The bazooka round is an outgrowth of the M10 rifle grenade designed to be fired from the .50 machinegun (using a blank cartridge). Procured in limited quantity starting in 1940 the M10 formed the basis for the bazooka round. US Army Captain Skinner was assigned to develop and investigate the use of rockets in war at the time and with limited funds started development of an antitank rocket by fitting a motor to the M10 grenade. His counterpart in the US Navy was Lieutenant Uhl and the two had had some dealings. Lt. Uhl and Cptn Skinner arranged to work together on making and launching M10 grenades with the rocket motor assembly attached. Uhl came up with the tube launcher while Skinner devised a firing mechanism. A test rig was ready in March 1942 and testing took place at Aberdeen Proving Ground. Someone at the tests pointed out the similarity of this device in looks to comedian Bob Burn's insturment the "Bazooka" and a weapon was named. The tests went well and the US Army quickly ordered 5,000 produced. The US Navy saw no future use for this particular weapon so they withdrew from the project. E. G. Budd Co. was the rocket manufacturer. Hercules Powder, DuPont Chemical, Atlas Powder and, American Cyanamid provided the motor fuel and explosives for the warhead. GE Bridgeport CT manufactured the launcher (they produced 5,000 in 30 days to the initial order) and eventually produced 450,000 launchers.
For most panzerfaust this meant you needed to be about 20 yards or less from your target to score a hit.
Oh that's excellent, it must have taken ages to dismantle that and cock them all again. But I imagine the effect was worth it even if it was under 40lbs of explosive in total. IMHO it's just this kind of improvisation which gave our Allied ancestors the win.
A veteran friend of mine who served in Company I, 13th Infantry Regiment, 8th Division told me when possible, his squad liked the smaller Faustpatrone, and collected them when they ran across them. The Faustpatrone was effective on log dug outs and machine gun nests, as well as, house to house fighting - blowing holes in walls etc. They also liked the German "potato masher" hand grenade for its TNT content. They were good for blowing doors off buildings, or whereever an explosion was needed with minimal fragmentation. Greg C.
The Panzerfaust fired hollow charge projectiles. These could - and would - be used as a substitute for HE projectiles by German AT guns or Sturmgeschütze. Even so, German infanty used their Panzerschrecks to provide their own indirect fire support. Panzerschreck was a derivative of captured US bazookas, but with 88 mm calibre, to which the US switched after some unpleasant encounters with the T-34 in Korea.
within the 50yeds minimum it was devastating and even beyond. remember this was a very close support weapon used by all German folk just not he military. think everyone has seen enough pics showing the training of old men, women and even children with this arm......and I do not mean pics of the Volkssturm either
The US started production of the bigger bazookas in WWII but didn't issue them as they were thought to be unnecessary. The problems in Korea vs T-34 weren't so much a problem with the size of the bazooka's round as the fact that they were using very degraded WWII ammo.
There is a live fire bazooka penetration test that I have read. Basically, the bazooka's penetration performance was surprisingly bad against heavily sloped armor. 45mm plate sloped at 60 degrees like the T-34 would be invulnerable frontally to bazooka rounds, but if the slope was reduced to 30 degrees than armor plates doubled that thickness were easily penetrated. Against decent bazooka ammunition T-34 kills are quite possible, but preferably you do it from ambush positions.
SF_CWO2, You are up to something here--I actually read an US 3d AD AAR in May 1945 that reported the unit met extremely heavy "bazooka fire" in a town many of which were used "indirect". We know African militia men often used massed RPG fire in lieu of real indirect fire weapons, so it's probably doable...
I don't remember the precise date or location of the fight, other than the fact that the armored infantry christened the city "bazooka town". Hope that was useful, but description of the fighting was very sparse.
I think he means 'about 70% of Soviet tanks that were destroyed during urban warfare in the late period of the war on the eastern front, were destroyed by Panzerfausts or Panzerschrecks'. Which is what is written in wikipedia, but is otherwise unsourced. That I think is somewhat more believable, given simply the lack of other anti-tank measures available to the Germans at this time, plus the issue of urban warfare.
But there are no evidence to support that statement in Wikipedia. IIRC Vasiliy Fofanov quoted Soviet sources in another forum that proved the deadliest threat to Russian tanks in '45 was still the 75mm gun. On the other hand, I cannot recall a single instance in which infantrymen armed with hand-held AT weapons managed to stop a full scale tank attack unaided. Bazooka, recoiless rifle and panzerfaust were deadly enough to be a nuissance, but not sufficiently lethal to be counted on as a primary AT defense.
