Reversed bullets

[TonyE]

To Gunner - It is claimed the bullets penetrated rather than acted as a HESH round does, scabbing the interior face.

I have seen the plates that were used for the TV documentary and penetreated and will try to get some photos, but it won't be for a couple of weeks.

Judging by the contemporary references, both in the Min. of Mun. history and in books such as Hesketh-Pritchard's it was fairly well known in at least the early part of the war. German SmK ammunition was not available in great numbers for ordinary troops until well into 1916.

Regards

TonyE

[Gunner Bailey]

To Gunner - It is claimed the bullets penetrated rather than acted as a HESH round does, scabbing the interior face.

Regards

TonyE

Thanks Tony. I wonder if the contempoary reports of penetration are accurate? If someone inside a tank was hit by a piece of metal, would they just assume it was a bullet? A normal but reversed bullet would probably be in a state after in had penetrated sheet steel. I'll look forward to seeing the photos when they are available.

John

[Piorun]

TonyE is right - there is evidence that they could and did penetrate but I would expect that they also could and did cause scabbing. Antony

[Gunner Bailey]

TonyE is right - there is evidence that they could and did penetrate but I would expect that they also could and did cause scabbing. Antony

Logic would imply that reversing a bullet sort of makes it like a wadcutter. OK for soft targets but I've not heard them working against metal?

I still go with the scab theory.

John

[Robert Dunlop]

I have seen the plates that were used for the TV documentary and penetreated...

Tony, I remember the documentary where a German rifle was fired at a metal plate. The bullet was reversed. It punched a hole in the plate. Presumably the plates you refer to were from that documentary. Photographs would be very interesting.

Robert

[Latze]

Not so, I'm afraid. The German round was very easy to remove and reverse and quite different in seating to the .303. Antony.

Antony,

as far as I know the production method for German SAA was changed in late 1915. The loose seating of the projectile was causing problems in machine-guns and made the ammunition susceptible to water damage. Does your information concerning the seating really cover late-war ammunition? I'm no expert on this - so a honest question.

regards

Matt

[Piorun]

Must confess to exceeding the limits of my technical expertise, Matt. Would appreciate input from others. Cheers, Antony

[Terry_Reeves]

There seems to me to be a number of questions that need to be answered:

1. If the head were removed by the firer, and then reversed, there must have been damage at the neck of the round. This would mean that the some of the propellant gasses would leak out before the full firing pressure could be applied. In addition, the fact that the round had been reversed meant that the force on the head was also considerably reduced further, because it had less surface area to bear on because the ogive was presented rather than the flat base in the conventionally seated round.

2. The reversed round would be unstable in flight, so it is very likely that this was a hit or miss situation.

3. With regard to the above, if there is sufficient evidence that the round did strike base first, I would contend that this must have been at very short range as the ballistics of the round had been altered quite considerably. I would also be interested to see what the thickness of the target plate was.

TR

[TonyE]

Several of the points that you make are in error.

I will gloss over the fact that you refer to the "Head" when you mean the bullet, the head being at the other end of the cartridge, but it would be reasonably easy to remove the bullet from a German 7.92 round without undue damamge to the neck as others have pointed out.

The base of the bullet would still be seated in the leed of the rifling, and since the bullet is over-bore diameter there would be no appreciable leakage of gas, although I agree bullet set-up would be nowhere near as good as a normal round.

You are also incorrect about the pressure on the bullet, since pressure is independent of area. If the chamber pressure of the round is 50,000 psi then that is the pressure, whether the bullet is the right or wrong way round.

Certainly the ballistics of a bullet fired base first would not be good, but we are talking about hitting a tank at close range, not a sniper shield at 300 yards. There are plenty of flat nosed bullets that were perfectly adequate for the ranges they were used at. I offer the .303 RTS as an example. Also Hebler and others designed bullets with a pointed tail so that would not be too great a problem.

I believe the frontal plate of the tanks was about 8mm, but Centurion will know the correct answer.

Regards

TonyE

[Terry_Reeves]

Tony

Sorry, but I think you are wrong. The "head" is a term often used in ballistics, whether it is a small arms round or an artillery round. There is a direct correlation between the pressure of the propellant gas and the surface area of the base of the projectile it has to bear against, and the pressure must be reduced even more when the round is loose fitted as you appear to acknowledge. Perhaps you could comment on the stability of the round whilst in the air and on striking the target? I don't doubt that there was some spalling on the inside of the armour, but I have severe doubts that this was necessarily because of reversed round effect, simply because there is little evidence to support this assertion.

TR

[TonyE]

Then we must agree to disagree. The head of a cartridge case is that part which surrounds the primer, hence the term headstamp. A bullet or shell certainly has a head which is the forward part of the ogive, and is often measured in terms of c.r.h. or Calibre Radius Head, but the whole projectile is certainly not the "head". I would be interested to see any ballistics document that refers to the complete projectile as the "head".

The area that the pressure has to bear against is the cross section of the bore/bullet, which is the same whatever the rear shape.

I cannot comment of the behaviour of the bullet in the air as I have not carried out the experiments myself. All I can say is that I believe experiments by others have shown that under the right circumstances a bullet fired base first has shown to have greater penetrative power than in the normal configuration.

As I said in a previous post, I hope to be able to post pictures of the effects of this in the near future.

Regards

TonyE

[Garron]

Someone had the idea to test it.

http://theboxotruth.com/docs/bot50.htm

its not .303 or 7.92 and its against jars of water that are meant to simulate flesh (for penetration ect tests) not armour plate. But it shoes the accuracy side to the question.

and the whole cutting X into the bullets for make adhoc dum dums (pistols and rifles)

http://theboxotruth.com/docs/bot32.htm

Gaz

[Gunner Bailey]

Well found Gaz. If the bullet shatters against a jar of water, why should it penetrate steel? I wonder if Tony's photos of another test are as revealing?

John

[Piorun]

I think that the rifle bullets shattered after more than A jar of water and, given that hitting water at speed is about the same as hitting hard concrete . . . . . This has all been discussed before and the bullets can penetrate some plate and cause spalling against other. Antony

[(nzef)]

I can not add anything of value to this thread, however I was impressed when watching an episode of Trench Detectives recently (The Tank one) where they experimented with reversed bullets and found that they would indeed punch a hole through standard thickness Tank armour.

Cheers

Grant

[truthergw]

Thanks for the links, Gaz. Q I as Mr. Fry would say. How much carries across from these trials to armour plate is questionable but it certainly answered one of the questions I had. How safe was it to reverse the bullets. It seems that, with care, it is OK. I was surprised that the accuracy was not affected up to 100 yards at least. I was no marksman but even I would expect to hit a tank at a hundred paces. Another question has occurred to me as I type. Assuming that a reversed bullet would usually penetrate armour plate, how effective would that be? A tank was a big box with lots of room for a bullet to enter and do little or no harm. Would an anti-tank sniper have needed to know the internal lay out? Assuming that a bullet entered the tank, would it still have enough momentum to damage any of the machinery or would it only hurt the crew members?

[Piorun]

Tom: anything that got into or spalled off tank armour was deadly in the turret. It's really a very cramped place and ricochet was plentiful. Tankers would wear chain-mail face masks for protection. Damaging the crew members was enough. If forced to evacuate, they were sitting ducks. Antony

[truthergw]

Tom: anything that got into or spalled off tank armour was deadly in the turret. It's really a very cramped place and ricochet was plentiful. Tankers would wear chain-mail face masks for protection. Damaging the crew members was enough. If forced to evacuate, they were sitting ducks. Antony

Yes, I quite appreciate that but injuring one crew member did not necessarily put the tank out of action. Even putting the guns or gunners out of action would not stop the tank from crushing wire or anything else in its path. I wonder if there are any figures on what proportion of tanks were stopped by artillery as opposed to reversed rounds. I know very little about tanks but the references I have come across suggest that ordinary machine gun fire caused serious spalling. That is what the visors were intended to protect against, not reversed bullets. I said earlier that I found this thread fascinating, I also find it very informative but I doubt if reversed bullets as anti-tank weapons were ever more than a very small side line in the story of tanks and how to combat them.

[TonyE]

I am sure you are right Tom about reversed bullets only ever being a small part of the story and that close range artillery fire was the biggest tank killer (although mechanical failure probably claimed as many).

Concentrated machine gun fire on the same spot could batter its way through the armour and also both machine gunners and riflemen were told to aim at the vision slits, which must have been very disconcerting for the drivers and commanders.

One point about the videos Gaz posted. The bullets being used had gilding metal jackets which is relatively soft. The German 7.92mm bullets had steel jackets coated in cupro-nickel (CNCS) which are much stronger. When Britain introduced the Mark VIIW AP round it was found that using a CNCS jacket considerably increased the ability to penetrate as the jacket did not break up on impact, supporting the steel core as it penetrated.

Regards

TonyE

[Garron]

It was posted to show the accuracy/bullet behavior side to the discussion rather than penetration side. I admit its not really the perfect test for our needs as the factors are different (calbre, bullet contruction and target) though it does show a reversed bullet is somewhat accurate, probably more than we all thought.

Gaz

[Piorun]

Point taken, Garron - and, yes, the reversed bullet was a lot more accurate over a longer distance than most imagine. Hence its occasional use and the trouble taken to create it. Antony

[johnreed]

Please see this on utube.

John

[squirrel]

Pretty conclusive by the look of it - what type and thickness of armour plate was being used in the test?

[Gunner Bailey]

A very interesting test and one that confirms both sides of the arguement are right. Yes a hole is made and metal from the steel plate is shot into the tank, but the bullet itself does not penetrate the tank. It is part of the plate itself that causes damaged but it is not a scab of metal. A hybrid answer!

John

[MikB]

A very interesting test and one that confirms both sides of the arguement are right. Yes a hole is made and metal from the steel plate is shot into the tank, but the bullet itself does not penetrate the tank. It is part of the plate itself that causes damaged but it is not a scab of metal. A hybrid answer!

John

Not a scab in the sense that it isn't a splinter detached from the inside surface by shockwave with no perforation of the outer surface, but a punched-out slug similar to that shed from a plate pierced by a flat-faced punch in an engineering press tool. I've long thought it might work like this - there's a much higher instantaneous force when the whole cross section is engaged at once than a collapsing point delivering it over a longer period.

It would be much less effective against the angled plates in the tank's lower hull front, but could work well against the vertical upper front plates, and especially against the sides. The more square to the plate the line of flight, the better the chance it would work - perhaps around 20 degrees or more would see the effect deteriorate to become equal or inferior to a spitzgeschoss travelling the usual way.

As far as accuracy goes, it's usual for pointed ball bullets to settle into a tailfirst attitude once the rifling effect has decayed either through normal air resistance at extreme range or through sharp deceleration whilst penetrating a soft target of almost any description. Aerodynamically it's their most stable mode of flight. Therefore, providing it could be launched concentrically and at consistent velocity there's no reason its accuracy would be poor, at least at short ranges. Of course, manual reassembly and the dumping of a visually-estimated amount of propellant - to make room for the point - would tend to work against that.

TonyE - It's clear Hesketh Prichard knew that reversed bullets had been found on German soldiers, but there's no evidence I noticed that he was aware they might be for piercing armour rather than for 'dumdum' effect.

Regards,

MikB