We continue the topic of historical investigations, since the debut turned out well. Today the issue of caliber is on the agenda. A caliber of 45 millimeters, a caliber that existed in one and only country - the Soviet Union, in service with one army - the Red Army.
And here there are not just a lot of irregularities and roughnesses.
Let's start with the fact that the bulk of researchers for some reason speaks of a 45 mm anti-tank gun, completely ignoring the rest. Probably because comrade Shirokorad did not write, and without him it is difficult to swing, I agree.
But Shirokorad did write about the anti-tank gun, and he wrote well. Which, however, is not a reason to forget all the other guns.
The rest are a tank gun, this is a battalion howitzer, this is an anti-aircraft gun, this is a semi-automatic station wagon, this is a naval weapon. And that's all - 45 mm.
45-mm universal gun of the cruiser "Krasny Kavkaz"
You will say that tank / anti-tank are the same thing. Well, yes, that's just the way of attachment and movement is slightly different, as well as the shells that were used. Tanks with tanks fought only with not very good commanders. The good ones had tanks hollowing out bunkers, bunkers and everything else, for which they needed mainly high-explosive shells.
However, we have written quite a lot about this, there is nothing special to invent.
As an interim result, we note that 45 mm is not exclusively an anti-tank caliber of the Red Army. There were more than enough guns with such a caliber, and this, I must say, pretty much shakes the opinion of Alexander Borisovich, whom I respect.
Why? It's simple.
If you look at a single "forty-five", then yes, everything fits together, and the version works. If you look at the caliber as a whole - no, no, and again no.
So, the version of Shirokorad and followers.
The famous "forty-five" is the imposition on the carriage of the 37-mm anti-tank gun 1-K of the 1930 model of its own barrel, bored to 45 mm.
Logically, the technique is as old as the world, nothing new. If the base allowed, they sharpened everything. Not only ours.
It is also worth saying a few words about the 1-K cannon itself, although we wrote about it. Yes, this is the same anti-tank gun 3, 7 cm model 1926 from the company "Rheinmetall", bought by the Soviet Union through the front company "Butast". Purchased "with giblets", that is, with all possible technological documentation. For a little over a million (1, 125 million, to be exact) dollars.
Only half a thousand 1-K guns were released, but the military did not like the weapon, it seemed frankly weak (the Great Patriotic War confirmed this), and the gun was promptly replaced with 19-K.
Caliber 45 mm … Although …
45-mm battalion gun designed by Sokolov. 1927 year
Currently, there are several versions about how this strange caliber was formed in our troops in general. There was a standard 47 mm caliber in the world, why did everything turn out “not like everyone else's”?
Version No. 1
Version No. 1 says that it was allegedly impossible to install a barrel from the same 47-mm cannon on the carriage of a 37-mm gun, so it was cut down to 45 mm.
I don't even want to criticize and disassemble the version.
2 (TWO!) Millimeters. On a gun carriage. What is this tolerance that could not fit? Or, perhaps, the 47-mm cannon had such a powerful projectile that the carriage design could not withstand? Well, more or less suitable, but I will give a plate from an article about anti-tank guns of the Second World War. And there you can see that the 45-mm cannon is in no way inferior in terms of power to the 47-mm sisters. And even surpasses some.
In any case, both dimensional and strength flaws - well, it looks stupid.
The Hotchkiss cannon gave out an initial velocity of the projectile of 701 m / s versus 760 m / s for the 1932 / 37gg cannon.
Hotchkiss cannon 47 mm
For an armor-piercing projectile, the difference is not very critical, but for a high-explosive fragmentation projectile, it is not even necessary. This is evidenced by such a value as the mass of a powder charge: a Hotchkiss cannon has 350 g, armor-piercing shells "forty-five" up to 360 g. A high-explosive fragmentation projectile was thrown out 100-115 g of gunpowder.
Version # 2
Version # 2 looks more serious, and Shirokorad and other (very numerous) supporters on the forums stand for it. According to this version, supposedly after the revolution, a large amount of armor-piercing ammunition for the aforementioned Hotchkiss 47-mm naval gun was accumulated in military warehouses.
Well, there was such a gun. Yes, at that time she was completely outdated, and yes, the shells from her at sea were theoretically completely useless, so they decided to transfer them to land and use them as anti-tank / infantry support weapons. There weren't very many tanks at that time.
The whole problem is that the Hotchkiss anti-mine gun was originally sharpened to fight unarmored targets such as destroyers, boats and submarines. And bad luck, I did not find armor-piercing shells in the specification for it. There were iron and steel grenades. So there is no clear connection here.
The very idea of rework also looks strange.
Well, we decided to clean up the warehouses, hand over the land artillery shells, let them suffer. It's so simple …
Grind the belts by 2 mm. Is it easy or what? This, I think, or what.
We need to discharge the projectile. That is, remove it from the sleeve. Then remove the fuse. So, just in case. And then you can tighten the projectile into the cartridge and grind the belt. With no real prospect of being hit by this projectile.
Next, insert the projectile into the case again, restore the tightness again, and yes, you can shoot.
I immediately have a question: was it not easier to make a 47-mm cannon right away and not engage in perversions?
Now experts will begin to say that the Hotchkiss cannon flew at a speed of 700 m / s, for the 19-K the speed was already 760 m / s, and for the M1932 it was 820 m / s. And the ill-fated belts could be torn off.
I agree that the initial speeds of the projectiles have increased. And he could easily tear off the belts. However, there is a nuance here that spoils everything. Namely, the complete lack of data.
“Many shells in warehouses” - how many pieces are there? Nobody names the number. Yes, and, in principle, it is unrealistic to name it, because the Russian-Japanese, World War I, Civil War, plus the eternal Russian mess.
The fact that the 47-mm was about nothing became clear even in the Russian-Japanese. No wonder the Hotchkiss cannons were removed from the ships by the hundreds, installed at least on some semblance of machine tools and sent to the front line in order to somehow compensate for the lack of battalion and regimental guns.
And since for the infantry in those years an armor-piercing shell was a completely useless thing, it is not surprising that these shells were simply lying around in warehouses. This is logical, this is indisputable, this is normal.
Another question, how many grams … This is a complete mystery, but I think that there were a lot of them. If the tsar's reserves for half of the Great Patriotic War (76, 2 mm) were enough, then 47-mm "good" could lie in excess.
And here a double feeling arises.
Well, if the mountains of shells lie right there, take it and shoot - I return to the question of whether it was not easier to make a barrel for the shells. Easier, on Obukhovskoye and not such calibers were deployed.
Plus (very significant) it would be possible "if something happens" to intercept the shells from the allies. During the First World War, both the British and the Americans supplied us with 76, 2-mm shells, not only in full, but supplied.
But if there are not so many shells, then it is quite possible to decide on such an adventure as resharpening a shell.
And what do they lie? Well, let them be useful, such shells can easily be used as training and combat, why not? The benefits of the carriage, the savings are huge, the training costs are reduced, even if for training purposes the artillerymen beat this ancient thing …
But again, it is very, very doubtful that there are millions. I found a figure that on January 1, 1901, the Naval Department had 963 47-mm Hotchkiss guns. From this we conclude how many shells could be in the warehouses for a thousand guns.
And since we are talking about the fact that there were frankly few cannons, therefore, there were hardly millions of shells for them. A couple hundred thousand at most.
After all, we are talking about the body movements of the 30s of the last century, when the First World War, and the Civil War, and the intervention had already died down. And gobbled up their shells.
So it turns out that the mosaic does not quite add up.
Version No. 3
Version No. 3 says that the 45 mm caliber is actually a 47 mm caliber, but:
1. It was developed according to a cunning plan so that the enemy could not use our shells in case of anything.
2. 45mm is exactly the same 47mm, but just measured differently. Ours measured the distance between opposite groove fields, and abroad measured from the bottom of the groove groove to the bottom of the opposite groove.
Both cases are so-so. Finnish, World War II, and the Great Patriotic War have shown that such an approach with calibers can and should be ignored and forgotten, since practice has shown that ammunition can usually very easily be provided with captured guns and vice versa.
As for such aspects of measurement … There you still can't get such a difference, that's why a lathe was needed in order to remove the copper belts and turn the projectile into a 45-mm one.
Own version
I don’t think I’ll reveal such a secret, but it seems to me that ours simply borrowed the idea of the 45 mm caliber. How much at that difficult time for the country. All the more so with regard to artillery.
Buy is not a question if you sold. More often they did not sell. But the fact that intelligence in the Soviet Union worked, God forbid, is a fact.
It turned out during the selection of material for this article that developments in Russia for calibers 40-47 mm were carried out before the revolution. There was a very interesting project of Likhonin, unified with the Hotchkiss gun, Lender worked in this direction.
Then, of course, there was no time for development.
Meanwhile, the West also did not sit idly by. Especially the French, not tied by hand, unlike the Germans. And the French used calibers from 42 to 45 millimeters in the works of Saint-Chamond and Nordenfeld.
Honestly, I don't know how this caliber was calculated, but somehow the designers came to the conclusion that for a battalion cannon (the so-called trench guns), a caliber of 40-45 mm would be optimal.
The Nordenfeld and Saint-Chamond cannons were not accepted for service. And therein lies such a nuance, since we, too, have begun to creep towards the creation of a tool for the future.
Research work was carried out by Lender back in 1916, there were developments. The new gun was to replace the 37mm trench cannons and the adapted Hotchkiss naval guns.
Franz Frantsiyevich Lender proposed a 42 mm caliber as a working version, but obviously they decided to make the gun more powerful, therefore they approved 45 mm.
Apparently, not just like that. It is possible that there was an opportunity to get acquainted with the works of Nordenfeld and Saint-Chamond. I admit it, because it was in those years that our intelligence plowed like a damn thing.
As a result, in 1929 (yeah, they started in 1916, continued practically to zero in 1922 and here you are) a battalion howitzer 45 mm of the 1929 model was put into service.
And in addition to the howitzer, a certain "BM cannon", that is, of high power, was also discussed. The BM did not go into production, but after a while the work on it was used in the alteration of the 1-K.
But I will argue about the alteration of the projectile. Lender, according to the order, developed a 45 mm HE shell back in 1916. This means that the 47-mm projectile from Hotchkiss had nothing to do with it. There was a 45 mm projectile, and the guns were developed based on it.
And this is very logical.
Who consumes HE shells? Anti-aircraft guns? Yes. Tanks? Yes. Infantry Support Cannons? Yes. Howitzers? Yes!
The exceptions are indeed anti-tank and naval guns. Well, and tank to a lesser extent.
This means that the industry, long before all this noise around the Hotchkiss shells, was sharpened for the release of 45 mm shells.
And this is a fact that is difficult to get rid of. The light did not converge like a wedge on the armor-piercing shells, since the nomenclature implied that they would shoot not only at tanks.
The nomenclature of rounds of 45-mm guns was as follows:
Armor-piercing: 53-B-240
Armor-piercing tracer: 53-BR-240
Armor-piercing tracer: 53-BR-240SP (solid)
Armor-piercing tracer sabot: 53-BR-240P
Shrapnel: 53-O-240 (steel)
Shrapnel: 53-O-240A (steel cast iron)
Buckshot: 53-Shch-240
Dymovoy: 53-D-240
Plus a line of rounds for anti-aircraft guns:
Fragment tracer: O-333, OR-73, OR-73A
High-explosive: O-240
What is the conclusion? And the conclusion is very simple: the 45 mm caliber was due to anything other than the desire to use in the case the supposedly huge reserves of 47 mm armor-piercing shells. Because in addition to armor-piercing, it was necessary to release all of the above nomenclature of shells.
And they let it out. And in huge quantities, because the 45-mm unitary cartridge was used everywhere: gunners, tankers, anti-aircraft gunners, sailors. Do not write off the entire submarine fleet of the Red Army, armed with 45-mm universal guns. And also battleships, cruisers, leaders, destroyers, minesweepers, hunters, and so on.
Compared to the sheer number of rounds to be fired for ALL 45mm cannons, a drop of 47mm rounds from the Hotchkiss cannons was exactly what it was.
Moreover, the chiselled belts, which were supposed to cut into the grooves, thereby improving compression and twisting the projectile around its axis, hardly had a positive effect on ballistics. Rather, on the contrary, they worsened, and so much so that it was difficult to demand from these shells something really combat.
I am sure that the only application that they found was just practice shooting. This crippled projectile was hardly suitable for more.
Therefore, I consider it possible to voice this conclusion:
1. Caliber 45 mm was a pre-revolutionary development of Russian engineers.
2. They returned to the project when the opportunity arose for this. Probably not without the help of intelligence and foreign developments.
3. The resharpening of 47-mm shells for 45 mm caliber is nothing more than a successful attempt to attach shells that were actually useless at that time. Maximum useful disposal.
This is the opinion.
