Big Guns

When people think about heavy tanks, one of the first things to comes to mind is big guns and big explosions, both of which are part of the Heavy tank’s purvey. Having enough armor to lead a charge across an open field and make it through relatively unscathed is worthless if when you get to the enemy line you can’t do anything to it. As a fix for this, heavy tanks carry incredibly large cannons well-suited to breaking lines, vehicles, or buildings. Here is where some of the main design philosophies differed the most. The Germans focused on building mostly very long, very high-velocity long-range cannons With superb penetrating ability. This was part of what made the Tiger’s reputation, as its 88 millimeter Kwk-36 cannon could penetrate through tank armor with ease at ranges where it would be very hard to retaliate against them. This also meant that more ammunition could be carried, and it was easier and faster to reload the main cannon for another shot.

A Tiger I  tank in a field. Note the size of the cannon compared to the rest of the tank

On the other hand, was Soviet cannon design philosophy, which could care less about the length of the bun so long as the tank drivers were hitting and destroying targets. However, this meant that many Soviet cannons lacked the stopping power of German cannons of similar size. In response, the Soviets simply developed bigger instead of better guns. Soviet builders recognized that at some point an incoming round was going to be so big that no matter how good your armor was, a round fired was going to penetrate or at least severely damage an enemy even despite armor. It was not uncommon for the Soviets to simply fit their Heavy Tanks with cannons from anti-tank artillery and roll those into battle. The most famous example of this was the Soviet KV-2, which incorporated the largest tank cannon in WWII, a 152mm beast of a cannon that could fell most German tanks at the time with a single shot. However, this cannon was also a lesson in the fact that there is such a thing as “too big” – the KV-2 was prone to knocking itself over if it fired its gun perpendicular ot the direction of the tank body.

A KV - 2. Again, note the size of the cannon compared to the rest of the tank