You’ve probably seen tanks get hit in various videos from the battlefield, but have you ever had a morbid curiosity about what actually happens to the crew inside? Well, that depends on what they were hit with and which tank they were in. And that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today.

 So, let’s start from the beginning. When the First World War stalemate on the Western Front had calcified into a continuous system of trenches, you had this defensive wall of barbed wire, machine guns, and deep fortifications that made offensive operations not great for the health of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers.

And among many strategies to break this deadlock, one came along designed specifically to solve the problem of no man’s land and machine guns mowing down everything that attempted to come across. The British developed something that was at first called a land ship and the code name to keep the secrecy was tank.

 These big metal boxes they were developing were said to be some experimental tanks for water. So no one was questioning after this boring answer. So you see how far the beginning of tanks was compared to what they are doing now. The main purpose of the first tanks was to cross no man’s land not affected by machine gunfire. hopefully not hit directly by artillery to crush the wire, not get stuck in the mud and shell craters, and then knock out the machine gun positions that were mowing down infantry.

 This way, they’d break the deadlock and win the war. Well, not quite, because these first tanks were everything but reliable and safe machines. But they were the humble beginning of the cat-and- mouse game that lasts to this very day. And we’ll come to it so you can see this absurd difference in everything on the battlefield and how it evolves day by day.

 Now, the first armor was breathtakingly thin by later standards. We’re talking steel plates measuring just 6 to 12 mm thick, maximum speed of 3.7 mph, and they carried a crew of eight men usually to not bother you with each specific tank of the time. By the way, if you didn’t know, there were male and female tanks.

 Males had cannons and females had machine guns. But regardless of sexual preference by which tank identified itself, their crews shared common problems when it came to enemy efforts to destroy them, besides other little things like engine and radiators in the middle of fighting compartment, gas and cordite ammo fumes, 122° of heat, deafening noise, and so on.

 Like we said, early armor was so thin that it would let through even rifle and machine gun rounds. And it’s a no-brainer what happens if the bullet goes through. It bounces off the interior of the metal box in which are 8 to 10 people made from soft flesh. So the first measure to counter tanks was armor-piercing bullets for standard infantry rifles, which worked in the beginning, but the armor was soon made thicker.

 And then first anti-tank rifles appeared like the German GA with its 13 mm hardened steel armor-piercing core that went through the early tanks relatively reliably. And well, it had the same effect on the crew inside as the bullet, just more significant. But even without a penetrating hit, there were two things the soldiers of the First World War couldn’t protect themselves from, and those were splash and spoing.

 Now, among the first improvised measures to counter tanks were so-called reversed bullets. This means that German soldiers in particular took their standard mouser rounds for their rifles, pulled out the projectile from the case, added a bit more powder, and then put it back the opposite way, so the back of the bullet is going forward.

 So, what does this have to do with splash and spoiling? Well, when anything hits the early tank armor, there was this effect where even if armor is not penetrated, the impact transferred a shock wave and the inner surface would break off metal shards at high speed, which would end up in the faces and eyes of the crew behind the armor.

 But splash was perhaps even worse. You see, this happened when bullets struck the hardened armor plate, and the lead core of the bullet melted on impact from the tremendous friction and heat. This molten metal found its way through openings like vision slits and even the smallest gaps between riveted and bolted plates, spraying into the interior and again into the eyes and faces of the unfortunate crew.

 The riveted construction was a large part of this because there were small gaps between the armor plates and if the rivet itself was hit, it could break off from inside and become shrapnel itself and not behave well with the flesh inside. This wasn’t learned well until the Second World War when the riveted armor was finally changed to welded in most tanks.

 The British responded to splash and spoiling injuries by developing protective equipment for tank crews. And the official designation was goggles steel with chain mail for use in tanks. But I wouldn’t quite bet my eyesight on this form of protection. Also, Germans quickly learned that a direct artillery hit would blow up tanks in a fireball, and they began reserving one or two cannons hidden at the front line so they could shoot directly at advancing tanks if they appeared.

 So, tanks in the First World War set the stage for a long, still lasting evolution. But besides the huge psychological shock to the Germans, they didn’t do much in deciding the war’s outcome. Then came the Second World War, and what we could freely say is that among many other weapons, it was the war of tanks as well.

 Never before, nor since, at least for now, were tanks used on such a scale and in such numbers and different configurations and types. So, here is where the weapons to counter them also evolved into something that basically characterizes still to this day how we fight against tanks. However, in the years after the war, tanks would learn also how to protect themselves from these weapons and in some quite creative ways.

 Let’s start with how that looked like at the beginning of the war and why everything changed so drastically within just a few short years. Now tanks that appeared on the Second World War battlefield were unlike anything from the First World War. Okay, the French were the ones to come up with the turret and smaller, more mobile tank configuration in the First World War with their Renault, but now they were being used on a much larger and quite improved scale.

 Tanks were now much better protected when it came to rifle fire, but still they were nothing compared to what would soon come and hence because the armor was better. The first main anti-tank weapons were anti-tank rifles and anti-tank cannons. Cannons like the German 37 mm were at first more than enough to fight most of the early tanks, but not all.

 The French B1 and British Matilda were tanks much better armored that earned these guns a nickname from their crews, door knocker. They could shoot the enemy tank over 20 times until something finally broke on it to put it out of action. They were destroying older, lighter tanks, but it was obvious that they needed to be scaled up.

 Same for the anti-tank rifles. Although, an interesting thing is that they could take out even the later developed German Panther tank, which was considered the best tank when it appeared, at least when it worked. The Soviets especially used anti-tank rifles to great extent and continued to harass German crews by finding the weak spots where the rounds would slip through inside the tank.

 Then ricochet around and paint the interior of the tank in red color. You can imagine what I mean. So the Germans began mounting those side skirts that frustrated the crews, obscured their view, and were easy to tear up driving through thick vegetation. But they were mounted exactly because of the anti-tank rifles. They wouldn’t stop the armor-piercing round since they were just a couple millimeters thick, but they would tumble it and make it lose its velocity so it couldn’t then penetrate the main armor.

So, the biggest killers of tanks in the Second World War were actually mines and anti-tank cannons. And those cannons soon grew in caliber size exponentially. Those 37 mm soon became 50, then 88, and up to 128 mm the Germans enormous anti-tank guns grew into. And by the later stage of the war, these could destroy any tank in the world at ranges over 2 km.

 They were usually mounted on tank destroyers, which was a concept characteristic for the Second World War when they experimented with the best ways to counter tanks. Now, as for the crew, being hit by an armor-piercing anti-tank round that went through was catastrophic. But depending on the shell type, it could be even more catastrophic, if that’s even possible.

You see, Germans were the first ones to use shells with explosive filler, meaning the shell would penetrate armor. Then, milliseconds later, the filler inside would explode and burst the armor-piercing core, creating explosion shrapnel and igniting everything inside the tank. And remember that besides the squishy crew inside, all around them was fuel and ammo.

 So, such explosions were not good for your skin. Even without filler, such shells would easily ignite the tank’s own ammunition or fuel, depending on where it hit the tank. There is an instance recalled by a British tank veteran who fought in North Africa when the tank beside them was hit by an anti-tank cannon and the radio operator inside happened to be speaking on the radio when they were hit.

 All other tanks could hear what happened to the crew inside a tank that immediately brewed up in flames. And if this is not horrifying enough, the radio operator was actually speaking, so to say, for some time still while the tank was burning. So, the other British tanks fired into their fellow burning tank to at least end this.

 I can’t spell it out because of YouTube, but I think that you got what happened. Crew could survive such hits, or at least some of them that were not directly hit. But it all depends on what it struck inside and how quickly the crew jumped out of the tank. Bailing out also doesn’t mean you’re safe because there were infantry or tank machine guns firing at the crew that escaped the burning tank.

 There would be no one to give you a hand and chivalously help you come out and ask you to become a prisoner of war. A tank is fired upon until it is finished along with its crew. It is war after all. Okay, so now it was realized that because anti-tank cannons, which were the main means to destroy enemy armor, had grown so large and heavy as the armor was constantly getting thicker, they were more difficult to put where actually needed.

 And because the way of fighting was more mobile, they couldn’t always predict where the tanks might appear on the battlefield. So, it was clear that something much lighter should be developed that every other infantry soldier could carry with himself in case enemy tanks appear. And that led to the creation of the first handheld anti-tank weapons.

 And the main core of this is the shaped charge. Now, this worked completely different from kinetic projectiles that needed speed and energy to penetrate armor by force. You see, the shaped charge basically consists of a cylinder of explosive with a cone-shaped metal liner at one end, usually copper, and a detonator at the other.

 So, when the explosive goes off, it collapses this metal liner inward at tremendous speed. And where this collapsing metal meets at the center, it creates a jet of superheated particles moving somewhere between 7 and 14 km/s. We’re talking about reaching maximum velocity in about 40 micros secondsonds. And this is why shaped charges create those narrow, deep holes rather than wide craters.

 The American bazooka was the first system that delivered a shaped charge to the armor with a rocket. And it created entry holes only about half an inch or 1.3 cm in diameter. But it produced massive spoing that killed or injured crews through burns and shrapnel. So you see, the shaped charge enabled something previously unthinkable.

 A single infantryman could now kill a tank. And the psychological impact on tank crews was profound. The bazooka was effective to around 150 to 200 yards with penetration of approximately 76 mm of rolled homogeneous armor which was great for the time. Now while the British got their pat basically a spigot mortar launching a shaped charge warhead.

 The Germans captured first American bazookas and made their own version just a bit bigger and more powerful the Panza Shrek. But then they made another similar weapon that would be cheaper and much more mass-roducible to give almost every infantry soldier a chance to destroy an enemy tank because Germans were facing overwhelming numbers of Allied tanks later in the war and they knew they couldn’t fight them conventionally with their tanks, tank destroyers, and anti-tank guns.

 The Panera launched a shaped charge that was powerful and could endanger any tank of the time. However, the range and accuracy were just poor with early versions no more than 20 meters where you could hit a tank. And by that point, when the tank is so close to you, there is probably infantry that came with it. So, good luck standing still to aim and fire at such close distance.

 But still, those weapons could now penetrate up to 200 mm of armor in later, more powerful versions, and no tank at the time was safe from them. Just the sheer number of them made tank crews take notice. and a shaped charge jet going through armor at several thousand degrees was not what any crew wanted inside their tank.

 So they began improvising the first versions of what we now call cope cages. Basically standoff improvised armor in the form of either sandbags, logs, rubber track links, and anything that might add some additional space between the shaped charge and the main armor. You see, if the charge hits the sandbag and detonates, the jet will lose a significant portion of its power because it’s not pressed directly at the main armor.

 And this way, it gives a chance for the main armor to stop it. And those German side skirts we mentioned earlier came in handy for detonating shaped charges away from the main armor as well. So, besides those weapons we mentioned, there were other improvised threats to Second World War tank crews like Molotov cocktails that were simple and cheap and strangely very deadly to tanks.

 The sticky burning liquid would drop through the spaces between armor, like between the turret and around the hatches, because mass-roduced Second World War tanks weren’t so watertight, and it would drip inside onto the crew and other flammable things inside the tank. Although it took some balls to come so close and throw a burning bottle at an enemy tank, it could quite easily ruin the day for the crew inside.

 Now moving on after the Second World War into the post-war evolution, tanks grew dramatically larger and heavier with thicker armor, larger guns, and increasingly sophisticated fire control, communications, and protection systems. But the big gamecher here was that anti-tankg guided missiles completely changed the equation of armored warfare because infantry could now kill tanks from kilometers away rather than the tens of meters required for panser attacks.

 and with much bigger warheads that could blow up the entire tank to pieces. Early wireg guided missiles were controlled by an operator using a joystick to manually steer them to the target. And then the RPG7 emerged as a cheap portable weapon that could endanger even the most modern tanks even today, let alone when it appeared in the Vietnam War when Soviets equipped North Vietnamese guerrillas to fight American Patton and British Centurion tanks there.

 But then we have, in my opinion, the most interesting way of destroying tanks, where you wouldn’t even attempt to break through the armor. This was HESH, which stands for high explosive squash head. And it’s a British invention that works on an entirely different principle than shaped charges or kinetic penetrators. You see, the shell contains plastic explosive that squashes against the armor surface on impact, spreading into a flat disc roughly 30 cm in diameter.

 And then a delay fuse in the base detonates the explosive a fraction of a second later. Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Because the detonation sends a powerful shock wave through the armor plate. And when this shock wave reaches the inner surface, it reflects back and causes a large chunk of metal to detach from the interior at high velocity.

 We’re talking about a scab, sometimes weighing 2 to 5 kg. And this chunk along with numerous smaller fragments becomes a lethal projectile ricocheting inside the tank. Think of it like the German reverse bullet just on steroids. Now HESH also proved particularly effective against concrete fortifications and buildings which made it a dualpurpose round.

 And actually in 2003 in Iraq and actually in 2003 in Iraq there was this tragic incident where a Challenger 2 mistakenly engaged another Challenger. The crew of the target tank were working on top of the turret in a hole down position when thermal sights misidentified them as enemy troops at a bunker position.

 Two hash rounds were fired at roughly 4,000 yards. And the second round struck the open commander hatchlid, sending hot fragments into the turret, killing two crew members and seriously injuring two others. So, how did tanks evolve to counter, at least to some extent, the effects of a shaped charge? Well, the British developed something called Chobam armor, and this became the most significant advance in armor protection since the transition from riveted to welded construction.

 Chobam demonstrated more than twice the effectiveness against shaped charges compared to homogeneous steel of equal weight, and it saw first operational deployment on the Challenger 1, while defense collaboration brought the technology to the M1 Abrams. So, how does it actually work? Well, basically there are ceramic tiles encased within a metal framework, usually titanium, bonded to a backing plate, and several elastic layers.

 The outer steel layer detonates the incoming shell, and then the ceramic layer shatters under the shaped charge jet, forming high pressure dust. But here’s the clever part. The ceramic’s brittleleness creates a ragged rather than smooth entrance channel, causing extreme pressures that disrupt the jet’s geometry.

 And then the disturbed jet causes greater irregularities, creating a vicious circle where the jet’s own energy basically works against it. This also made hash rounds significantly less effective because it couldn’t cause spoiling anymore due to dissipation of energy through those different layers. And just to show you how effective this composite armor was, during the 2003 Iraq invasion, a Challenger 2 threw its tracks and became stuck in a ditch.

 It was then reportedly hit by 14 RPG variants and a Milan anti-tank missile. And yet the crew remained safe inside for several hours until the vehicle was recovered. Now the Soviets took a different approach and developed what’s called explosive reactive armor or ER. These are basically bricks containing an explosive sheet sandwiched between two metal plates.

 And when a shaped charge jet penetrates and hits the explosive liner, it detonates and throws those metal plates obliquely at the jet. The plates move in opposite directions at high velocity, deforming and defocusing the jet. But of course, the weapons evolved yet again to counter this because erra has some pretty significant limitations.

 You see, each brick is destroyed after just one hit. So once it’s triggered, it’s gone. And that’s exactly what tandem charge weapons exploit because they use a first charge to trigger the reactive armor and then a second one punches through the exposed metal beneath. Now the armor-piercing finabilized discarding Sabo round or APFSDS basically represents the pinnacle of kinetic anti-armour technology.

 You see, a subcaliber penetrator is carried by a larger Sabo during barrel acceleration, and then the Sabo separates into three to four petals after leaving the gun tube. Modern penetrators measure 2 to 3 cm in diameter and up to 1 meter in length, and there is no explosive warhead at all because penetration relies purely on kinetic energy transfer.

 These rounds operate at velocities between 1,400 and 1,800 meters/s and depleted uranium penetrators offer some unique properties. DU is pyrohoric meaning it ignites on contact with air after penetration and it also exhibits a self-sharpening effect that maintains a sharp nose rather than mushrooming like other metals.

 So what happens after penetration is basically a combination of multiple killing mechanisms all at once. Penetrator fragments scatter through the crew compartment while armor spoing sends fragments inward. Then the pyrohoric ignition combusts those DU particles setting fire to fuel and ammunition. The combination of fragmenting metal fire and over pressure leaves basically no chance of crew survival.

 Everything squishy like the human body literally evaporates at such pressures. And some data actually suggests that the crew could even be sucked out through that small hole. this rod creates coming out the tank if it doesn’t blow it up completely, which is most often the case. The M829 Silver Bullet Series demonstrated these effects in combat because during Desert Storm, these rounds absolutely devastated Iraqi armor.

 But what really didn’t go well for the crews of those tanks was that Soviet tank designers had made a fateful choice in the T72 series. and later they placed the autoloadader’s ammunition carousel in a ring at the base of the turret basket directly among the crew. This design prioritized smaller, cheaper tanks, but it created a fatal flaw.

 You see, when the armor is penetrated, there is a high probability of striking that ammunition, and when the propellant ignites, a chain reaction follows. Massive instantaneous over pressure blows the turret completely off the chassis, and crew survival when the carousel ignites is basically zero. However, it did happen that the driver somehow survived this in a couple of instances because the main pressure went upward together with the turret and well, the gunner and commander in it, but somehow didn’t spread in the

direction of the driver. But those were just a couple of crazy instances and enormous luck for the driver. At least this seems to be instantaneous for the crew, hopefully. And while there are today many highly advanced missile systems like Javelin and many others, they pretty much do the same things to the crew inside.

 Now, FPV drones, which stands for firstperson view, have basically revolutionized anti-tank warfare. They’re assembled from commercial components for somewhere between $300 and $600 per drone, and they create a devastating cost asymmetry, where a $500 FPV drone can destroy a $5 million tank. Sources say that more than 2/3 of Russian tanks destroyed in recent months have been taken out using FPV drones.

 And although they carry pretty much the same warhead as the RPG7 that was for decades in service, they can now deliver it from miles away and more importantly hit the most vulnerable parts of the tank. Especially the wireg guided fiber optic drones are completely immune to electronic jamming and give a much clearer picture to the operator.

 Cope cages, improvised armor, and up to those absurd so-called turtle tanks. Nothing can reliably protect the tank from swarms of drones with a simple-shaped charge strapped on them. And if tanks, like they always did through history, as you’ve seen now, don’t come up with an answer of their own that would make drones much less effective in return, the whole concept of a tank, like we imagine it might come into question.

 But we’ll see what time will