Trains in WWII

Another train tearing up track.

 

BP44

 

Beautiful armored train. Which belligerant did it belong to, Russian?

 

Nope. Its German BP44.Notice the Balkenkreuz and Flak 38?

 

This is the photo I was looking for for the other thread and couldn't find! The Force runs strong in you

 

No Prob. I had to go through my files for it. I thought I remembered seeing something similar

 

Here is a great book on Armored trains by Steven J. Zaloga, Tony Bryan

Armored Trains - Google Book Search

 

Some just don't look as good as some of the German ones.

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The crew of armored train number 24 stand in formation for review.​

This particular armored train saw action in the Balkans from 1941-43, then in Italy and then France in 1944. On Jan. 16 1945, after serving four months on the Eastern Front, it was destroyed by it own crew after being surrounded by Russian troops near Konskie, Poland.

http://worldwartwozone.com/forums/land-warfare/7259-eisenbahnpanzerzuge-german-armored-trains.html

 

How vulnerable were armored trains to air attack?

 

A lot they were hard to hide and couldn't just "go for cover" if engaged. Imagine a tank but without the ability to take cover in woods and other areas and with a fixed course.



Cheers...

 

In posts # 1 and #5 there is some info on Flak protection of trains. Some of the pics you see of German armored trains usually show at least 1 Flak 30 or Flak 38. Most armored trains operated on the Eastern Front during the war and IMO were more vunerable to attacks by partisans and ground forces then to air attack.

 

I know in France they suffered from the Tempests, P-38s and whatnot. They were vulnerable period true the Flak could help still there's more than one way to make a train useless.

 

German Armored Trains
[SIZE=-1]By Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
November 2008[/SIZE]​

The Imperial German Army had used armored trains in the First World War, as had all of the powers involved on the Eastern Front. A train had many advantages in this period, as no other vehicle could move nearly so fast or so far. Mounted units might have an advantage over rough terrain, but they could not carry with them the heavy weapons available to a train.
“Artillery wagon” of Panzerzug 21.During the following war, Germany did not make as great use of armored trains as the Red Army, whose trains were profiled in another piece. But the Wehrmacht fielded several dozen such anachronisms during the war in the Soviet Union, and they are present in Panzer Grenadier: Eastern Front.
In the years that followed the First World War, the armored train fell out of favor with the German armed forces. A train clad in armor and bearing artillery seemed a relic of the previous generation, and this did not fit Nazi visions of their class-free society’s technologically advanced war machine.

But Nazism consisted of projecting an imagined heroic past into the future, and thus it maintained a feudal economic and political system. Under this organization, political power bases that lacked their own para-military arm faced the danger of being pushed aside in the race for prestige and funding. So while the Reichswehr disdained armored trains as did its successor, the Wehrmacht, the Reichsbahn, or German National Railways, seized on them as an opportunity to maintain a military force.
During the 1920s, the railroad’s paramilitary organization, the Bahnschutz, had been a volunteer affair dedicated to protecting rail lines in case of national emergency. By 1932 the railway’s board of directors considered it a hotbed of Nazi agitation; the Nazis themselves were frustrated that they had not penetrated the railroad militia deeply enough and considered it a potential enemy in case of civil war.
The Reichsbahn made good profits from carrying Nazi activists to assorted party rallies in the early 1930s. The state-owned firm cultivated this relationship by extending a 40 percent discount to Nazis, in the face of direct orders from both the national government and Prussia’s state government to restrict Nazi train rides. At the same time, however, board memebrs rejected Nazi demands that the Reichsbahn cancel contracts with Jewish-owned firms and fire directors and managers who were Jewish, Freemasons or from other undesirable categories. By September 1934, the Reichbahn had reached a compromise with the Nazis, who now firmly controlled the government: The railways would adhere to Nazi political, military and economic policies. In exchange, the government would not interfere with management of the railways outside of those spheres. Over the next decade, firm control of the railways would become crucial to Nazi schemes, not least of them the Holocaust.

Panzerzug 10b. Built by Tsarist Russia, captured by Reds, captured by Poles,
captured by Soviets, captured by Germans. Not considered jinxed.​

The Bahnschutz converted from a militia to a uniformed full-time paramilitary police force. In 1938 they handed over their seven armored trains to the regular army. Most of these participated in the Polish campaign of 1939, giving artillery support to advancing German troops. Polish troops shot up several of the trains; only of them, Armored Train 6, seems to have met any significant success, helping to capture the town of Grajewo on 1 September.

Despite these failures, the Wehrmacht added a number of former Polish and Czech armored trains to its inventory for the 1940 campaign in the Western theater. The plan to invade the Netherlands made up for the relative lack of tanks in the German force by assigning armored trains to the assault forces. On Holland’s level ground and well-developed railway system, planners hoped the trains could have a significant impact.
Instead, the Dutch attacked the trains enthusiastically. Armored Train 6 was assigned to seize the turntable bridge at Winschoten; the Dutch defenders turned the bridge 90 degrees and the German train turned back. Dutch defenders of the Ijssel Bridge turned back a Brandenburg commando attack and smashed the supporting Armored Train 5 with anti-tank fire. A few miles away at Zutphen, other Dutch infantrymen shot Armored Train 3 to pieces with machine-gun fire.
Continuing the policy of “no failure left behind,” the Wehrmacht ordered a serious expansion of its armored train branch for the 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The new armored trains, known as “Panzerzug 1941,” made use of turrets from French tanks and sometimes the entire vehicle. A standard armored diesel locomotive, the WR360, was ordered to power them.
A number of these fought in the opening stages of Operation Barbarossa, with somewhat more success than they had in the Netherlands. That resulted in orders for the much more sophisticated “Panzerzug 1942,” with specialized armored artillery and anti-aircraft cars. For reconnaissance, a smaller version known as the “Panzerbetriebswagen 42” had just the locomotive, with extensions at either end bearing an armored turret for a captured 76.2mm ex-Soviet field gun. These would scout ahead of the full-size armored trains to make sure the tracks remained intact; armored cars and sometimes tanks with their wheels or tracks replaced with railroad axles performed this duty as well.
Panzerbetriebwagen Number 16.German armored trains fought at the front throughout the war, but their real use came in patrolling the Soviet Union’s huge railway net to protect against partisan attack. Rail beds are actually fairly difficult to destroy without explosives or special equipment, and the trains always carried spare rails and ties, and the equipment and specialists to make quick repairs.

Avalanche Press

 

Another use.

The Dummy Railhead 1942

"The Dummy Railhead was made up to look like a large rail yard. It had imitation rail lines, goods wagons and piles of empty ammo boxes. This was all done in Montgomery's time. Jasper Masculine was the main planner and designer of this deception. Even when you were up close to the dummy munitions, materials railheads, tanks and lorries, you would think they were real. That was the idea. The German Recce planes were expected to take photos of these dummy locations and consider the risk they created. At the same time the real tanks, trains and goods yards were well disguised and camouflaged. That way, the Germans would fail to spot them.
This was an important tactic because it saved thousands of lives by preserving the real materials for the battle field. It also wasted German munitions and units on dealing with these objects". Robin Martin (2004)

http://coleraine-battery.tripod.com/page190831.htm

 

lol, truth in retrospect and even without context.

 

Interesting that the NKVD would have 25 armored trains.

The same re-armament plan that brought out a series of new tanks in the early 1930s also called for new, purpose-built armored trains. The standard BP-35 armored train used many components from the tank program (for example, the same 76.2mm turret as the T-35 heavy tank). When the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Red Army had 34 light and 19 heavy armored trains, while the NKVD had another 25 armored trains (many of them Civil War veterans) and 36 self-propelled armored wagons (a large locomotive sporting several tank turrets).
Armored trains proved themselves extremely useful in covering the Red Army’s retreats during the summer of 1941 — all of the rail lines ahead of them were in friendly hands, and they could unleash their massive firepower from secure locations. The Red Army began producing more trains as quickly as possible, and by late September two dozen more had taken to the rails.

Two turret-mounted 107mm howitzers of a BP-35 armored train.
The big armored trains proved vulnerable to German air attacks, and in January 1942 Soviet factories began turning out a new design, the OB-3, with more, smaller wagons each carrying one gun turret or anti-aircraft gun. This would allow the crew to jettison damaged cars without losing as much of the train’s firepower, and their lower profile would make them more difficult to hit. But armor quality was poor (often a pair of mild steel plates with several inches of concrete poured between them) and the weapons were the leftovers from the Red Army’s depots — guns of French and Polish manufacture captured during the Civil War. Twenty of the 65 OB-3 trains built were lost in action.
The final Soviet armored train design was the BP-43, a modified OB-3 with real armor and tank turrets from the T-34 production line. Twenty-one of these were built by the end of the war. In the game, armored trains are, of course, limited to movement on railroad tracks. A train can both move and fire in the same action segment, unlike a tank, but otherwise is treated just like a tank. The piece provided in the game represents a smaller vehicle, the M1938 self-propelled armored wagon, and as such can be destroyed by anti-tank fire. When we issue pieces and rules for bigger armored trains in an upcoming supplement, these will be harder to put out of action (you’ll need to hit them many times).

Avalanche Press

 

I love this quote LOL.

Panzerzug 10b. Built by Tsarist Russia, captured by Reds, captured by Poles,
captured by Soviets, captured by Germans. Not considered jinxed.​

 

Panzerzug 11 near Tarnopol (Ukraine), March 1944. The train received evident camouflage (the last available photo of this train).