twice the guns

[b]Weapons of two worlds[/b]

Development and improvements in airplane design led to aircraft that were difficult to shoot down. This was especially true for bombers, whose toughness grew with size. Typical armament of a 1930s fighter consisted only of rifle caliber machine guns, making shooting down a bomber very difficult.

Adding machine guns did not solve the problem.

Earlier, we spoke of airplane motors used in armoured vehicles The same thing happened with guns. Some of them descended from the skies, others did the opposite, flying upward after being developed for land combat.

Airplane guns usually had a small caliber, 20-37 mm, but they were automatic, which meant they could fire in bursts. Cannons drastically increased the firepower of aircraft.

The small T-60 tank was developed and produced in 1941 to replace the losses of Soviet tank units during the first stages of the Great Patriotic War. The first T-60s were armed with the tank version of the 20 mm automatic ShVAK cannon, based on the ShVAK-20 aircraft cannon. The use of the ShVAK did not start with the T-60, it was used on earlier T-40 and T-30 tanks. The gun proved itself picky: it was not used to a dirty tank, and the automatic mechanisms would jam. The gun was modified, and the result was called TNSh-20 (Tank, Nudelman-Shpitalniy). The VJa (Volkov-Jartsev) cannon was also explored, but was never implemented in metal.

There were also large caliber plane guns. For example, G and H modifications of the Mitchell B25 bomber had 75 mm cannons. This gun was later used on the M24 Chaffee tank. It was planned with an M3 gun, like the Sherman, but it turned out that the mass and recoil were too much for a light tank. Engineers decided to equip the Chaffee with the bomber's gun.

An example of a gun that migrated from tanks to planes would be the 50 mm KwK 39 German gun, used in the PzIII tank. The BK-5 aircraft cannon was inspired by its design, and was used on the Me.410, Junkers Ju88P4, and jet fighter Me.262.

We described only several examples of guns that existed in two worlds, but the practice was much more widespread, and we will explore it in more detail. Keep your eye on the news!