2/13/2024 0 Comments Paderborn tank battle wwii![]() ![]() With 3AD tanks fanning out, and 36th Infantry riflemen following, the Super Pershing reached an intersection and began to round a corner to its right. Division armor was finally able to enter the city slowly after numerous concrete tank barriers were destroyed. The 3AD had begun a four-pronged attack on the city, which was heavily defended. But in Dessau on April 21, "luck" would befall the Super Pershing crew commanded by SSgt Joe Maduri, a veteran 3AD tanker in his tenth straight month of combat. But by April, 1945, German armor west of Berlin had dramatically thinned out, not to mention an extreme shortage of fuel, and the odds of spotting the monster German tank were slim. ![]() and Europe) had been anxious about getting the new tank into combat, hoping to match it against a King Tiger. The new 90mm round also proved to have superior range and accuracy over the previous version.Īrmy ordnance technicians (in the U.S. ![]() The special 90mm ammunition had produced a muzzle velocity of 3,850 feet per second, or some 600 feet per second faster than the 88mm of the King Tiger. Even more remarkable, it had penetrated 13 inches of armor at 100 yards. gun had successfully penetrated 8.5 inches of armor at 1,000 yards at 30 degrees. The Super Pershing (aka T26E4-1) was equipped with a new long-barreled T15E1 90mm gun that was designed to out-perform the German high-velocity 88mm on the King Tiger. Arriving very late in the war (March, 1945), it was field tested and modified inside Germany and subsequently saw about ten days of actual combat action, beginning several days after the Battle of Paderborn and ending with the Battle of Dessau near the Elbe River. Only two Super Pershings were ever built, and the 3AD had the only one in the European Theater - an experimental version with its remarkably long barrel. It would be the first and only meeting between a King Tiger and the Super Pershing, a modified standard M26 Pershing weighing 7 tons heavier at 53 tons - an almost "secret" tank that, to this day, remains largely an enigma to military historians. Only three days before the 3rd Armored Division's final combat action of WWII, a Super Pershing of the 33rd Armored Regiment met and defeated the most powerful and most heavily armored German tank of the war - the legendary 77-ton King Tiger, also known as the Tiger II or Tiger Royal. ![]()
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