The Panzergranate 39 or Pzgr. 39 was a German

armor-piercing shell Armour-piercing ammunition (AP) is a type of projectile designed to penetrate either body armour or vehicle armour. From the 1860s to 1950s, a major application of armour-piercing projectiles was to defeat the thick armour carried on many wars ...

used during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

. It was manufactured in various

caliber In guns, particularly firearms, caliber (or calibre; sometimes abbreviated as "cal") is the specified nominal internal diameter of the gun barrel Gauge (firearms) , bore – regardless of how or where the bore is measured and whether the f ...

s and was the most common anti-tank shell used in German

tank A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and good battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engin ...

(German: ''Kampfwagenkanone''; shorted to ''KwK'') and

anti-tank guns Anti-tank warfare originated from the need to develop technology and tactics to destroy tanks during World War I. Since the Triple Entente deployed the first tanks in 1916, the German Empire developed the first anti-tank weapons. The first devel ...

(German: ''Panzerabwehrkanone(n)''; shortened to ''PaK'') of caliber.

Design

The Pzgr. 39 was an

APCBC Armour-piercing, capped, ballistic capped (APCBC) is a type of configuration for armour-piercing ammunition introduced in the 1930s to improve the armour-piercing capabilities of both naval and anti-tank guns. The configuration consists of an ar ...

-HE-T design. It consisted of the shell body that was armour penetrating (AP) using a cap (C) to increase performance against sloped armour, a ballistic cap (BC) to increase aerodynamic performance along with a high explosive (HE) filler and tracer unit (T) that was incorporated into the base

fuze In military munitions, a fuze (sometimes fuse) is the part of the device that initiates function. In some applications, such as torpedoes, a fuze may be identified by function as the exploder. The relative complexity of even the earliest fuze d ...

. Phlegmatized

PETN Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), also known as PENT, PENTA, (ПЕНТА, primarily in Russian) TEN, corpent, or penthrite (or, rarely and primarily in German, as nitropenta), is an explosive material. It is the nitrate ester of pentaerythri ...

RDX RDX (abbreviation of "Research Department eXplosive") or hexogen, among other names, is an organic compound with the formula (O2N2CH2)3. It is a white solid without smell or taste, widely used as an explosive. Chemically, it is classified as a n ...

were commonplace as the explosive filling. Pzgr. 39 was only used in guns firing

fixed ammunition Fixed may refer to: * ''Fixed'' (EP), EP by Nine Inch Nails * ''Fixed'', an upcoming 2D adult animated film directed by Genndy Tartakovsky * Fixed (typeface), a collection of monospace bitmap fonts that is distributed with the X Window System * F ...

. The same Pzgr. 39 shells of a certain caliber could be fitted to different cartridge cases. For example, the 7.5 cm Pak 40 L/46 antitank gun and the 7.5 cm KwK 40 L/48 tank gun fired the same projectile, even though they had completely different cartridge cases. Different versions of the shell were made, but the changes were usually minor. For instance, in the 88 mm Pzgr. 39-1 version the quality of steel was improved. The 75 mm Pzgr. 39/42 of KwK 42 and Pak 42 guns had two

driving band Russian 122 mm shrapnel shell, which has been fired, showing rifling marks on the copper driving band around its base and the steel bourrelet nearer the front A driving band or rotating band is a band of soft metal near the base of an artillery ...

s instead of one. In the Pzgr. 39/43 of KwK and Pak 43 guns, the driving bands were made wider than those of Pzgr. 39-1. The widening took place because the high gas pressure in these long-barreled guns presented certain problems when firing the older Pzgr. 39–1 shells with narrower driving bands. The abbreviation 'FES', found on many Pzgr. 39 rounds indicates the presence of

sintered Clinker nodules produced by sintering Sintering or frittage is the process of compacting and forming a solid mass of material by pressure or heat without melting it to the point of liquefaction. Sintering happens as part of a manufacturing ...

iron driving bands.

Technical data - 75 mm Pzgr. 39 FES

* Weight, complete with fuze: * Explosive filler: of RDX and wax (90/10) * Number of driving bands: 1 * Material of driving band: sintered iron * Shell diameter at driving band: * Shell body diameter: * Fuze: Bd.Z. 5103 ** Type: base fuze ** Weight with tracer unit: ** Tracer burning time: 2 seconds

References

* Walter E. Wagenknecht: ''Die Fertigung von Panzergeschossen'', In: Deutsches Waffen Journal, Nr. 5–6, 1977. * D 460/1+ Geschoßringbuch, Band I, Juli 1939. * D 460/10+ Ringbuch für Sprengladungen, Band I, 26. Oktober 1942. * L.Dv. 4402/8 Munition der 8,8 cm Flak 41 (Munition der Flakartillerie Teil 8) Mai 1943. * D 435/1, Handbuch, Munition der deutschen Geschütze und Werfer, 28. Dezember 1940.

External links

* {{cite web , title = German Ordnance , publisher = Departments of the Army and the Air Force , url = https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA376695.pdf , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20140521184352/http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr-doc/pdf?AD=ADA376695&Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf , url-status = live , archive-date = May 21, 2014 , format = PDF , access-date = 2014-05-21 , date = March 1953 , language = en , pages = 347, 410–448 Artillery shells Anti-tank rounds World War II weapons of Germany