Pryor on Fire posted:

I don't know what you mean by that, concealability is not really an attribute of crew served anti tank weapons. The PIAT was bigger and heavier and less reliable and worse at killing tanks than even the early bazookas, and by the end of the war they were used more for blowing up houses and walls than for killing tanks. Kind of a neat design, but apparently it would fail to fire all the time.

Pryor on Fire posted:

I don't know what you mean by that, concealability is not really an attribute of crew served anti tank weapons. The PIAT was bigger and heavier and less reliable and worse at killing tanks than even the early bazookas, and by the end of the war they were used more for blowing up houses and walls than for killing tanks. Kind of a neat design, but apparently it would fail to fire all the time.

Nenonen posted:

What did Allied Italy bomb?

Also lol at including Soviet Union in the list of minors you sneaky bastard!

OwlFancier posted:

As in, you can fire it without giving away your position with a big rocket flare, which might attract the ire of all the people who don't want to be blown up by a rocket.

Not that you can shove it down your kecks and whistle your way past the german front line.

They were by all accounts a right twat to use with the recoil, but the design does have its advantages, not least that you're still carrying a shoulder fired mortar which is useful in many of the ways a similar light artillery piece might be.

You also see lots of pictures of people using them like this:



Which you very definitely cannot do with a bazooka. And bracing against the terrain also helps to mitigate the recoil problem.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Its a shoulder-fired mortar that is fired specifically from the prone position. The short range of the PIAT gives no tactical advantage over a rocket launcher other than "less likely to be spotted when firing". Consider that other launchers outrange it, or that, in an urban environment, it wouldn't matter anyways because you'd simply fire your rocket and then bug out into the next building over.

quote:

The PIAT is also heavy as gently caress and a complete bitch-and-a-half to reload.

Cyrano4747 posted:

An anti-tank weapon that you can limp wrist.

For what it's worth, the thing was designed in '41-42. This was the Sten era of british weapons design - I strongly suspect that their overriding priority was to get something that worked often enough and could be built really loving quickly rather than to optimize it.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Yes but we're arguing about using a PIAT-styled system in current-day combat action. Pointing out how dated or impractical the system was is just another point towards arguably better weapons currently in service.

OwlFancier posted:

I don't think anyone is arguing that the PIAT would work better than a modern recoilless AT weapon.

The Lone Badger posted:

Does anyone field a PIAT-style shoulder-fired-mortar these days? I understand that the lack of backblast gave it certain advantages over recoilless rifles / rocket launchers in urban terrain.

Jobbo_Fett posted:

Fangz posted:

Nah, that's easy and settled, we're arguing against Pryor on Fire's "really unreliable spring loaded piece of poo poo, they were not loved in any terrain". By modern standards all of these WWII weapons suck, but the PIAT was fairly competitive with everything else the Allies had and reasonably fulfilled what people required from such weapons.

bewbies posted:

DIA just released a thing on the Russian military that is very good.

Acebuckeye13 posted:

At the same time, your assessment of the PIAT is way too rosy. Yeah, they could be fired out of a house more effectively, but that's only a useful feature in certain environments. Conversely, the shorter range was a significant issue, as was the weight-having a less mobile weapon that you have to get closer to use is not a recipe for success. Having a PIAT was better than having no ranged anti-tank weapon at all, but to suggest it was competitive to the far more mobile and effective Bazooka is just flat-out wrong.

quote:

[Then LtGen] Patton expressed his thoughts regarding the bazooka in a letter of instruction to his senior commanders on May 20, 1944: The purpose of the bazooka is not to hunt tanks offensively, but to be used as the last resort in keeping tanks from overrunning infantry. Since the bazooka is unarmored, and always discloses its position when fired, it must get a hit on the first shot. To insure this, the range should be held to about 30 yards. When thus used, the bazooka will hit and penetrate any tank I have yet seen and will probably stop it. If used at longer ranges, it will probably miss and its operators will then become targets for the tanks machine guns.”

quote:

In 1951, this writer was invited to observe infantry training at Camp Roberts, California, where it was obvious that the 2.36-inch Bazookas were, for the most part, failing to detonate high order and form a jet as designed. Instead, most of the rounds were apparently functioned low order from crush-up on the target, as evidenced by the presence of many undeformed conical liners laying about on the test field.

zoux posted:

This reminds me: how does Russian maintain "peer" military status with the US when they have a GDP less than Italy? That may be answered in that link but it's 116 pages!

bewbies posted:

That's kind of a complex question with a lot of different answers but the short version is that in just about any scenario where Russia and the US are shooting at each other, Russia is playing a home game. Having to fight a long way from home is very difficult and very costly.

zoux posted:

Didn't we overestimate Soviet military capabilities quite a bit during the Cold War? Probably that document you linked would answer this, but do we have a tendency to over- rather than under-estimate threats from near-peers?

Don Gato posted:

I have an odd question, but does anyone have a good source on the Lille pocket in 1940? I just found out that 40,000 Frenchmen held off 7 divisions during the Fall of France and might have directly contributed to the sheer amount of men, but my brief googling found only a few clickbait articles and a woefully short wikipedia article. It seems depressingly obscure for something so important.

bewbies posted:

We regularly overestimated Soviet capabilities (Team B), sometimes deliberately (bomber gap). We also underestimated a lot of stuff (tanks, fighter aircraft, low altitude air defense, quality of tactical leadership).

I'm not sure if you can identify a clear tendency in any of it but it ultimately all goes to the basic fact that intelligence is a very imprecise science and it gets even less precise when politics get mixed in.

Fangz posted:

Patton might be exaggerating somewhat here, but still. It's likely you and I have different ideas of what 'competitive' means, but it seems like the British had the bazooka as an option and saw no real need to replace their PIATs with them.

Jamwad Hilder posted:

His early stuff about hoplite warfare was actually really good, in my opinion. I think 9/11 broke his brain because since then almost everything he puts out is about how The West is inherently superior and garbage like "mixed-race cultures are doomed to fail".

Neophyte posted:

Congrats on making 500 pages of drunken window shootings!

In honor of that pretend it is now TYOOL 500AD. In this wide world of ours, who is trying to kill who, and how badly are they loving it up?

Cyrano4747 posted:

I wouldn't be so sure of that. The Brits used a lot of American equipment, but as much as we like to talk about the overwhelming power of US industry the British had a large military and the US couldn't make guns for both at the same time. Theoretically the M1 Garand was a lot better than the No4 Enfield, but outside of maybe some edge case OSS poo poo we never equiped the British Army with them.

The other thing to remember is the time frame all this poo poo is happening on. PIAT is developed in 1941, when the US is out of the war except for Lend Lease. Even Lend Lease was mostly giving our old poo poo to England, or letting some minor factories in the US manufacture English guns and ship them over (Savage was fairly small potatoes compared to the majors in that time, and Winchester and Remington both switched over to making other poo poo by 1943, offloading Enfield production onto Canada). The brits had started making the PIAT, and it was good enough, so the US could concentrate on making AT weapons for its own forces, which were rapidly expanding through 42-44. Retooling factories in wartime is a bitch, and by the time it would be feasible you're well into the end-game for the war. The immediate need for a better weapon just isn't there even by D-Day. You can make the exact same set of observations for why they're still using the Enfield in 1945.

It's also worth noting that as soon as the war ended they adopted the Bazooka (and also started sourcing a replacement for the Enfield).

I think you're reading way too far into the differences in the equipment as any kind of grounds for what they chose. The reality is probably much more "this is what we have, it is good enough, and we produce it domestically on the factories we already have running."

zoux posted:

Who knows, I'm a naked peasant that doesn't believe in other towns.

Phobophilia posted:

Is it? Really? I find the idea of only a bunch of random amateur greek farmers being completely untouchable in a melee with effete east completely unconvincing. And the description that only the greeks had heavy infantry sounds like nonsense, considering phalanx warfare was pretty well developed in the post-Babylonian kingdoms, and the latter had a sophisticated economy and bureaucracy that could supply the equipment and professionalization.

I decided to google it, and stumbled on a reddit thread that shits on that fucker.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/42isht/how_is_victor_davis_hansons_work_on_greek_warfare/

Jamwad Hilder posted:

No, I'm not referring to any of the "why the Greeks were the best" stuff. I mean the things he's written about the actual mechanics of Greek vs Greek hoplite warfare, the types of people who may have fought as hoplites, his theories on why that style of warfare may have developed in the context of Greek agriculture, etc. That stuff is interesting even though I don't necessarily agree with all of his conclusions.

WoodrowSkillson posted:

that thread calls out a lot of that stuff, which parts specifically are you curious about?