I saw it many times in the moovies but I always thought that the tank’s armor has to be penetrated and the crew killed or engine or tracks dammaged. But slamming a glass bottle against it? OK, there is lots of flame but it is on the surface of the armor. If the tank can be destroyed in this way, how does the molotov coctail really do it?
Cheers…
You can cook the engine or foul the air intakes with flame and smoke. That would certainly immobilize a tank. From what I understand, anti tank teams w/molotovs would aim for engine decks. you’re correct that it’d be pretty useless to waste them on other areas of a buttoned up tank. That’s where smoke grenades would be used – blind the crew.
I remember reading reports of the Mujahedeen knocking out Soviet tanks in that war with Molotov cocktails on the engine deck. It woudl trigger the onboard fore suppression system and the crew would ahve to bail out or suffocate. Dont know how accurate that is though. But otherwise, unless you have and open hatch to drop the cocktail down and hopefully cause ammo to cook off, you are not likely to get more than a mobility kill.
Dump the molovo cocktail into the gun barrel [:P]
How could they suffocate? This means that a tank sholud have a water tank/or any other fire extinguisher as big as the tank’s volume 
I think the point is what has been mentioned above. Cooking the engine. Othervise, it just will left some smoke marks on it.
Cheers,
Adam
Modern tanks use a Halon fire suppression system that absorbs the oxygen and extinguishes the flames. The Abrams has a couple of separate systems, one in the engine compartment and one in the crew compartment. If the one in the crew compartment goes off, the inside of the tank fills with compressed Halon and you need to get out to breath. A fire inside the crew compartment has to be sensed by the sensors (dual action sensor that detects flash of light + heat to activate).
A fire on the engine deck may set off the engine compartment’s Halon, but other than a sensor alert to the crew and a lot of smoke out of the rear, the crew compartment Haylon would not go off and the crew would not suffocate. The Halon would put out any internal fire and the engine might abort, but could probably be restarted in seconds.
Besides, tank crews practice “unass drills” to get out of the tank as quickly as possible in case of internal fire or rollover. The gunner is the only one without a hatch and usually trying to climb out over the TC to get some air. The TC and loader normally have their heads out of the hatch so the Halon going off is just a minor inconvenience as far as air goes.
A smoke grenade is fairly useless against a tank. Thermal sights see through smoke and a tank is a moving object and would roll through the smoke generated by the grenade in a few seconds.
Yes…been there, done that…
My remark about smoke used to obscure tankers’ vision was meant more for the WW2 era where tank hunting teams were trained to use smoke as part of their arsenal.
Awwwwww…
you were just blowing Krakow bank doors using your 75 L24 …[:D]
Is that where Clint got his idea for the movie Kelly’s Heros…?
when I was a kid I remember watching Hungarians knock out Soviet tanks with molotov cocktails on TV. Looked like they tossed them from above (roof tops), and either ontop the turret or engine deck
gary
I presume some tank designs are more vulnerable to burning petrol than others and WWII tank fighting compartments were not, to my knowledge, sealed from the fighting compartment.
The engine decking of the Pzkw IV and Pzkw V, from what I recall, would appear to be more vulnerable than a T-34 due to the location of air intake grills.
Am I correct?
I’m not as familiar with the JS line or the American and British tank designs.
In WWII the Soviets added tar to the petrolium and a reactive chemical on the bottle to ignite upon mixing. The tar slowed the burn time of the mix for maximum damage. Actual damage would be varied depending on what caught on fire. Regardless the crew would suffer terror and panic under these attacks.
All WW2 tanks had air intakes—some more vulnerable than others…T-34 was fairly vulnerable…
US Army Basic Combat Training in 1972 taught us the ‘art’ of making and placing Molotov Cocktails. We were instructed to aim for the engine deck(s). We made ours with sand, gas, glass bottle and a rag. The sand being the carrier.
Awesome, old-school Army training! When I went through basic (1989) as an Infantry soldier, they taught us how to shoot a LAW and an AT-4. When I got to my unit, I learned the Dragon and the TOW 2. I guess they decided in those 17 years that you weren’t going to be too successful charging Soviet armor with a flaming bottle!
[:XX]
In '83 at Benning we were taught to use Thermite grenades on the engine deck[6] And the fun hide in hole while the tank runs over you and then pop up and hit it in the rear with a M-72 LAW.
Depending on the fuel used in the Molotov Coctail, this might not be enough. Any fire needs three main factors to both start and sustain:
Remove any one of those, and the fire extinguishes. In the case of the MC, the burning rag attached to the bottle provides the heat necessary to ignite the fire. The bottle itself contains the fuel, and oxygen is provided by the atmosphere.
The halon or CO2 fire extinguishers work by displacing oxygen from the vicinity of the fire, thus suffocating the flames. However, unless the fire happens inside an air-tight compartment, fresh oxygen will seep in, eventually replacing the halon or CO2.
The key question is what happens in the mean time: If both enough fuel remains and the temperature remains high enough (details depend on the type of fuel used), there is a chance that the fire might re-ignite when oxygen eventually seeps back into the vicinity of the fire.
This is the reason why fires in deep friers are hard to extinguish: Even if one snuffs out the flames temporarily using e.g CO2, the residual heat in the fat reservoir is enough to cause the fire to re-ignite when oxygen replaces the CO2, as it eventually will. The only way to extinguish these kinds of fires is to permanently shut off air supplies - by covering the fat reservoir with a lid - and then turn off power to let the liquid cool to a temperature below its flash point.
If one comes up with a fuel that is not too volatile - it stays in the engine compartment long enough to remain after the halon has done its job - and with low enough flash point that it re-ignites from residual heat in the engine when air eventually replaces the halon, a molotov coctail can do some serious damage to the engine, and thus to the tank itself.
And of course, if one can come up with a fuel that contains its own oxydizer - it doesn’t rely on air for oxygen - it will burn independently of any attempts to extinguish it. But in that case the MC will no longer be the ad hoc improvized weapon it started out as, but relies instead on rather sophisticated chemistry.
DoC
Then there is the simple matter of delivering said very impressive chemistry project to the target before the tankers with 1 big gun and a plethora of machine guns, and/or their accompanying infantry, turn you into a pink mist!
[:XX]
Don’t forget the driver and the tracks themselves. Given the right motivation, like a person with a flaming bottle, the driver can run that person down in a blink.
Provided the right scale, sure!
1:1, not likely!
1:35, goodbye tank!