what happened on the inside?
Original article
A flash, and a loud bang. in a split-second, its over.
An anti-armour missile, armed with a HEAT warhead, has pushed its
glowing jet through the armoured vehicle,
sending molten fragments of APC and missile spraying out of the left side.
On the following page, Göran Byström talks about what it feels like to sit inside
an APC that is hit. This event took place in Bosnia, 1994.
text: Jan-Ivar Askelin, translated by Raino sommer. picture: Martin Nauclér
We have the vehicle, the details, and the crew stories.
The drama in bosnia is replicated in a world-first FOA-experiment.
It was cold, the sun was shining, and a few flakes of snow was drifting through the air.
Then it was, in early february 1994 that 2 swedish PBV302 APC's was hit by 2 missiles.
Now it is november 1996, and on FOA's area in Grindsjön.
Outside a bunker, a PBV 302 stands.
Ulf Petterson, has prepared the BANTAM-missle, and now sits with the finger on the trigger,
and Andrew medin has started the countdown.
Göran Byström stands inside the bunker and is looking at the TV-image that shows when the
missile is fired. A short flash that you barely notice, and a soundwave that barely penetrates,
the thick walls of the bunker.
And then smoke that slowly creeps out of the open hatches.
Last time he was there when it happened. inside the vehicle. He's the only one behind
the concrete walls that can tell about what it feels like, and his story is an important
part in the puzzle that the FOA-researchers under Håkan Axelssons leadership
are laying down.
Didn't know what had happened:
- I was the driver, and was waiting for us to move out.
Then a brightlight flashed before my eyes, and i passed out.
When i regained conciousness, i had a hard time breathing,
and i felt something had happened with my leg, Göran Byström says.
We didn't know what had happened, we thought we'd been hit by a
heavy machine gun, or splinters from a grenade, but the vehicle
is supposed to protect from that.
We managed to get out, and run to safety.
What had happened, was that the vehicle was hit by a sagger wire guided missile.
The FN-patrol was outside the city Ribnica to scout for Serb positions that
was between 1-2km away. The FN soldiers thought that it was a safe distance.
What they didn't know, was that the serbs had long range sagger missiles, with a range of 3km.
In the vehicle sat 10 soldiers. none of them was seriously wounded.
Whoever looks into this cramped box of a vehicle, will have a hard time believing that the missiles
hot metal jet could avoid hitting any humans or explosive storage.
-I used to have my equipment to the left of me. in my equipment i had hand grenades,
Göran said. This time i had moved the pack to the right. where it normally was,
the HEAT jet came.
Sometime later, the timesetting varies with 10-25 minutes, a second PBV302 was hit.
even in that vehicle, everyone survived with minor injuries.
You have to press that they had a lot of luck, says Håkan Axelsson.
The beam from the missile that hit the second vehicle grazed the storage where the
gun ammunition was located. it was only a few decimeters from something that could have
ended a lot more seriously.
Pictures from several wars often shows obliterated armoured vehicles, with turrets that
has been detached. We rarely see pictures of vehicles that has been hit, but where the
damage done is minimal. To render a vehicle completely destroyed,
the HEAT jet needs to hit something that either burns or explodes, like
fuel or ammunition.
Håkan Axelsson says that the ongoing experiment is typical FOA-research.
-We have knowledge from different areas like for example combat parts effects,
and the human body, and we have resources to follow through a sharp experiment.
There is others who shoot against vehicles to see what it can do, and what
it cannot do. but here we have a unique situation. we have one vehicle.
we have a special event where the conditions can be modified, under controlled
circumstances. And we have a crew, witnesses like Göran, that can describe what
it feels like. in a real battle, there shouldn't have been any witnesses.
In the short period where the crew was unconcious and defenceless the next round
comes along, that might have a larger effect.
Through shooting a similar compartment in the same angle as in real event and
feed the information of what is happending inside the vehicle,
the scientist has come into the grey area of events between damage and no damage.
and its in this zone that its easiest to do something for the soldiers.
-Earlier we have known that even low levels of pressure, gas, smoke and others, affects the soldiers
but our knowledge has been lacking a firm basis.
Now we have acquired hard proof for our assumptions, even if you memorize to always be careful
when you talk about limits on low levels, says Håkan Axelsson.
-We now have the value of pressure, gas, smoke etc. and we have the crews
stories. And then we have the damage criterias that says if you for example
expose a a human to a certain level of pressure, you will get a certain
effect.
With our new knowledge, we know more aobut the damage criterias.
You know something happends to the body. several UN soldiers
says that they were unconcious for a short while. But the researchers nows
very little about what is actually happending, or how dangerous it is,
or what pressure levels things starts to become dangerous.
FOA has for a long while researched if humans are affected by high pressures.
the event in Bosnia came to be an important happending in FOA's
pressure research, not least thanks to Göran Byström and his
friends could talk about what happened.
This project was ordered by the FMV(swedish army database)
and is apparently leading to demands for better protection
in armoured vehicles.
Hearing protection is a must,
but the FOA-researchers thinks that spall protection, glasses,
breathing protection and something that protects the body from
high pressures.