http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/bazooka-1.htm
In prewar America, a West Point ordnance officer, Maj. Leslie A. Skinner, was responsible for the Army’s rocket program. The Army had assigned him to its new rocket research group of the National Defense Research Committee in Washington, DC, in 1940. Money for projects never filtered down, however, nor did guidance as to what he was supposed to develop. Skinner benefited from the work of Robert H. Goddard. Unlike Goddard, who had demonstrated a rocket gun at the end of World War I, Skinner and Edward G. Uhl unveiled their invention at a more opportune time. In a private workshop, on their own time, the pair created the bazooka, the first workable US military-produced rocket. Uhl, a recent graduate of Lehigh University, had a thorough grounding in physics and engineering. Despite Hickman’s high interest, the Army rocket program remained a relatively low priority with a miniscule budget. Uhl, for example, would first search the Powder Factory’s scrap heap whenever he needed some metal. While rummaging through the scrap pile behind his workshop, Uhl came upon a 5-foot length of metal pipe that proved just wide enough to accept a 60-mm. round.
Within months of U.S. involvement in World War II, the Army adopted, produced and fielded the 2.36-inch-diameter, shoulder-fired anti-tank rocket and tube launcher. The first troops to receive it called it “the Buck Rogers gun.”
At the first test firing of the rocket grenade, the firing tube was dubbed the bazooka after the humorous musical instrument which entertainer Bob Burns had fashioned from two gas pipes and a funnel in the 1930s. Suggestions that it was named because of the sound it made when fired appear less well established. Topps developed its Bazooka Bubble Gum product in Brooklyn, New York after World War II ended. Bazooka is also famous for the popular series of Bazooka Joe comics, first introduced in 1953 to add extra interest for youngsters.
Initially known only under the code name of THE WHIP, the bazooka was a shoulder projector launching an effective 2.36-inch antitank rocket. For the first time in history a foot soldier had a weapon specifically designed to penetrate armor. The rocket included the hollow-charge antitank principle. The destructive power of the combat arms — infantry, armor, and artillery — greatly increased in World War II. Infantry carried its own antitank weapons in the form of the American 2.36 inch Bazooka rocket launcher.
I like the scene in Band of Brothers where a lieutenant volunteers an enlisted man to help him stop a German tank headed for their position. The EM doesn't much like the plan but they get the job done, putting a round from their bazooka into the underside of the tank as it climbed over a hump.