Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1115818
Although these types of weapons are quite common, recoilless rifles seem to be given less attention than more 'mediagenic' kinds of ar- maments. They're often confused with anti-tank rocket launchers like the Bazooka or the Panzerschreck from the era of WWII. Until recently they've been believed to share the fate of dinosaurs – by go- ing extinct and give way to modern disposable grenade launchers, to "hybrid" grenade launchers with fire control units or to ultra-light AT- GMs. Supporters of the technological fetishism which has taken the military industry by storm lately would claim that weapons that need to be handled by two, not featuring intelligent, guided missiles, are obsolete and should be replaced with something more modern. The claim itself may be reasonable, but it fails to consider a few "details" such as the life-cycle costs, training, the price of ammunition, and the flexibility of application. For several years now, recoilless rifles (the Carl Gustaf, to be more precise) have been making a quiet but big comeback. To explain why it is so requires going back to over one hundred years ago – to the birth of this type of weapon. A bit of historical background The origins of the Carl Gustaf date back to 1911, when Commander Cleland Davis of the US Navy patented his first recoilless rifle. Or its predecessor, actu- ally. His invention was a gun with a single chamber and two barrels "aiming" in opposite directions. The projectile was composed of a high-explosive shell and an electrically-fused powder lifting charge, ending with a considerable package of lead shots soaked in grease, with the total weight equal to the weight of the high-explosive shell. When the gun was fired, the shell left the rifled barrel, and the counterweight was partially burned (grease) and ejected (lead shots) from the other barrel. The described solution had a breech, but the projectile was loaded separately, which made the weapon difficult to use. Starting in 1916, such guns were fitted on aircraft to combat submarines and airships. Soon after, Englishman Charles John Cooke improved the said invention significant- ly by designing fixed ammunition, and after WWII ended, he advanced it even further by featuring a so-called de Laval nozzle, which dispersed powder gases more effectively by increasing their velocity. Both inventions were known in Europe in the interwar period. Some countries even went on to develop those solutions further. This was the case of e.g. Ško- da in Czechoslovakia, Böhler in Austria, or the USSR, where the first mass-pro- duced recoilless rifle was created. The fate of the Soviet creation is quite bi- zarre – the 76.2 mm BPK was a fruit of the engineering prowess of Leonid Kurchevsky, of the ongoing purge, and of the mess that accompanied it, leading to the pre-serial prototypes of the solution not being even tested. Several thou- sand DR BKPs were manufactured – with the majority of them to be scrapped later as unusable. But during the Winter War of 1939–1940, some of the re- maining units from the improved manufacturing series were used in combat, where they were seized by the Finnish, who studied their structure inside-out. Recoilless rifles were also worked on in the Weimar Republic, and later in Nazi Germany, Third Teich. The outcome of their efforts was carefully designed rifles which made it to small series production. The pragmatic Germans appreciated their advantages right away, especially the low weight and the relatively good firing accuracy. The rifle of such type was to move along with the infantry, fir- ing directly at and destroying the identified targets. The end-users of the new weapon were to be also units who operated in difficult terrain or away from sup- ply facilities – mountain infantry and paratroopers (LG – the Leichtgeschütz). The production of the 7.5-cm LG 40 gun started in 1940, with 653 guns manu- factured by 1944. Krupp's original designed featured some early-stage imper- fections, but the solution was improved when taken over by Rheinmettal. There were 528 10.5-cm LG 42s manufactured from 1941 to 1944. The 7.5-cm version for mountain infantry weighed 270 kg, and its length including the nozzle was 1,150 mm. A 5.8-kg shell was fired at a velocity of 345 m/s, and the theoretical range was 6.5 kg. The version for paratroopers was made of lightweight alloys, weighing only 175 kg. The 10.5-cm LG 42 weighed as much as 480 kg, in turn, offering a range of 8.5 km. Only 144,000 ammunition for the 7.5-cm version and 450,000 ammunition for the 10.5-cm version were made during the war. Since paratroopers suffered from a lack of anti-tank weapons, the response to their needs was the 7.5-cm Granate 38 Hl/B used with a high-explosive charge able to get through a steel plate of up to 70-mm, positioned at right angles, or www.fragoutmag.com