Why German Forces Hated the PIAT Used by the Canadian Army…?

Imagine for a moment that you are a German tank commander in the summer of 1944. You are sitting inside a Panther, one of the most formidable armored vehicles of the Second World War. As you navigate the narrow, rubble strewn streets of an Italian village or the dense hedge of Normandy, your eyes are scanning for one specific threat. Enemy infantry.

You know what to look for. If an American GI fires a bazooka, there is a blinding flash and a distinct trail of white smoke that points right back to his position. If a British soldier fires a heavy gun, there is a muzzle blast. These visual cues are your lifeline. They tell you where to swing your turret and unleash your MG42 to suppress the enemy. But then disaster strikes.

There is no flash. There is no smoke trail. There is no warning, just a dull metallic thud, followed instantly by the catastrophic screech of molten metal tearing through your side armor. Your tank is burning, and you have absolutely no idea where the shot came from. You have just been struck by a ghost. This ghost was not a high-tech wonder weapon.

In fact, to the soldiers who had to carry it, it looked like a piece of scrap metal scavenged from a plumbing site. This is the Projector Infantry Anti-tank, better known as the Pott. On paper, the Pott was a disaster. It was heavy, incredibly awkward to carry, and relied on a massive, primitive steel spring that required a herculean effort to [ __ ] It kicked like a mule, often leaving Canadian soldiers with massive bruises on their shoulders after a single shot.

The troops often cursed it, mocking its crude design compared to the sleek American bazooka. And yet, here lies one of the greatest paradoxes of World War II weaponry. While the Allied troops complained about it, the German forces from the Vermacht to the elite Vafen SS came to loathe and fear this weapon with a passion. Why? Because unlike the rocket propelled weapons of the era, the spring-loaded Pat did not give away its position.

It was the ultimate ambush predator. In the hands of the Canadian army, who used it with aggressive creativity from Ortona to the Shelt, this piece of junk became the silent nightmare of the German panzers. To understand why the Pat was such a unique threat, we must first dispel a common misconception. When looking at footage of World War II, it is easy to lump the Pat into the same category as the American Bazooka or the German Panzer Shrek, but technically speaking, they are entirely different beasts. The Bazooka and the Panzer Shrek

were rocket launchers. They were essentially hollow tubes designed to guide a rocket propelled grenade. When the trigger was pulled, a rocket motor ignited, sending the projectile flying. The Pat, however, was not a rocket launcher. It was a spigot mortar. Its heart was not a rocket motor, but a massive, powerful steel mainspring, a piece of engineering that looked like it belonged in a Lori suspension rather than an infantry weapon.

The mechanism worked more like a gigantic explosive crossbow. Here is how it functioned. Inside the weapon was a heavy steel rod or spigot held back by that massive spring. When the trigger was pulled, the spring released, driving the spigot forward with tremendous force into the tail of the bomb. This impact detonated a propellant cartridge inside the bomb’s tail.

The explosion launched the projectile forward while simultaneously kicking the heavy spigot backward to recompress the spring and [ __ ] the weapon for the next shot. It sounds ingenious, but in practice, it was a beast to handle. The spring was incredibly stiff. To [ __ ] the weapon manually for the first shot required 200 lb, 90 kg of pressure.

This was not a weapon you could easily prepare while lying prone in the mud. A soldier often had to stand up, place the butt on the ground, and use his entire body weight to engage the spring. A dangerous move in the heat of battle. And then there was the recoil. Because it relied on a heavy mechanical spring and a captive explosion, the recoil was punishing.

Canadian veterans often joked that they deserved an award just for firing it. If a soldier didn’t hold it tightly against his shoulder, the kickback was strong enough to cause severe bruising or even dislocate a collar bone. It was a weapon that hurt the user almost as much as it hurt the target.

However, this crude shoulder bruising mechanism provided the one tactical advantage that the Germans came to despise. Rocket launchers like the Panzer Shrek created a massive back blast. When a German soldier fired a Panzer Shrek, a jet of flame and gas erupted from the rear of the tube. This back blast did two things.

First, it made it impossible to fire from inside a building or an enclosed space without killing the operator. Second, it kicked up a massive cloud of dust and smoke, instantly revealing the shooter’s position to every enemy tank and sniper in the vicinity. The pot had no back blast. Because the explosion happened inside the bomb’s tail and was absorbed by the spring mechanism, there was no jet of flame shooting out the back.

There was no giant puff of white smoke. There was no muzzle flash. This meant a Canadian soldier could lie in the tall grass, fire a shot, and remain completely invisible. More importantly, as the war moved into the tight urban ruins of Italian and Dutch cities, this mechanism allowed the POT to be fired from inside small rooms, something the German anti-tank teams simply could not do.

While the German engineers mocked the Pott’s primitive design, the German tankers on the receiving end learned a hard lesson. A crude weapon that you cannot see is infinitely more dangerous than a sophisticated one that reveals itself. If the open fields of Normandy were dangerous for tanks, the narrow rubble choked streets of European cities were a death trap.

And it was here in the claustrophobic nightmare of urban warfare that the Pat truly shone and where the German forces began to truly despise it. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Battle of Ortona, often called the Stalenrad of Italy. This was a brutal close quarters fight where Canadian troops fought house-to-house, roomto room against elite German paratroopers.

In this environment, the German anti-tank teams faced a critical limitation. If a German soldier wanted to fire a panzer Shrek at an approaching Canadian Sherman tank, he had to step out into the street or at least stand in an open doorway. Why? Because of that deadly back blast we mentioned earlier. If he fired from inside a small room, the pressure wave reflecting off the back wall would kill him instantly or turn the room into an inferno.

The Canadians, however, had the Pott. Because the Pott had no back blast, a Canadian soldier could set up an ambush position deep inside a ruined building. He could lie prone on a dusty floor 5 m back from a window, hidden in the shadows. When a German Panzer rolled down the street, blindly swinging its turret, the Canadian could fire through the window frame without exposing himself.

The tank crew would hear the impact, feel the explosion, but see nothing. No flash from the window, no smoke, just a silent strike from the dark. This capability turned every window, every cellar vent, and every hole in a wall into a potential kill zone. It forced German infantry to check every single building thoroughly, slowing their advance to a crawl and bleeding their morale.

But the POT had another quirk that the Canadians mastered, its trajectory. Most anti-tank weapons fired in a flat, high velocity line. You pointed at the tank and the rocket flew straight to it. The POT being a spigot mortar, fired a heavy projectile that traveled relatively slowly in a steep arc.

At longer ranges, it fell like a stone. While this made hitting a moving target at 200 meters incredibly difficult, in a city it became a unique advantage. The Pat could be used for indirect fire. Canadian troops quickly realized they could tilt the weapon up and lob the bombs over obstacles much like a mortar. Was a German machine gun team hiding behind a stone wall or a pile of rubble? A flatfiring bazooka couldn’t hit them, but a skilled pat gunner could lob a high explosive bomb over the wall, dropping it right on top of the enemy’s

heads. This versatility meant the Pat wasn’t just an anti-tank weapon. It was a pocket artillery piece. It could blast open doors, collapse walls to create mouse holes, a tactic the Canadians perfected in Ortona to move between buildings without entering the streets, and destroy sniper nests. For the German defenders, this was infuriating.

They were accustomed to fighting enemies they could see, or at least enemies whose weapons followed the standard rules of ballistics. The Pat followed no such rules. It could strike from enclosed rooms without warning, and it could rain death from above over solid cover. In the hands of the innovative Canadian infantry, this clunky spring gun transformed the urban landscape into a maze of invisible threats that the German heavy armor simply could not counter.

To fully grasp why the German forces hated the Pat, we must step inside the mind of a German tanker. By 1944, the crews of the Vermacht and the Vafan SS were arguably the most experienced armored warriors in history. They operated by a strict set of survival instincts honed on the Eastern Front. Their primary rule of survival was simple, target identification and suppression.

When a tank is ambushed, the crew’s only hope is to immediately spot the source of fire and flood that area with machine gun rounds and high explosive shells. If they can see the enemy, they can kill him or at least force him to keep his head down, preventing a second shot. The Pott dismantled this survival instinct.

In afteraction reports and interrogations, German prisoners of war often expressed a deep, simmering frustration regarding Canadian anti-tank tactics. They described the sensation of fighting phantoms. When a POT struck, the German crew often panicked, not because of the damage itself, but because they didn’t know which direction to turn their turret.

They would spray machine gun fire wildly into the hedge or ruins, wasting ammunition on empty shadows, while the Canadian gunner, coolly hidden and undetected, cocked his spring for a second, killing shot. This inability to retaliate created a pervasive sense of paranoia. It stripped the German crews of their feeling of superiority.

They weren’t being beaten by a better machine. They were being hunted by something they couldn’t see. But the hate wasn’t just psychological. It was physical. The Germans might have mocked the Pott’s appearance, calling it a water pipe, but they could not mock its warhead. The Pott fired a heat high explosive anti-tank projectile.

Despite the weapon’s crude launch method, the bomb itself was highly effective. It could penetrate approximately 100 mm of armor plate. To put that in perspective, the side armor of a Panther tank, Germany’s medium tank masterpiece, was only about 40 mm to 50 mm thick. The mighty Tiger 1 had 80 mm of side armor.

This meant that at close range, a cheap stamped metal POT could punch a hole straight through the pride of the German engineering industry. When a POT bomb struck, it didn’t just explode on the surface. The shaped charge focused the blast into a hypersonic jet of molten copper and gas. This jet punched through the steel like a hot needle through butter.

Inside the tank, the effect was horrific. The jet would spray molten metal and hot spalling shrapnel from the tank’s own inner wall around the cabin, igniting ammunition and fuel lines. The hatred also extended to the German infantry supporting the tanks. They felt helpless. Their job was to protect the tanks from enemy tank hunters.

But how do you protect a tank from a weapon that leaves no smoke trail? You can’t trace the flight path back to the bush where the Canadian is hiding. There is a documented instance where a German commander upon surrendering to Canadian forces asked to see the automatic anti-tank cannon that had decimated his column.

When the Canadians showed him a POT, he reportedly refused to believe it. He felt insulted that his technologically superior machines had been defeated by a spring-loaded tube. This was the core of the German hatred. It was a professional resentment to them. The Pat felt unfair. It was an assassin’s weapon. Silent, deadly, and frustratingly effective in the chaotic, broken terrain of Western Europe.

To truly understand why the Germans feared the Pat in Canadian hands, we cannot rely solely on technical manuals. We must look at the men who wielded them. Because of the Pat’s heavy recoil, difficult cocking mechanism, and short effective range, it was not a weapon for the timid. It required nerves of steel.

And no soldier exemplified this gritty courage more than Private Earnest Smokeoky Smith of the Seforth Highlanders of Canada. On a rain soaked night in October 1944, Smith’s unit had crossed the river Savio to establish a fragile bridge head. They were cut off, outnumbered, and digging into the mud.

Suddenly, the distinct roar of Maybach engines pierced the storm. Three German Panther tanks supported by self-propelled guns and infantry were advancing to crush the Canadians. A Panther tank is a terrifying beast. Its frontal armor is nearly impenetrable to most Allied weapons. To kill it with a pot, you cannot shoot from 200 m away.

You cannot shoot from 100 meters away. You have to get close. Suicidally close. As the lead panther clanked down the road, sweeping the area with machine gun fire, Smokeoky Smith did not retreat. He grabbed his pot. While his comrades held their breath, Smith waited in a roadside ditch.

He let the 45ton monster approach until it was practically on top of him, a distance of just 30 ft, 10 m. At that point blank range, the German crew had no chance to spot him. Smith rose, leveled the heavy weapon, and squeezed the trigger. Thump. The shaped charge warhead slammed into the Panther’s side, crippling it instantly. But the battle wasn’t over.

10 German infantry men riding on the back of the tank scrambled off and attacked Smith. Showing incredible ferocity, he dropped the Pott, picked up his Thompson submachine gun, and killed four of them, driving the rest back. Later in the night, another tank attacked again. Smith waited. Again, he used the darkness and the Potts silent launch to his advantage.

He fired again, forcing the second tank to retreat. For his actions that night, Smokeoky Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth’s highest honor for valor. His story illustrates the ultimate paradox of the Pott. It was a weapon that soldiers loved to hate. It was heavy. It bruised them. And the fuse was unreliable.

But in the chaos of a night ambush, where stealth was the only thing keeping you alive, it was irreplaceable. The Germans hated the pot because it empowered individual infantrymen like Smokeoky Smith to stand their ground against heavy armor. It turned the confident advance of a panzer division into a tentative, fearful crawl where every shadow in a ditch could be hiding a Canadian with a spring-loaded pipe and a heart of iron.

As the smoke cleared over Europe in May 1945, the Pott began to fade from history. It was quickly replaced in the post-war years by the American bazooka and later the Swedish Carl Gustaf. By modern standards, the POT was an evolutionary dead end. It was heavy. It had a punishing recoil and its loading mechanism was a nightmare for any soldier under fire.

From a purely engineering standpoint, it was arguably one of the worst designed weapons of the war. And yet looking back through the lens of history, we find an undeniable truth. It worked. The German Vermacht, a force that prided itself on technological superiority, on Tiger tanks, V2 rockets, and jet fighters, found itself constantly frustrated by a simple steel tube, and a spring.

They hated the POAT because it denied them the one thing they relied on most, predictability. They could predict a rocket’s path. They could predict an anti-tank gun’s position. But they could never predict where a Canadian soldier with a POT might be hiding. For the Canadian Army, the POT became a symbol of their specific brand of warfare.

It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t glamorous. It was gritty, pragmatic, and required a sheer amount of physical toughness to use effectively. It was a weapon that demanded the user to stand their ground, wait until they could see the whites of the enemy’s eyes, and hold fast. While American GIS had the luxury of engaging from a distance with rockets, the Canadian Pat Gunner had to get up close and personal.

The legacy of the Pat is not found in its technical specifications. It is found in the burntout hulks of panther tanks in the streets of Ortona. It is found in the hedge of Normandy where German advances were stalled by invisible assassins. And it is found in the Victoria Cross of Smoky Smith who proved that a lone soldier with a spring gun could stop a Blitzkrieg.

The Germans hated it because it broke the rules. The Canadians used it because it won battles. In the end, the Silent Nightmare earned its place in history, not by being the best weapon, but by being the right weapon at the right time.