In 22 days, less than it takes to approve a business trip in peace time, Soviet engineers created a weapon. This weapon forced Germany to redesign all of its tanks. It cost less than a machine gun, weighed less than a soldier’s full load, and was manufactured on ordinary lathes.
These lathes had been used to make parts for weaving machines before the war. At the same time, it maimed its own soldiers almost as reliably as it did its enemies. Several decades later, historians would call Dick Jario’s anti-tank rifle a weapon of despair. There would be some truth in that, but only some. Despair alone creates nothing.
Despair paralyzes, causes people to rush around, and leads to mistakes. To turn despair into a working mechanism, something else is needed. It requires a person who can do with their hands what others can only draw on paper. This story begins in July 1941 when the Soviet infantry was left alone to face German tanks without artillery, without hope, without weapons capable of piercing armor.
To understand why Degario’s anti-tank rifle became possible, one must first grasp how hopeless the situation was for those awaiting it. On June 22nd, 1941, the Red Army had an impressive anti-tank arsenal at its disposal. Nearly 15,000 guns of various calibers were in service from the Baltic to the Black Sea. And according to pre-war calculations, this should have been enough to repel any attack.
The calculations did not take into account one thing, that the attack would be so fast and deep that the guns would simply not have time to fire. By the end of August, most of this arsenal had turned into trophies, scrap metal, and mass graves of crews somewhere between Breast and Smalinsk. Anti-tank guns weighed hundreds of kilograms, required horses or tractors for transportation, and most importantly, required time to deploy, which the retreating infantry simply did not have.
A tank would appear from behind a cops, and a minute later, it would all be over. The survivors would retreat eastward, abandoning their guns in the roadside ditches. The infantry, left without artillery cover, could only counter the armor with grenades and bottles of incendiary mixture. To do this, they had to let the vehicle get within throwing distance, that is 15 m, sometimes 10.
Those who threw from such a distance at the steel mass approaching them felt as if they were standing directly in the path of a freight train. The ground shook from the tracks. The air vibrated from the roar of the engine. Their throats dried up from the exhaust fumes and their own fear. Most missed. Many did not have time to throw at all. This is how tank fear was born.
A soldier who saw a 30tonon machine break through the log roof of a dugout and crush the people inside ceased to perceive the tank as a target. He began to perceive it as a force of nature. It was like a flood or a stepfire from which one can only run. The rational part of their consciousness understood that running away from a tank was pointless.
The tracks were faster anyway, but their legs were already carrying their bodies away. The survival instinct did not read combat regulations. The irony was that the Soviet Union had already solved this problem once. In 1936, when tanks were still relatively thin skinned, a program to develop anti-tank guns began. Over 3 years, designers created and tested a dozen and a half different models.
One of them, the Rook Vishnikov rifle, was even adopted for service in 1939. It fired up to 15 rounds per minute. It could be carried by a crew of two and penetrated 20 mm of armor at a range of half a kilometer. Then the program was shut down. Military theorists looked at the development of tank construction and extrapolated trends.
They concluded that by the mid 1940s, tank armor would reach 60 to 80 mm. An anti-tank gun would be useless against such thicknesses. Why waste resources on weapons that would become obsolete in 5 years? The logic was flawless. Production was shut down. The designs were sent to the archives and the designers were reassigned to other tasks.
In the summer of 1941, it became clear that the theorists had been wrong about one important point. German tanks did indeed have thick frontal armor, but the sides and rear of most vehicles was still fairly poorly protected. The most common German tank of that period, the Panzer 3, had 30 mm of side armor.
The Panzer 2, which the Panzerafa still had plenty of, had even less. Rukavishnikov’s gun would have penetrated them without much difficulty. But Rukavishnikov’s gun no longer existed. All that remained were drawings in safes and a few prototypes in factory museums. In early July, Stalin summoned the people’s commasar for armaments and set him a task.
In peace time, this would certainly have seemed like a joke. He was required to create an anti-tank rifle from scratch. not to retrieve old blueprints from the archives or modify an existing prototype, but to create something entirely new. Production capacities, technological chains, and the range of materials had changed so much in 2 years that reviving Ruka Vishnikov’s rifle would take longer than making a new one.
They were given a month to complete the task. By mid August, the prototypes had to be ready. Several design bureaus were assigned the task. Among them was KB2 of the Kovv arms plant headed by Vasili Dejario. Dejarv had no engineering education. In fact, he had no education at all except for 3 years of parish school.
From the age of 11, he worked at the Tula Arms plant. First as an apprentice, then as an inspector, and then as a mechanic. He did not think in terms of formulas and drawings. He thought with his hands. Vasilei dearv was born in Tula into a family of hereditary gunsmiths where the craft was passed down from grandfather to father and from father to son as naturally as the color of one’s eyes or the shape of one’s nose.
At the age of six, he was already blowing bellows in his grandfather’s forge in the yard of their house. At 11, he went to work at the Tula Arms plant because the family needed money, and the boy with nimble hands could be useful. His first job was to check rifle springs. By the age of 17, he was already a gunsmith, and after his father’s death, he became the sole bread winner for his mother and siblings.
He never received an education, no high school, no technical school, and certainly no university. Everything he knew about weapons, he learned with his hands, standing at the machine 12 hours a day, year after year, decade after decade. And that is why he did not work the way engineers with degrees did.
They first drew up plans, then calculated, then sent the drawings to the workshop, and then wondered why the finished part did not quite match the design. Degarv did the opposite. He took metal and began to make a part, keeping the design in his head. When the part was ready and worked as it should, a drawing was prepared for serial production.
In July 1941, he applied this method to a task that allowed no room for error. A month to create a weapon from scratch meant that there was simply no time for the classic design cycle. It was impossible to spend a week drawing, then a week calculating, then two weeks refining the prototype. Everything had to be done at once. Thinking and cutting metal happened in one continuous motion.
Dictario divided his KB2 into two groups. He sent the first, led by young engineer Dementiaf down one path. He led the second group himself down a different path. Both groups worked on rifles chambered for the same powerful 14.5 mm caliber cartridge, but used different design solutions. This was not a waste of resources.
It was insurance in case one of the paths turned out to be a dead end. Initially, both versions provided magazine feeding, allowing the shooter to fire several shots in a row without reloading. This seemed logical from the perspective of combat effectiveness, but it created a problem from the perspective of production. A magazine meant additional parts, additional tolerances, and additional assembly time.
And neither the designers nor the factories nor the army had time. After two weeks of work, Deayario made a decision that many considered a step backward. He abandoned the magazine and made the rifle single shot. One cartridge, one shot, manual reloading. But the design was simplified to such an extent that it could be manufactured almost entirely on lathes.
There were no complex milling operations or special fixtures. Any factory with a fleet of universal machines could master production in a matter of days. On August 29, 1941, exactly 22 days after the start of design, both samples were placed on the acceptance commission’s table. The rifle designed by Dement’s team and the rifle designed by Degarv himself passed field tests and were accepted for service on the same day.
But it was Degarv’s singleshot rifle, simple to the point of primitiveness, that went into mass production first because factories did not need to be rebuilt. Because workers did not need retraining. Because an old locksmith from Tula, who thought with his hands, understood production in a way that no engineering graduate could. Simplicity did not come for free.
Degrev’s rifle weighed 17 kg and was over 2 m long. Soldiers called it a fishing rod, and this nickname conveyed not only irony, but also fatigue. Carrying such a heavy weapon across rough terrain, especially with ammunition, was less than pleasant. The crew consisted of two people, which was the minimum possible number.
One carried the gun, the other carried the ammunition and everything else. Then they switched because otherwise the first one would be exhausted after a few kilometers of marching. In defense, this was still tolerable. In retreat, when every minute counted, 17 kg of iron on the shoulder became a curse. But the real price became clear when firing.
The 14.5 mm cartridge was originally designed for large caliber machine guns, which have massive mounts that dampen recoil. The Decarov rifle did not have such a mount. It had a muzzle brake that deflected some of the powder gases to the sides. It had a stock with a soft butt plate. It had a spring in the trigger box.
All this softened the recoil, but did not eliminate it. Each shot hit the shooter’s shoulder with a force that veterans later compared to a sledgehammer blow. The trigger pull was about 5 kg, which meant that the shooter had to press the trigger with his whole finger, not just the pad. After 10 to 15 shots, the shoulder would go numb.
After 20 or 30, it became difficult to raise the arm. Some armor-piercing riflemen placed a rolledup sweater under the butt, which helped, but not much. The second problem was even more serious. To pierce the armor of a German tank, it was necessary to let it get within a distance of 150, or better yet, 100 m. From 100 m, the gun could penetrate 40 mm of steel.
From 500 m, the armor penetration dropped to about 25. This meant that a gunner with an anti-tank rifle had to lie motionless in his foxhole while the tank approached him and wait until the machine gets so close that it’s impossible to miss or if he was lucky until it exposed its side where the armor was thinner. When fired, the muzzle break through a cloud of dust, sand, and snow to the sides, visible for several hundred meters.
The armored vehicle’s position was instantly revealed. If the first shot missed the target or failed to disable the tank, there might not be a second chance. The tank turned its turret toward the flash. And the gunner had a few seconds to either reload and fire again or leave his position. It was a job for people with very strong nerves or for people who had nothing to lose.
Serial production of the PTRD began on September 22nd at the Kovra plant. The first batch of 50 guns was ready in October. This seems ridiculously small, but the factory needed to fine-tune the technological process, train workers, and check quality at every stage. After that, production began to pick up speed in a way that only Soviet wartime factories knew how.
On October 26th, Jukov, commander of the Western Front, signed a directive. The first 300 rifles were to be sent directly from the factory to Roofsky’s 16th Army, which was defending the Volkamsk direction northwest of Moscow. This was the most dangerous section. It was here that the Germans aimed to break through the defenses and reach the capital by the shortest route.
The guns were delivered to the 316th Rifle Division, which would later be named after Panfalova. On November the 16th, 1941, soldiers of the 1,75th regiment engaged German tanks in the area of the villages of Palino and Shiraayo. According to reports from the chief of artillery of the front, General Camra, six German tanks were destroyed by anti-tank guns that day at distances of 150 to 200 m.
Six tanks are not much when you look at the overall statistics of the war. But for the infantry, which for several months in a row could only run from armor or die under it, it was a revelation. It turned out the tanks could be stopped. Two soldiers with a long iron pipe could do what previously required a cannon, a crew, and a team of horses.
The fear of tanks began to recede. Not immediately, not everywhere, but it began. In 1942, production reached a completely different level. Factories supplied the front with 184,800 dctario rifles in one year. Added to this were 63,000 Simonov rifles, which were more complex and expensive, but self-loading.
Anti-tank rifles were no longer in short supply. They became a mass weapon of the infantry as common as machine guns or mortars. A company of anti-tank rifles numbering from 27 to 54 units was introduced into the rifle regiment. Infantry battalions now had platoon of 18 guns. Anti-tank gunners became a separate specialty with their own tactics, techniques, and a special position in the infantry hierarchy.
They were respected because they did what others feared to do. They were pied because everyone knew the price of every tank destroyed. By the middle of 1942, the Germans realized that the rules of the game had changed. Soviet infantry no longer scattered at the sight of tanks. They lay down in trenches, set up long anti-tank guns, and waited.
And then the Reich’s design bureaus began to search for an answer to the weapon that an old locksmith from Tula had created in 22 days. The answer came in 1943 and looked deceptively simple. Thin steel plates appeared on the sides of German tanks and self-propelled guns suspended on brackets a few centimeters from the main armor.
The Germans called them shirtsen, which translates as aprons or skirts. These screens could not stop an anti-tank gunshell, but they worked perfectly against a 14.5 mm armor-piercing bullet. The bullet pierced the thin screen, lost its stability, and hit the main armor flat with no chance of piercing it. This was a direct response to Soviet anti-tank rifles and German documents from that period confirm this unequivocally.
The Sherzen were developed specifically to protect against PTD and PTRS fire. The weapon created in 22 days force German industry to restructure production, change tank designs, and allocate resources to additional protection. In the context of a war of attrition, this was not just a tactical inconvenience.
It was a strategic success. But for the armorpiercing troops on the front lines, strategic successes meant little for them. The Sheren made the tanks front and side projections virtually invulnerable. The tracks, observation slits, rear and roof remained. But hitting these areas from a distance of 100 meters while the vehicle was moving and firing was a task of a completely different level of difficulty.
Armor-piercing gunners adapted because there was no other way out. They learned to shoot at the tracks, immobilizing the tank and turning it into a stationary target for artillery. They aimed at the mechanics and drivers viewing devices, blinding the crew. They climbed to the upper floors of destroyed buildings to shoot from above at the thin roof of the engine compartment.
In Stalenrad, where every house was fought over, this tactic proved particularly effective. A tank that had entered a narrow street between the ruins was shot at from the third floor before it had time to raise its barrel. Gradually, anti-tank guns shifted into a niche for which they were not originally intended.
They became anti-material weapons effective against anything thinner than tank armor. Armored personnel carriers, armored cars, trucks, tractors, firing points, fortified positions. A bullet capable of piercing 40 mm of steel left no chance for brick work or log rollers. There were cases when low-flying aircraft were shot down with PTRDs, although this task required exceptional skill and a fair amount of luck.
By 1944, when anti-tank grenade launchers appeared in large numbers on the front lines and artillery was strengthened, the role of anti-tank rifles finally became auxiliary. But they were not removed from service. They continued to serve until the very end of the war because there was nothing to replace them in the niche of anti-material shooting.
During the war, Soviet industry produced a total of 281,11 dictarov guns. This is more than any other anti-tank gun in history. The figure reflects not so much the weapon’s combat value as the genius of its production concept. Degarov created something that could be mass- prodduced in quantities unthinkable for complex military equipment.
After 1945, the PTD did not disappear. They ended up in mobilization reserve warehouses, were transferred to allies, and fell into the hands of partisans and insurgents around the world. In Korea, Chinese volunteers use them against American armored vehicles. In Vietnam, captured guns were found in Vietkong hideouts.
Weapons created to stop the Panzerwafa near Moscow continued to fire in the jungles of Southeast Asia 20 years after the end of World War II. And then something happened that deserves a separate mention. In Korea, American Captain William Broofphy captured a PTRD and became interested in its design. He came up with the idea of mounting a 12.
7 mm barrel from a Browning machine gun on Degario’s stock. The resulting hybrid became one of the first examples of what would later be called a large caliber sniper rifle. Deciario’s idea proved so successful that it outlived its original purpose. But the rifle’s main legacy was not the rifle itself, but the cartridge.
14 1.5x 14 mm adopted on July 16th, 1941. It proved so versatile that it is still in use today. It is used in large caliber KPV machine guns mounted on armored vehicles ranging from armored personnel carriers to anti-aircraft installations. It is used in ZPU anti-aircraft systems. It is used in modern anti-material rifles.
The cartridge created in the rush of the war summer to fight German tanks has become one of the world’s standard calibers. In 2014, when armed conflict broke out in eastern Ukraine, PTRDs reappeared in news reports. They were taken out of storage, cleaned of preservative grease, and put into position.
The weapon was 73 years old. It still fired. It still penetrated anything thinner than tank armor, armored vehicles, fortified positions, light equipment. Decttario’s rifle proved indestructible in its simplicity. It is tempting to say that this story is about how despair breeds genius. That would be beautiful but inaccurate.
Despair breeds vanity, panic, and hasty bad decisions. What happened in the summer of 1941 in Kovrov was not despair, but a cold realization that there was no alternative. When the choice is between the impossible and destruction, the impossible ceases to be impossible. It simply becomes very difficult.
It is tempting to say that this story is about a lone genius who put the system to shame. That would also be inaccurate. Decarv was not alone. Behind him stood dozens of engineers and technicians from KB2, hundreds of workers from the Kov plant, thousands of people who made machines, transported metal, and provided electricity.
He was the tip of the spear, but without a shaft, the tip is useless. This story is about something else. It is about how simplicity triumphs over perfection when time becomes the main deficit. German engineers spent years designing tanks, polishing every component to technical perfection. A Soviet mechanic created a weapon against these tanks in 3 weeks because he understood that a good gun today is better than a perfect one.
Never will be. The shirts on German tanks became a monument to this understanding. It is about how the price of victory is always distributed unevenly. The designer receives awards and goes down in history. The armorpiercer gets a broken shoulder, concussion, and if he is lucky, the chance to live to see the next battle.
Weapons are not good or bad in themselves. They are sufficient for their task. The PTD was sufficient. Those who paid for this sufficiency with their bodies are mostly not remembered by name, and it is about the fact that the true measure of things is determined by time. The German tanks against which Deiario’s rifle was created have long since become museum exhibits.
Diario himself died in 1949 and is buried in Kov at the Awano Vinsky cemetery, but his rifle continues to fire. More than 80 years later, in conflicts that the old Tula locksmith could not have imagined, someone raises a 2meter steel pipe to their shoulder, takes aim, and pulls the trigger with a force of 5 kg.
