Germany Never Expected PIAT Springs To Crack Panthers Up Close
Normandy, June 27, 1944, zero nine hundred hours, and Hauptsturmführer Karl Wessel commanding six Panther tanks from the 1st Battalion, 3rd Panzer Regiment, 2nd Panzer Division rolled toward the village of Le Haut du Bosq, his crews supremely confident in their seventy-millimeter frontal armor sloped at fifty-five degrees, unaware that British infantry hidden in the hedgerows carried a weapon that would ignore every principle of armor protection the Wehrmacht had perfected, a thirty-two-pound spring-loaded monstrosity called the Projector Infantry Anti-Tank that would teach German tank crews a lesson they never expected to learn about shaped charges and close combat.
The morning mist clung to the Norman bocage as Wessel’s Panthers advanced in formation, their long-barreled seventy-five-millimeter KwK 42 L/70 guns sweeping the hedgerows, the drivers maintaining careful spacing between vehicles while the radio operator in Panther 433 reported clear approaches, and Wessel himself stood in his commander’s cupola surveying the seemingly empty countryside, remembering the briefing from Oberst von Lauchert who had assured them that British infantry anti-tank weapons posed minimal threat to the Panther’s revolutionary sloped armor design that had proven invulnerable to Soviet anti-tank rifles on the Eastern Front.
Credit to : WWII Battlefield Memoirs
