M-9 being used to blow up giant ants!
Posted on 03/13/2015 8:57:36 AM PDT by C19fan
In 1945, Wilbur “Bill” Brunger was an engineer with the U.S. Army, and it was his job to break things. Namely, three underpasses on the Autobahn near Dortmund, Germany.
He had to break the underpasses, so the rubble would block the road from any attacking enemy vehicles. But as Brunger and a squad of soldiers attempted to take control of the underpasses, they spotted German armored half-tracks coming their way.
Fortunately, he had the right tool for the job at hand—an M-9 Recoilless Rocket Launcher—better known as a “bazooka.” Brunger fired a round at one of the half-tracks.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
Also the Carl Gustav; a US Army favorite that I wish the Marine Corps would adopt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Gustav_recoilless_rifle
Nice!!!!!!!!
Thanks! Didn’t know about that one.
Bazooka was the first to get deployed in quantity, panzerfaust was developed in parallel. Panzerfaust, having a larger warhead, was a little more effective.
In Korea, we found the original bazooka (built for getting through the smaller, less-armoered German-tanks from WWII) didn’t work against the Soviet’s thicker-armor, in the soviet tanks used by NK/Chinese tanks.
The German panzerschreck was a copy of American bazookas. Most likely captured on the eastern front. The Panzerfaust came later as a one shot fire and throw tube away variant with a good warhead.
But the soldier operated anti tank rocket was an American invention.
The kitchen match-head gases blew back under and out to the rear, sending the matchstick shooting toward our toy soldiers.
Tiny play rockets!!
Believe it or not we also made a cyanide warhead bazooka round for use against Japs in caves. We never used it for some reason, but we sure had it.
The world used to fear us.
C19fan wrote:
“Was the bazooka the first anti-tank weapon to use a shaped charge?”
No, the theory of a shaped charge was known in the late 1800’s. Before WWII, the U.S. Army had anti-tank hand grenades, that used a shaped charge. Only problem was, they weighed a couple of pounds, so that in order to throw them at a tank, and hit it, you were well within the blast radius. Not Popular With The Troops!
M-9 being used to blow up giant ants!
Nuclear Bazooka! Yes, they had them.
You gotta be kidding me...!!!
Excellent!!!!
Talk about “more bang for the buck”....!
Man, I would love to dismantle one of those warheads to see how they did it!
Love the story about the Brit that knocked out an Argentine Ship (Corvette) using the Carl Gustav! 3 days in dry dock.
Back in the mid '50s I saw one of those "man portables" in action. I was on a WWII Fleet boat armed with a 5"/25 and two 40MMs. There was some flap in Bolivia at that time and the govt decided to send a few subs down there for some clandestine blockade duty. We were supposed to surface near the offending vessel and fire a shot across its bow.
Our companion boat was one of those new streamlined "Guppy" subs that looked like the boats today. We were berthed alongside and kidded them on how they were supposed to scare the freighters. We were told they would do the job with one of those new recoiless rifles, considered somewhat of a wonder weapon then.
One day we had a rehearsal surface and fire drill. We were able to "fire" ten rounds of 5" during the time their gun crew struggled to hump that "portable" weapon up the sub's hatch and into position.
We were two days at sea when the word came to scrub the mission. I guess wiser heads prevailed, or the situation cooled off.
The Davey Crockett used either the 120mm or 150mm recoiless rifles with a range of between >1 to over two miles depending on which rifle was used.
The yield was small and most of the damage came from the Prompt Radiation.
> There was some flap in Bolivia at that time and the govt decided to send a few subs down there for some clandestine blockade duty.
Bolivia is landlocked, obviously a government operation. ;’)
And the blast radius was greater than the range. The crew had to dig a slit trench to hide in until the blast wave passed them. Not one of our better ideas.
Yeah, I just had a "Wait a minute" flash and checked for a name I remembered - Arbenez. My bad - it was Guatemala.
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