Faustpatron: the first anti-tank grenade launcher

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

At the beginning of 1945, it was probably only for Adolf Hitler that it was not completely obvious that for Germany in the entire Second World War "something went wrong." The Reich was literally in agony under the blows of the Red Army and the Allied forces. The last reliable of the crumbling Nazi state was the people's militia - the Volkssturm, whose activities are primarily associated in the mass consciousness with teenagers from the Hitler Youth and, of course, the faust patrons.

Around the faustpatrons, like any other weapon widely known due to mass culture, the debaters broke more than one spear on "these your Internet". The main point of controversy is the effectiveness of this weapon against tanks.

However, to begin with, it should be noted that the German faustpatron became the first dynamo-reactive anti-tank disposable grenade launcher in the history of military affairs, which was widely produced and actively used in military conflict.

In addition to them, the Germans also had reusable grenade launchers, but the essence of all these weapons is fundamentally the same - the defeat of armored vehicles with a cumulative jet.

In total, from the end of 1944 to April 1945, the bloodless German industry managed to stamp more than 9.6 million disposable and reusable anti-tank grenade launchers.

Very often, Volkssturm might not have enough small arms and ammunition for them, but the provision of the German militia with faust patrons was very high. It is not easy to assess the actual effectiveness of this weapon. Dry experiments will not help much here, where it is better to turn to memories and historical facts.

So, for example, twice Hero and Marshal of the Soviet Union Ivan Stepanovich Konev wrote that the "faustniki" - militia fighters and the German army with hand-held anti-tank grenade launchers really became a problem at the end of 1944.

Subdivisions of the USSR suffered naturally large losses, which forced the command to change tactics and, if possible, avoid places convenient for an ambush. In addition, Konev recalls in his memoirs that the massive appearance of the "Faustists" forced the command to take countermeasures.

In the army, mobile rifle teams began to be formed, to which the best machine gunners and several snipers were usually sent. Their task was to detect and eliminate those very calculations with grenade launchers. At the same time, Soviet tankers began to massively attach protective grilles to tanks, which made it possible to weaken the effect of the cumulative jet.

At the same time, Marshal of the Tank Forces and twice Hero of the Soviet Union Semyon Ilyich Bogdanov wrote in his memoirs that in many ways the "faustpatron" became a bogeyman of German propaganda to inspire the inhabitants of Germany to fight the Red Army, which, by 1944, led to the enemy with its military successes. natural horror.

Semyon Ilyich noted that most of the militia were poorly motivated and prepared, very often the shots of the faust patrons went into milk, and therefore the groups of "faustics" in their mass could not become a serious obstacle for Soviet tanks.

It may seem that the opinions and memories of the two marshals of the USSR contradict each other, but in reality this is not so. They are not mutually exclusive. Often, the militia often acted extremely weakly, but this does not negate the fact that the faustpatron itself turned out to be a very effective weapon.

It is elementary to be convinced of this: if German grenade launchers were harmless, the Red Army would not have used the very countermeasures mentioned by Ivan Stepanovich Konev.

One cannot but recall what Eike Middeldorf, a German military historian, colonel of the Wehrmacht, and later Major General of the Bundeswehr, author of the book “Russian Military Campaign.

Experience of the Second World War. 1941-1945 . Eicke pointed to the extremely high effectiveness of the faustpatron as a weapon. However, at the same time, he wrote that a significant part of the effectiveness of this miracle-tool was already reduced to a minimum at the end of 1944 due to the fact that the Red Army dramatically changed the tactics of the offensive and strengthened the coverage of its tanks with submachine gunners.

In conclusion, it should be said that with all the pros, cons and buts, the only important thing is that the gloomy German engineering genius gave the world another type of weapon, which became a natural development of the confrontation between infantry and equipment on the battlefield.