organization had their own factory; ISIS or HAMAs probably runs it now] You have to know what you're doing with it to know how to use it in the wind, so practice sometime on a windy day. Give me an RPG and 5 rounds and I'll use up three training a gunner and let him have at a million-dollar main battle tank, with a launcher that costs less than a good auto bumper jack. Give him a rookie rifleman with an AK to carry a few more rounds and watch his back, and they're in business. And if the gunner gets hit, the loader picks it up and stays in business; maybe two million dollar tanks and eight crewmen gone. Cheap.
The Israelis thought enough of them that they issued the ones they captured from the Egyptians and Syrians in '67 and '73 to their own troops, one gunner [known in Israeli gruntspeak as the RPGist] per squad. And manufactured their own ammo. And came up with a coule of next-generation designs; my last trip to Israel I heard rumbles anout a guided RPG round that follows an [invisible] Infra-red laser beam, accurate out to 1000-1500 meters; don't know if it's a bad guy or Israeli development and it doesn't matter: if it works, it'll get copied. If not it'll get improved.
It's a good deal better than the RPG-2/ B40 that it replaced. It's at least the equal of a bazooka, throwaway LAW or one-time-use German Armbrust, and did I mention it's cheap. And simple.
I don't have one. I guess maybe I oughta rethink that.
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