Built for One Job: Specialist Weapons from the Matilda II to the PBK-500U Drel

The Matilda II was an infantry tank, designed to advance alongside infantry at modest speed while carrying up to 78 millimeters of armor. That protection made it effectively immune to Italian anti-tank weapons in North Africa in 1940 and 1941, though it became vulnerable once Germany deployed guns such as the 88mm.

The SG104 Munchhausen was a German prototype 355.6 millimeter recoilless gun, designed from 1939 so that a diving bomber could attack the thin deck armor of warships. Flight trials on a Dornier Do 217 beginning in September 1940 found that its backblast seriously damaged the test aircraft, and the project was dropped in favor of air-to-ground rockets.

The StuG III was an assault gun, a Panzer III chassis with a fixed armored superstructure instead of a turret, introduced in 1940 to give infantry close fire support. About 10,086 were built, and it was increasingly used as a tank destroyer as the war went on.

The M10 smoke tank was an under-wing tank, carried on aircraft such as the Douglas A-20 Havoc, that held up to thirty gallons and could lay a smoke screen roughly two thousand feet long. It was used to screen the airdrop of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment at Nadzab, New Guinea, in 1943.

The Jagdpanther was a tank destroyer that put the 8.8cm Pak 43 gun on the Panther chassis, entering service in 1944. Its gun could defeat almost any Allied tank at long range, but production difficulties limited output to 413 vehicles.

The Comet was a British cruiser tank that entered service in January 1945, with a 77mm high-velocity gun adapted from the 17-pounder that could defeat late-war German tanks including the Panther and Tiger. Around 1,200 were built, and the 11th Armoured Division was the only British formation fully equipped with it before the war ended.

The XM1100 Scorpion was a networked munition meant as a remotely controlled alternative to a buried landmine. Operators up to three kilometers away could switch it on or off to avoid striking friendly vehicles, but funding pressure meant that by 2013 it was folded into the broader XM-7 Spider system.

The SVP-24 is a Russian computerized bomb sight that combines GLONASS navigation with a mission computer so a crew can preprogram target coordinates and let the system calculate the release point. Its job is to give unguided bombs accuracy approaching that of precision-guided weapons, and strike accuracy improved sharply in Syria once ground correction stations were installed in 2015.

The PBK-500U Drel is an inertial and GLONASS-guided cluster glide bomb that can glide 30 to 50 kilometers from a launch altitude of up to 14 kilometers. It carries 15 self-targeting anti-tank submunitions with infrared and radar seekers and a friend-or-foe identification system, and entered Russian service in 2024.