June 15th, 1944.
The Norman Boage, three miles south of Villa’s Boage.
A Panza officer peers through his periscope at the narrow lane ahead.
Hedge rows pressing in on both sides.
His Tiger tank has just destroyed three British Cromwells in as many minutes.
The crew is confident, almost relaxed.
Then, from somewhere in the dense vegetation to their left comes a sound.
Not the crack of a conventional anti-tank gun.
Something else.
A whooshing roar like fabric tearing at tremendous speed.
The Tiger’s commander has perhaps 2 seconds to process this before a shaped charge warhead strikes his tank’s side armor at 140 m/s.
The explosion doesn’t bounce off.
It doesn’t ricochet.
It punches clean through 80 mm of steel plate and fills the fighting compartment with superheated metal fragments traveling at 8,000 m/s.
The Tiger is dead.
Its crew, if they survive the initial blast, abandon it within seconds.
What killed them wasn’t fired from another tank.
It wasn’t even fired from a gun in the traditional sense.
It was launched from a tube carried by two men hiding in a hedger row.
A weapon so simple a child could understand its mechanism, yet so devastatingly effective it would force German armored doctrine to fundamentally change.
This is the story of the PIAT, the projector, infantry, anti-tank, the shoulder fired weapon that gave British infantry the power to destroy the most heavily armored vehicles ever built.
By 1942, the problem facing British infantry was brutally simple and seemingly insoluble.
German Panza divisions were fielding tanks with frontal armor exceeding 100 mm in thickness.
The Panzer 4, the workhorse of the Vermacht, carried 80 mm of face hardened steel on its glacis plate.
The Tiger, already appearing in Tunisia, boasted 120 mm at the front.
British infantry anti-tank rifles.
The boy’s.55 caliber rifles they’d carried since 1937 could barely scratch paint at anything beyond point blank range.
At 100 m, a boy’s rifle could penetrate perhaps 13 mm of armor plate.
13 mm against 80.
The mathematics were obscene.
Soldiers knew it.
They’d seen what happened when you tried to stop a panzer advance with boy’s rifles.
You died, usually slowly, as the tank methodically ground your position into the earth.
The standard response was to call for artillery or anti-tank guns, but artillery took time to range, and anti-tank guns were heavy crew served weapons that couldn’t follow infantry into close country.
In the rubble of Stalingrad, in the Wadis of North Africa, in the Boage of Normandy, British soldiers needed something they could carry, something they could use from cover, something that would actually kill a tank.
Every army was searching for the same solution.
The Germans had their Panzer Foust and Panzer Shrek programs underway.
The Americans were developing the bazooka, but in 1942, nothing existed.
The British solution would emerge from a most unlikely source, a rejected grenade launcher design and the stubborn genius of a man who refused to accept that shaped charges couldn’t be made to work.
The weapon that would eventually terrify Panzer crews began its life at the Ministry of Supplies research facility at Witurch just outside Cardiff.
Major Milis Jeffris, already responsible for several unconventional weapons, including the sticky bomb, had been examining a rejected spigot mortar design originally intended for launching grenades.
The principle was simple.
A steel rod would be driven forward by a powerful spring, striking a propellant charge in the tail of the projectile.
The explosion would simultaneously launch the projectile and reccock the spring.
It was mechanically elegant, but had been dismissed for grenade work as too complex.
Jeffris saw something else.
He saw a platform for a shaped charge warhead.
The same Monroe effect technology that allowed a relatively small explosive to defeat thick armor by focusing its energy into a superheated jet of metal.
The challenge was making it work at short range.
shaped charges needed distance to function properly.
Typically 15 to 20 times the diameter of the charge.
Fire too close and the jet doesn’t form correctly.
But anti-tank weapons for infantry had to work at close range, often under 50 m.
Jeffris and his team solved this by creating a warhead with an extended probe at its tip.
The probe would strike the target first, initiating the shaped charge detonation at the optimal distance from the armor surface.
The result was a three lb warhead 3 in in diameter, capable of penetrating approximately 100 mm of armor plate, roughly equivalent to the protection on a Tiger tank’s side armor.
The complete weapon weighed 32 lb, stretched 40 in from buttstock to barrel end, and looked, in the words of one soldier, like a drain pipe that had mated with a rifle.
The spring mechanism generated a peak force of 200 lb.
Loading required placing the weapon butt down, standing on the shoulder rest, and pulling the barrel upward until the spring locked into battery position.
It required the strength of a full-g grown man and left users red-faced and trembling.
Production began at Imperial Chemical Industries facilities in Birmingham in late 1942.
By mid 1943, roughly 115,000 PIATS had been manufactured.
The exact total remains classified in some documentation, but post-war assessments suggest somewhere between 100,000 and 115,000 units reached British and Commonwealth forces before production ceased in 1945.
The PT entered combat in Tunisia in early 1943, though accounts from this period are fragmentaryary.
What’s documented is that it proved effective against Italian armor almost immediately.
The real test came in Italy proper in the rubble of Ortona and the mountains beyond Casino.
Here in close urban combat, the pat found its natural environment.
German tanks couldn’t maneuver easily in narrow streets.
British infantry positioned in upper story windows or concealed in rubble could fire down onto thinner top armor or strike side plates at pointblank range.
One account from Ortona describes a PAT team destroying a Panzer 4 by firing through a ground floor window as the tank passed.
The bomb struck the turret ring, detonating the ammunition inside.
The explosion was so violent it blew the turret 15 ft from the hull.
But it was in Normandy in that impossible landscape of sunken lanes and towering hedge that the Piet truly proved its worth.
Visibility was measured in meters, not hundreds of meters.
Tanks had to advance slowly, confined to narrow tracks.
Infantry could set up Pyad positions in hedge rows overlooking these choke points, completely invisible until they fired.
The psychological effect on German armored crews was profound.
They’d been trained to fear anti-tank guns, weapons that announced their presence with a sharp crack and a visible muzzle flash.
The Piet made a strange whooshing sound, more like a heavy object being thrown than a gun being fired.
By the time you heard it, the bomb was already in flight.
And because PAT teams fired from concealment, often from above, locating them was nearly impossible.
Records from German units in Normandy, fragmentaryary as they are, mention increasing reluctance to advance through bokeage without extensive infantry support, specifically citing fear of short range projectile weapons.
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The Germans had attempted their own infantry anti-tank solutions and comparing them to the Pat reveals the British weapons particular strengths and weaknesses.
The Paner Foust entering service in late 1943 was lighter, simpler, and genuinely disposable.
A soldier could carry multiple Panzer Fousts where they could barely manage one Piet.
The Panzer Foust’s shaped charge was also more powerful, capable of defeating 200 mm of armor.
But the Panzer Foust was truly single use.
Once fired, the tube was discarded.
The Pat could fire again and again, limited only by the availability of bombs and the operator’s physical stamina.
The German Panzer Shrek, a direct copy of the American Bazooka, offered similar reusability, but required two men to operate effectively and produced a massive back blast signature that revealed the firing position instantly.
The PAT spring mechanism generated almost no visible signature.
A well-conceeded PAT team could fire, observe the hit, and remain completely hidden.
The American bazooka in its early M1 and M1 A1 variants was lighter than the Pyad and easier to operate, but its 2.36 in rocket couldn’t reliably penetrate the frontal armor of German heavy tanks.
American forces compensated with superior numbers and a combined arms coordination, but in close terrain where infantry fought alone, the Piet stopping power was unmatched.
Soviet forces interestingly examined captured Pats, but opted to focus on their own RPG series, which wouldn’t enter service until after the war.
They relied instead on massed anti-tank rifles and an almost suicidal willingness to attack tanks with magnetic mines.
The Piet represented a middle path, reusable, powerful, and concealable, but demanding enormous physical effort and courage from its operators.
The PIAT’s impact on the war is difficult to quantify with precision because tank losses were rarely attributed to specific weapon types in afteraction reports.
What can be said with confidence is that German tactical doctrine changed in response to weapons like the Piet.
Armored advances through close terrain without infantry support became increasingly rare after 1943.
Tanks began standing off, using their guns to suppress suspected anti-tank positions before closing.
This slowed advances, disrupted timets, and gave defending forces time to organize counterattacks.
The psychological impact may have been greater than the material one.
A Pat bomb didn’t always destroy a tank outright.
Sometimes it damaged the tracks or suspension.
Sometimes it merely terrified the crew into abandoning an otherwise functional vehicle.
Records are sparse, but postwar interviews with German tank crews reveal a common thread.
The fear of unseen infantry weapons in close terrain exceeded in many cases the fear of conventional anti-tank guns.
The pat contributed to this fear.
It made every hedgero, every ruined building, every pile of rubble a potential threat.
And unlike a mine which was passive, the pat was actively aimed.
Someone was watching, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
This knowledge, this constant awareness of invisible danger wore down crews in ways that can’t be measured in statistics.
The weapons technical innovations influenced postwar development significantly.
The shaped charge principle refined in the pat informed the design of later recoilless rifles and rocket propelled grenades.
The emphasis on manportability and individual firepower became central to infantry anti-tank doctrine.
Surviving pats can be seen today at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Tank Museum at Boington, and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
They sit behind glass, silent and inert, looking more awkward than threatening.
It’s difficult seeing them now to imagine the terror they once inspired.
June 15th, 1944.
The Norman Bokeage 3 mi south of Villa’s Bokehart.
A Tiger tank burns.
Its crew scattered into the hedge, shaken and disbelieving.
Two British infantrymen, their pat already reloaded, watched from concealment 70 m away.
They don’t move.
They barely breathe.
Further down the lane, they can hear another tank’s engine.
its commander likely on the radio calling for instructions asking what happened whether to advance or withdraw.
The answer when it comes is withdrawal.
Not because of artillery, not because of air support, because of two men with a drainpipe weapon weighing 32 lb.
In the calculus of armored warfare, this shouldn’t be possible.
Tanks are supposed to dominate infantry and open ground.
And even in close terrain, their armor should provide security.
But the pat changed that calculation.
It gave individual soldiers the power to kill a 50-tonon machine.
It made every advance a gamble, every narrow lane a potential death trap.
The weapon wasn’t elegant.
It wasn’t comfortable to use.
It demanded brute strength to load and ice cold nerves to fire effectively.
But it worked.
In the rubble of Ortona, in the Boage of Normandy, in the streets of German cities in 1945, it worked.
German Panzer divisions the most powerful armored formations ever assembled.
Learned to retreat from positions they could have taken.
Not because they lacked the firepower or the armor, because somewhere in that terrain, invisible impatient, was a man with a P I A T.
And that was enough.
