(Read more about the weapons and armaments that shaped the war inside WWII History magazine.) The Russian PTRS 41: “ Destroy Fascist Tanks with the Anti-tank Rifle!” Yet it was not until 1941 that the Soviets had developed and put into production their own antitank rifle. By 1941, advances in tank armor and technology had rendered it all but useless. In 1939, the antitank rifle was state of the art. These weapons were actually effective enough in penetrating the armor of tanks from the 1920s and 1930s. Somewhere in the middle fell the British Boys. At the other end of the scale were the “rifles” chambered for cannon ammunition, such as the Finnish Lahti, Swiss Solothurn, and Japanese Type 97, all of which used 20mm ammunition. Some, such as the Germans and the Poles, opted for small-caliber weapons firing extremely high velocity hardened-core projectiles.

While it could indeed penetrate the armor of World War I tanks, recoil was so brutal that few infantrymen wished to fire it more than once.īetween the world wars, for lack of anything better, several armies fielded anti-tank rifles. Long before the PTRS 41 was the Germans’ first attempt, made during World War I with the 13.2mm Tank-Gewehr Model 1918: a monster Mauser anti-tank rifle five and one-half feet long and weighing 40 pounds. Ever since the tank appeared on the battlefield during World War I, armies the world over have sought to field man-portable infantry antitank weapons to give the infantryman a viable defense against the metal monsters.

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