User talk:Metacosm

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[edit] Unissued stock

Thanks for the article. Just a quick reminder to include one or more categories for the article (by putting, e.g. "[[Category:Corporate law]]") at then end of the article. It's important for referencing purposes. Keep up the good work. Legis 07:57, 16 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment

Hello, this is a stab at answering your questions. I do not have further information on the 1077th, some of these comments are educated guesses. No idea if they had armor piercing rounds. A small issue of AP rounds for an anti-aircraft gun was probably standard in the Red Army, but with the chaotic situation at Stalingrad, all sorts of supply disruptions were probably happening. However, if there is any truth to the claims of tanks destroyed, that implies the unit had at least a few rounds of AP. Destroying a tank with a high explosive ("FlaK") round is possible but not very likely, as in the HE round entering a hatch or other opening in the tank and detonating inside the vehicle. Damaging a tank with HE rounds is possible, particularly if the rounds strike vulnerable components like track linkage, gunsights, vision ports, etc. Also, soldiers in combat will tend to see any armored vehicle as a "tank", so there may have been lighter stuff like half-tracks and armored cars that got hammered by the HE rounds.
Sorry, I have no information about aircraft losses to AA at Stalingrad. You may find it instructive that the effective vertical range of the Soviet 37mm AA gun was about 3,000 meters.
There is certainly exaggeration in the Soviet claims of German losses (this is common behavior for any army), but there is probably some truth in them as well. In the context of the Soviet official history, it is common to find small blurbs like this that hail a particular small unit in order to give the reader a sense of the heroism of the ordinary soldiers alongside the descriptions of major military operations. With that in mind, I tend to interpret these passages like I would the text accompanying the award of any military medal -- there is a given amount of exaggeration involved to get the point across unambiguously. That said, I think the correlation of German and Soviet sources in this case clearly points to a notable sacrifice by the 1077th.
On German infantry losses, the 37mm HE round would have been indeed effective. Depending on design and other factors, a 37mm round would create something like one to a few hundred "effective fragments" (fragments that can kill or incapacitate a human), with the number declining the farther one is from the impact point. So, these types of rounds detonating among groups of infantry, or exploding on the sides of armored vehicles and shredding an infantry escort, especially given that the 37mm AA-gun was an automatic weapon with a high rate of fire, could wreak havoc on soft targets like people or unarmored vehicles.
On the topic of other sources, there may well be works on this regiment in Russian, but I doubt you'll find much more that is written in English. Cheers, W. B. Wilson 04:24, 1 October 2007 (UTC)