You often see videos filmed by insurgents of successful attacks on the rear which activate the blowout panels.
What they don’t tell you is that the crew survived due to the ammo compartmentalization.
What you don’t see is the many multiple times they fail like this
We are lucky this amount of footage was recovered from the phone the remainder of the video was corrupted.
These were Saudi M1s in Yemen without the DU armor US models have. (By request of the Saudis, we would have sold them DU models if they wanted) While the hit to the turret rear would have been the same regardless, the hit to the turret side did nothing except alert the tank crew who sent back a 120mm HEOR less than a second after the video ends.
One tank in my unit in 2004 got disabled by RPG fire in Karbala, So they stayed and fought for about an hour till we could get them recovery and back up. When we finally got to them with recovery, the tank had suffered no less than 14 rpg hits from all sides. They explained that the 7th or 8th hit got the engine about 20 minutes prior so they kept fighting with manual traverse.
All 4 members survived with out injury and were surrounded by dead bodies and blown up buildings.
Modern Tanks are really vulnerable to sneak attack RPGs and Missiles from the rear. Attacks from the sides have a good chance of breaking the track immobilizing it like what happened to our brothers. But fighting an active aware and well trained tank crew is a suicide in most cases, especially from the front.
The vast majority of those videos do not survive.
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