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The following article on the United Kingdom’s Royal Artillery is an excerpt from Barrett Tillman’ D-Day Encyclopedia. It is available for order now from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. 


The Royal Artillery’s Seventeen-Pounder

The quick-firing (QF) seventeen-pounder was a three-inch (76 mm) howitzer introduced in 1942. It was primarily intended as an antitank gun, but no suitable carriage was available in production quantity until 1943, when the weapon entered combat in Italy. With a variety of ammunition it could defeat 130 mm of armor at a thousand yards. Its capability against Tigers was enhanced with discarding-sabot projectiles issued in 1944. Typically the 2.9-ton weapon was towed by a Morris Commercial C8/AT, served by a seven-man crew.

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Six-Pounder

The six-pounder (57 mm) gun Mark 2 replaced the prewar two-pounder antitank gun in 1941–42. Served by five men, it fired 6.38-pound round out to five thousand yards. However, its utility was limited in that no high-explosive ammunition was available until 1944. By then its antitank capability was demonstrably lacking against Panthers and Tigers, but a discarding-sabot round developed by 1944 prolonged the weapon’s use. At 1.1 tons it was light enough to be towed by a jeep.

Twenty-five-Pounder

The standard British army artillery piece was the twenty-five-pounder (weight of the projectile), with a specified range of 13,400 yards. Longer ranged than its American counterparts, the 3.45-inch weapon was generally regarded as the Allies’ most effective antitank gun. With the discardingsabot round just coming into service in mid-1944, the twenty-five-pounder was rated to penetrate 130 mm (5.2 inches) of armor at a thousand yards. Nominally a 1944 British infantry division had seventy-two twenty-five pounders deployed in three Royal artillery regiments.

 


This article is from the book D-Day Encyclopedia, © 2014 by Barrett Tillman. Please use this data for any reference citations. To order this book, please visit its online sales page at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

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This article is part of our larger resource on the WW2 weapons development. Click here for our comprehensive article on the WW2 weapons.

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Cite This Article
"Royal Artillery: The UK’s World War Two Arsenal" History on the Net
© 2000-2024, Salem Media.
March 28, 2024 <https://www.historyonthenet.com/royal-artillery>
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