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75mm Resita Model 1943

1943 WORLD WAR 2

History

The 75mm Resita Type 1943 anti-tank gun was developed to provide the Romanian military with a locally produced anti-tank solution that proved to be comparable to its contemporaries. To speed up its development (World War II has been raging since the fall of 1939), Colonel Valerian Nestorescu of the Romanian Army supported a design that took advantage of the best qualities of competing weapons found elsewhere - namely the German PaK 40 series and the classic Soviet Army ZiS-3 model. Development work began in 1942, culminating in three prototypes being built and tested against existing designs.

The weapon subsequently entered service as the "Tunul Antitanc DT-UDR 26, cal. 75mm, md 1943", but was better known as the "75mm Resita Model 1943".

The system fires a 15-pound armor-piercing (AP) or high-explosive (HE) stationary projectile to a range of 12,000 meters. Cartridges are loaded via a vertically sliding breech assembly (adopted from the PaK 40) and measure 75 mm in caliber (as opposed to the 76.2 mm demonstrated in the Soviet ZiS-3 series). Weapon components include a full recoil mechanism and mounting hardware (inherited from the ZiS-3) on a split two-wheeled frame and a small shield for partial frontal protection.

Inherent height ranges from -7 to +35 degrees and 70 degrees from left to right of the centerline. A well-trained shooting team can count on 20 rounds per minute in field conditions. The shell leaves the barrel at 1,030 meters per second.

Typical sevens and transportation are facilitated by moving vehicles.

The total weight of the finished design is 3,150 lbs, and the dimensions include a 17.9-foot length and 8.2-foot barrel length. The barrel is rifled to rotate the fired projectile and maintain range accuracy.

The cannon was made by Uzinele si Domeniile Resita and was in service in 1944. The initial 400 of about 1,100 ordered in December 1943 may have been produced by the end of production. Simplified production Performance is generally good at 500 yards of 100mm penetration due to the much lower number of parts compared to the PaK 40.

The 1st Armoured Division of the Romanian Army received the first Model 1943 guns in 1944 and used them against the Soviet Union later that year. Casualties continued to mount, ultimately limiting the weapon's strategic range in the wider war, but the genre persisted in the immediate postwar years.

Due to the large Soviet influence over Romania during the decades of the Cold War, weapons were relegated to secondary roles, such as training, as more Soviet-oriented equipment took their place. Surprisingly, despite its origins in the 1940s, the 75mm anti-tank gun brought a useful (if increasingly limited) presence to Romania in the mid to late 1990s.