This 1943 U.S. Army training film is directed at infantry faced with an armoured assault. Tactics include small arms fire to force enemy tank crews to “button up”, firing at periscope and view ports to impede vision, using rifle-fired grenades against tracks and the lightly-armoured sides of tanks, and throwing Molotov cocktails at close range. Riding out the assault in foxholes and resisting the urge to run is stressed.
The film predates the introduction of the bazooka as an infantry anti-tank weapon.
Modern infantry tactics doesn’t worry a whole lot against tanks. Unlike the old days, a purely infantry unit can damage/destroy a pure tank attack. Indeed, what is usually required is something called a tank-infantry assault - where the infantry attacks to the FCL, then marks the transit spots for the tanks, which assault at high speed, while allowing the infantry to also begin their assault - slower but less resisted because of the tanks.
The Ukrainians are doing as well as they are because they are using modern, quite technologically advanced anti-armor weaponry - AND the idiot Russians waited for the worst time to attack - when the ground is wet, muddy, and soft. It has rather forced the tanks to stay on the roads - kind of like we had in Nam, when tanks would sink in the paddies. Dead of winter the ground would have been frozen and the tanks would have spread out and run like the wind. Mid-summer - samy,.samy.
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Good info for when society collapses and I have to contend with a UN peacekeeping force. Thanks John.
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