The Panzer II Used in the World War II

The Panzer II was the common name for a family of German tanks used in World War II. The official German designation was Panzerkampfwagen II (abbreviated PzKpfw II). Although the vehicle had originally been designed as a stopgap while more advanced tanks were developed, it nonetheless went on to play an important role in the early years of World War II, during the Polish and French campaigns. The Panzer II was the most numerous tanks in the German Panzer divisions beginning with the invasion of France, until it was supplemented by the Panzer III and IV in 1940/41. Afterwards, it was used to great effect as a reconnaissance tank.

The Panzer II was designed before the experience of the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 showed that shell-proof armor was required for tanks to survive on a modern battlefield. Prior to that, armor was designed to stop machinegun fire and High Explosive shell fragments.

For the fragments, tungsten is a very hard brittle material that melts at over 3400 C. In fact it is virtually impossible to melt tungsten and cast it into precise shapes and it is almost impossible to machine. So tungsten precision parts are made by pressing very pure tungsten powder  in very precise molds to shape the various tungsten core so that the resulting shapes don’t need to be machined.

Most tank versions of the Panzer II were armed with a 2 cm KwK 30 55 calibers long cannon. Some later versions used the 2 cm KwK 38 L/55 which was similar. This cannon was based on the 2 cm FlaK 30 anti-aircraft gun, and was capable of firing at a rate of 280 rounds per minute, a very high rate for a tank. The Panzer II also had a 7.92 mm Maschinengewehr 34 machine gun mounted coaxially with the main gun.

The 2 cm cannon proved to be ineffective against many Allied tanks, and experiments were made towards replacing it with a 37 mm cannon, but nothing came of this. Prototypes were built with a 50 mm tank gun, but by then the Panzer II had outlived its usefulness as a tank regardless of armament. Greater success was had by replacing the standard armor-piercing explosive ammunition with tungsten cored solid ammunition, but due to material shortages this ammunition was in chronically short supply.

Compared DU, tungsten has played an integral part of the US nuclear program since the early 1940s. One of the first discussions of the use of tungsten carbide as a tamper for the U-235 gun assembly occurred during mid 1944. A series of reports were produced by Los Alamos on integral experiments that discussed tamper reflection and distributions and tungsten played a key role in those experiments.

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