Corner mirror MK.IV

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Gundlach corner mirror
upper figure: view in direction of view
lower figure: direction of view reversed
principle

The angle mirror MK.IV is a rotatable by 360 ° viewing angle mirror for battle tanks , in the interwar period of the Polish engineer Rudolf Gundlach was developed. It offers a crew member - usually the commander - the opportunity to observe the battlefield without having to leave the armor protection.

The corner mirror is the forefather of all modern tank observation devices. It was installed in almost all tanks of the Second World War from 1940 at the latest and remained a standard part of battle tanks until well after the war.

development

The tanks of the First World War had only very simple options for battlefield observation with viewing flaps or slots, which, like the British Mark II and the German A7V , were housed in a fixed, box-like structure or, like the French Renault FT, in a commander's cupola. The crew members who had to watch through these slits also wore heavy full or partial face masks as protection against splintering. Periscopes were used in submarines and as trench periscopes in World War I, but not in tanks.

  • Mark II with viewing slots

  • A7V with viewing slots

  • Commander's cupola with viewing slits

  • Splinter protection mask

Gundlach developed his corner mirror in the 1930s, with which the tank commander had a much larger field of vision than with the traditional viewing slits and he was also protected from hits.

description

The Gundlach corner mirror consists of two 45 ° angled prisms, which first deflect the beam path vertically downwards and then back to the horizontal. It can be swiveled around its standing axis with just one hand without any effort and also offers the option of changing the direction of observation by 180 ° by switching on another prism in the beam path.

The outer prism can be quickly replaced if damaged.

commitment

Gundlach developed his corner mirror for the Polish 7TP tank, which was built from 1935. In 1936 he received a patent for it ( Gundlach Peryskop obrotowy ). As part of the Polish-British military cooperation before World War II, the patent was sold to Great Britain for a symbolic zloty . There the Vickers-Armstrong corner mirror was mass -produced as the Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV ( English Vickers Tank Periscope MK.IV ). All British tanks of World War II were equipped with MK.IV corner mirrors.

As part of the Allied military cooperation, the corner mirror was also made available to the USA and the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union the corner mirror was referred to as Mk-IV or Mk-4, in the USA as M6.

During the attack on Poland , the Wehrmacht captured a number of Polish tanks, including MK.IV corner mirrors. As a result, the corner mirror was recreated and German tanks equipped with it. The other Axis powers also equipped or retrofitted their tanks and armored personnel carriers with them until 1941.

The name of the armored troop of the NVA was Winkelspiegel WS-4 (later models WS-4M).

British tanks with MK.IV

American tanks with M6

Soviet tanks with Mk-IV

German tanks with MK.IV

literature

  • AW Karpenko: Soviet-Russian tanks . 1905-2003. Elbe-Dnjepr, Klitzschen 2004, ISBN 3-933395-44-5 , p. 491 (Russian: Обозрение отечественной бронетанковой техники (1905–1995 гг.) . Translated by R. Meier).
  • Jörg Siegert , Helmut Hanske: Main battle tanks of the NVA . Motorbuch, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-613-03294-1 , p. 35-36, 61, 75, 101, 119 .

Web links

Commons : Gundlach Winkelspiegel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files