I've been reading Frontsoldaten and though I'm not very far into it, there was a very interesting comment from a German soldier who saw a T-34 I think it was, reinforced with concrete armor. Any idea how this would be applied to a tank? My concern would be how to guarentee it stays on.

thanks
shain

When I first saw this post I thought you might be asking about concrete armor on ships. The Japanese added concrete armor to the steering areas of battleships after Hiei and Kirishima were sunk off Guadalcanal.

As far as tanks could they put something like chicken wire over the area it would applied to. The concrete would fill in the holes in the wire and cling to it. Kind of like the stucco applied to my house. This is just a guess though.

US Shermans used to do it too. I believe they weld on a few bars or use sommerfield type meshing to reinforce the cement.

I know it was used sometimes on German sturmgeschutzes as well. Blocks of pured concrete or something on the front. These is an option for it in the Tamiya stug4 kit.

Interesting, now would all this concrete have any great affect on the performance of the vehicle, particularly speed?

Ciao Mech-Maniac,
I can't give you an instance of the Russians using concrete, but the Germans certainly did on Assault guns (as Davester444 mentioned) and as Alan stated, Shermans in the Pacific would place the wooden slats on the sides of Shermans to ward off magnetic mines, and would fill in the gap between the wood and tank sides with cement. (One trick was to place busted glass or corregated tin cut like teeth into the wet cement. Once dried, those edges would prohibit hostile boarding.)
As for the performance, I don't really know the "engineering" standpoint, but I would say that it wouldn't really make much of a difference in vehicles that averaged around 30 tons. I do know that the cement fragmented badily when struck.
Ciao for now
Rob

Hi all,
Ive seen an M36 Jackson that got brought back from Bosnia that had concrete armour being held to the sides by ttree truncks,rubber and fairly large nuts and bolts welded to the sides and front .

Hi all,
Ive seen an M36 Jackson that got brought back from Bosnia that had concrete armour being held to the sides by ttree truncks,rubber and fairly large nuts and bolts welded to the sides and front .