Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1150145
Immediately after the German army was revived, the American Bazooka – the bedrock for the Panzerschreck, improved as necessary – became the lowest-tier anti-tank weapon. As the weapon featured many flaws and since Germans were still able to use a design from 1945, it was not long before a domestic solution saw the light of day – it was named the PzF 44 2A1 (unofficially referred to also as the Panzerfaust 2). The weapon was constructed in the 1950s by two companies – Dynamit No- bel, who designed the rocket-propelled shaped charge grenade, and H&K, who designed its 44 mm launcher. The new weapon was put into oper- ation in 1963 and used until the end of the Cold War. Initially, it featured a rather specific (and ill-conceived) mechanism of launching shaped charge grenades. Inside the rear grip (with the trigger mechanism) there was a box magazine holding cartridges. After a grenade was loaded, it was necessary to use the sliding-rotating bolt-action to load a cartridge, which alsor tensed the spring of the firing pin. After the butt was pressed against the shoulder (which deactivated the automatic safety), it was possible to pull the trigger and release the pin, which fired off the car- tridge, and the cartridge initiated the firing of the propellant of the an- ti-tank grenade. Originally, the PzF 44 was a recoilless gun which ejected counter-mass when the grenade was launched. The solution described above was not very user-friendly and criticized as such – that's why the weapon was quickly modernized and since 1973 featured a lower-caliber grenade (offering a greater penetration potential) propelled by means of a combined solution – a recoilless launch from the barrel and a rocket booster. As a result, the weapon became a kind of equivalent to the Sovi- et RPG-2 – and even resembled it in terms of appearance. The later version of the PzF 44 measured 880 mm in length and weighed 7.8 kg. The DM32 shaped charge grenade weighed 1.5 kg and could pierce up to 370 mm of steel, and the declared range of firing at moving targets was 300 m, but in reality, it was half of that values. The life-span of the launcher was declared to amount to 2,000 rounds. The effectiveness of the German grenade launcher did not lag much be- hind other weapons of such type used in the 1960s and 1970s. In the www.fragoutmag.com