Bazooka Co-Inventor Passes Away

The Boston Globe ^ | 5-14-09 | AP

[BronzePencil]

OXFORD, Maryland

[BronzePencil]

Rest In Peace and God Bless.

[thefactor]

[WayneS]

I’d like to be there for THAT 21 gun salute!

Rest In Peace, sir; and thank you for your service to our country.

[iowamark]

Mr. Uhl joined Fairchild as president in 1961. He oversaw its transformation from a military aircraft manufacturer to an aerospace giant, retiring in 1985.

Fairchild’s products included the A-10 Thunderbolt II, an airplane nicknamed the Warthog that was used against Iraqi tanks in the first Gulf War.

[tet68]

That’s a PIAT not a bazooka.

[thefactor]

You mean google images lied to me? I’m shocked. SHOCKED!

[OneWingedShark]

...I thought schools had a zero-tolerance policy for firearms.
Arrest that man!

[fieldmarshaldj]

RIP.

[iowamark]

[C210N]

and i thought this would be a thread about something completely different...

[tnlibertarian]

Oh, man. I love that gum.

What? Oh never mind.

[Cheesel]

Thanks to him for creating one AWESOME weapon!

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

But the ORIGINAL Bazooka was a musical instrument invented by some guy from Arkan-saw!

[thefactor]

that’s actually the pic i first tried to load. got the little red ‘X’ instead.

[SBprone]

Wasn’t the bazooka a failure against heavy armor? No doubt it had its uses against softer targets.

I’ll bet that by the time he did his work on the A-10 he was determined that it would penetrate and obliterate anything on the battlefield.

[wita]

I thought it was the bubble gum.

[rawhide]

First thing I thought about when I read the headline:

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Wasn’t the bazooka a failure against heavy armor?

The tactic was for the gunner conceal himself until the tank was passing him and then attack from the side or rear where there was less armor. Even the heaviest Panzer were vulnerable to bazookas. MG Walter Dornberger, head of Peenemunde and the Wehrmacht's rocket research bureau said that he was rightly critized for not coming up with the incredibly effective bazooka instead of the showy, but relatively ineffective, V2. (The V1 was not a rocket and was a Luftwaffe project.)

The Germans captured some bazookas in North Africa and reverse engineered and improved them to come up with the Panzerschreck. The bazooka changed the rules of tank warfare by requiring infantry to accompany tanks to suppress or discourage bazooka attacks. The infantry both slowed up the tanks and were themselves vulnerable to indirect fire, which the tanks were not.

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

RIP, Mr. Uhl.

Maryland “Freak State” PING!

[Little Bill]

I had a Platoon Sgt in the States who was with the 1ST Division in WW2, in all of its campaigns. He said they has a SGT that showed them, in North Africa, how to skip a Bazooka round across a mine field to set them off. Whether this was true or not he wasn’t prone to exaggeration, for a Texan.