The HORRORS of the Bazooka in WW2
The HORRORS of the Bazooka in WW2
The copper isn’t a needle. It’s a jet of liquid metal moving at nearly 5 mph. It punches through the side of the panzer. The crew inside doesn’t hear the impact. They feel it. A wave of overpressure slams through the sealed compartment. Steel fragments from the inside face of their own armor turn inward traveling fast enough to pass through a man without slowing down.
Hydraulic fluid sprays into the air and ignites. The ammunition in the ready racks begins to cook. They have seconds. Sometimes a single breath. Most of them don’t get out. This is what the men inside a German tank experienced when an American bazooka round found home. And the weapon that did this to them, the weapon that ended German armor’s dominance over the infantry battlefield started its life as a length of scrap pipe lying in a junkyard at Aberdeen Proving Ground in the spring of 1942.
This is the story of the bazooka. >> [music] >> In 1942, an American rifleman facing a German tank had nothing. The standard issue anti-tank weapon was the 37-mm M3 gun, already obsolete against the Mark III by the time the United States entered the war. The rifle grenade lacked the range and the warhead to matter.
Hand-placed mines and grenades required a man to crawl close enough to a moving tank to put them in personal contact with the armor. Doctrine, in plain language, came down to this. Hold position, call for artillery, pray. In February of 1943, at the Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, that doctrine collapsed. The 10th and 21st Panzer divisions broke through the green American positions of the First Armored and supporting infantry.
Men of Combat Command A watched Mark IIIs and Mark IVs roll forward through the dust. They had Garands and prayer. The Germans had 50 mm of frontal armor and a long 75. The Americans lost 3,300 killed and wounded, 3,000 more captured. 183 tanks burned in a single week. The tank had outpaced the foot soldier.
Something had to give. A man on the ground the ability to kill a 30-ton machine bearing down on him. That something was already lying in a scrap pile in Maryland. His name was Edward Uhl, Lehigh University, class of 1940, a 23-year-old lieutenant in the United States Army Ordnance Corps. In the spring of 1942, his commanding officer, Colonel Leslie Skinner, gave him a problem.
The army had a small shaped charge grenade called the M10. It could defeat tank armor. It could not be thrown far enough for a man to live through delivering it. The grenade needed to fly. Uhl needed to find a way to fire it. He was walking past a junk heap behind the workshops at Aberdeen when he saw it, a length of steel pipe, 5 ft long.
The inside diameter happened to be a near perfect match for the rocket he was trying to launch. In a 2002 interview, Uhl described what happened next. “I was walking by this scrap pile,” he said, “and there was a tube that happened to be the same size as the grenade we were turning into a rocket. I said, ‘That’s the answer.
Put the tube on a soldier’s shoulder with the rocket inside and away it goes.'” He took the pipe back to the shop, soldered on a wooden stock, bent a coat hanger into a sight. In May of 1942, at Aberdeen Proving Ground, he and Skinner demonstrated the device against a moving tank target. Brigadier General Gladeon Barnes of the Ordnance Department raised it to his shoulder and fired the first official combat evaluation shot.
Direct hit. The weapon went into production that day. General Electric was given 30 days to deliver 5,000 launchers. They delivered with 89 minutes to spare. By November, the first bazookas waded ashore in North Africa with Operation Torch. The combat debut was a mess. Training was minimal.
The early rockets were unreliable. >> The sub-standard steel of the original launcher tube could rupture and kill the gunner. But by Sicily in July of 1943, with the improved M1A1 launcher and the M6A1 rocket, the bazooka was working. A team from the 45th Infantry Division put a rocket into a Mark III near Gela. The track separated.
The crew bailed out. The rifleman with the bazooka team finished them with Garands. The math had changed. What the bazooka actually did to a tank was not what the recruiting posters showed. The rocket carried a shaped charge based on the Monroe effect, a hollow cone of explosive lined with copper, designed so that when it detonated against armor, the copper collapsed inward and reformed into a jet of liquid metal moving at roughly 8,000 m per second, nearly 5 mi per second.
The jet itself was thin, about the diameter of a pencil. It did not melt through the steel. It punched through hydraulically, the way a stream of water bores through clay. What followed inside the tank was the part the crews understood. The jet shattered the inside face of the armor and turned it into a spray of high-velocity fragments, spall.
Steel splinters traveling fast enough to pass through a man’s body and through the man behind him. The overpressure inside the sealed compartment was enough to rupture eardrums and lungs. Hydraulic fluid ignited. Propellant in the ready racks began to cook off. If the crew survived the initial penetration, they had the time it took to draw a single breath to claw open a hatch and get out before the ammunition detonated. Many didn’t.
The bazooka turned tanks into ovens. In June of 1944, on the second night of the battle for Saipan, Colonel Takashi Goto led the largest Japanese armor assault of the Pacific War. >> [music] >> 44 tanks, Type 95s and Type 97s of the Imperial Japanese 9th Tank Regiment, rolling at the Marine lines of the 2nd Marine Division shortly after midnight.
The Japanese held back at 350 yd, the very edge of bazooka range. They worked the Marine positions over with machine guns and waited for an infantry response. Bazooka teams of the 6th Marine Regiment crawled forward through tracer fire. One team got close enough to put a rocket into the lead tank’s flank. It stopped.
They put another into the next. It stopped. By dawn, Goto had lost 31 of his 44 tanks. Goto himself died in the wreckage of his command. A single Marine bazooka team in that engagement was officially credited with four Japanese tank kills before they ran out of rockets and disabled a fifth with a hand grenade.
But the cleanest, most cinematic single-man bazooka action of the war happened a month earlier on the other side of the world. May 23rd, 1944, near Coriano, Italy, the breakout from the Anzio beachhead. Technical Sergeant Van Thomas Barfoot, Company L, 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division. A Mississippi farm boy, part Choctaw.
He had already landed at Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio. That morning, Barfoot had crawled alone through a minefield in front of his platoon, knocked out three German machine gun positions with grenades and his Thompson, and captured 17 prisoners. Then the German counterattack came. Three tanks, heavy armor, coming straight at his line.
Barfoot grabbed a bazooka. He moved out into the avenue of advance, alone. He let the lead tank come to within 75 yards, then he fired. The rocket hit the front sprocket. The track separated. The tank slewed sideways and stopped where it stood. The other two tanks veered off. The crew of the disabled tank threw open their hatches and tried to run.
Barfoot dropped the bazooka, picked up his Thompson, and killed three of them on the ground. He then walked deeper into German lines, found an abandoned 88-mm field gun, and disabled it with demolitions. On his way back, he came across two seriously wounded American soldiers >> [music] >> and carried them approximately 1,700 yards to friendly lines.
He was awarded the Medal of Honor. Seven months later and 1,200 miles north, in the snow outside the Belgian town of Malmedy, on December 21st, 1944, Sergeant Francis Currey of the 120th Infantry Regiment did almost the same thing in the worst weather of the war. Pinned down by the relief spearhead of Kampfgruppe Peiper, Currey found a bazooka inside a factory, sprinted across an open street under fire to scavenge rockets from a destroyed tank destroyer, [music] and stopped a German tank with a single shot to the base of the turret.
He then used white phosphorus grenades to drive the crews out of three more tanks and finished a fourth with the bazooka, covering the withdrawal of pinned American anti-tank gunners. Medal of Honor. The same weapon, the same physics, the same outcome inside the tank. The Germans noticed. By the spring of 1943, captured American bazookas were on the workbenches at Kummersdorf.
Within months, the Wehrmacht had scaled the design up from 60 mm to 88, fitted with the larger shaped charge warhead from their own Püppchen anti-tank weapon. They called it the Panzerfaust Schreck, tank terror. Some 290,000 were built. The deepest compliment the Wehrmacht could pay a weapon was to copy it.
They paid it. But the bazooka had hard limits, and the men who carried it knew them. The frontal armor of a Panther at 55° of slope was effectively immune to a 2.36-in rocket. A Tiger I’s 100 mm of frontal plate was immune. A King Tiger’s 185 mm was a complete [music] waste of a round. The bazooka killed German heavies only by hitting them in the side, the rear, or the running gear.
Most successful bazooka kills were not on Tigers and Panthers. They were on Mark IVs, StuG assault guns, and halftracks. The backblast gave the gunner away. The exhaust trail rose 10 ft behind him the instant he fired, and what came back was machine gun fire from every German position that saw it. Technical Sergeant Charles Coolidge of the 36th Infantry Division earned the Medal of Honor in the Vosges Mountains in October of 1944.
He tried to take out two German tanks with a bazooka. It would not fire. He threw it away and used hand grenades. The weapon worked. Not always. Not for everyone. Not at every range, but often enough and at close enough range that the men climbing inside a German tank in 1944 no longer assumed they were going home.
After the war, Edward Uhl left the army and went to work in private industry. He rose to become president of Fairchild Industries. Under his leadership, the company built the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the Warthog, a flying gun designed around a 30-mm cannon for the explicit purpose of killing Soviet tanks. The line is direct.
From a piece of scrap pipe at Aberdeen in 1942 to depleted uranium rounds tearing through Iraqi armor in 1991. Every shoulder-fired anti-tank weapon in any army on Earth today, the LAW, the Carl Gustaf, the Javelin, traces its bloodline back to that pipe. Uhl died in 2010. He was 92. His stepson said he rarely talked about the new technologies he had helped develop.
But sometimes, his stepson said, he brought up the bazooka, a length of scrap pipe on the ground, a coat hanger sight, a young lieutenant who looked at a junk pile and saw a way to give a man on foot the power to kill a tank. And the men inside those tanks, who learned in seconds what the copper jet could do,
