Wednesday 19 September 2018

Mega Hetzer

"Artillery HQ, 1st Order of Lenin Guards Mechanized Corps
February 5th, 1945

Only for: commander of the 1453rd Self Propelled Artillery Regiment

Based on directive #0160 of the Commander of Artillery of the 3rd Ukrainian Front, issued on January 17th, 1945, I report that:

A captured radio operator of the 73rd Artillery Regiment of the 1st Tank Division, German Gefreiter Gugenreiter, said that: "the first tank regiment of the division received four new anti-tank guns called "Getzer". These guns are held in great secrecy and no one is allowed to come close to them aside from their maintenance personnel. They are designed to fight Russian tanks. A shell fired from their guns can penetrate 22 cm of armour from a distance of 1200 meters. The gun is 1.5 meters tall and moves at a speed of 70 kph."

The Corps Deputy Commander of Artillery ordered that:
  1. Personnel of artillery units and reconnaissance especially must be familiarized with the POW's statement.
  2. If the new "Getzer" SPGs are located, immediately report to the Corps Artillery HQ.
Corps Artillery HQ Chief, Guards Major Veselovskiy."

Via Andrei Ulanov

5 comments:

  1. For those who don't know, and there may be a few still, there is no H character in Russian so they just transliterate it as their 'G' character, so Hetzer becomes Getzer. It wasn't a mistake.

    This is also why in Russian they have Garry Potter :)

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    1. And fought Adolf Gitler, which you might otherwise think was a British appellation...

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  2. My guess is either the statement from this captured german is entirely wrong about the Hetzer or he mistaken it with some thing else since the Hetzer was 2.7m tall, has a max speed of 44kph and it shell definitely has no chance of penetrating such amount of steel at that distance

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    1. Given the date odds are on wild hearsay and rumours about magical wonder-weapons that would *somehow* turn things around for the Germans.
      There certainly existed a dire need for such psychological placebos and the propaganda certainly wasn't doing anything to discourage them...

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