Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction House
taking a look at a German World War Two Bazooka.
Well, the German equivalent, the German copy of the Bazooka.
This is a Raketenpanzerbüchse 54, or as it is much more commonly known, a Panzerschreck.
Now the Germans first started encountering the Bazooka in Tunisia in 1943.
And they took one look at that thing and realised that was a much better solution to their anti-tank problems
than the gun that they were currently .... finishing the development of which was a thing called the Raketenwerfer 43,
the "Puppchen", which ... was a rocket launcher, sort of, but it fired from a closed sealed breech.
And it was this thing built on a carriage like a small anti-tank gun.
So it really wasn't anywhere remotely as portable as a Bazooka.
They ... started seeing Bazookas and went, "Oh, we should have thought of that."
And what they did in order to speed development they adapted the Bazooka up
from 2.36 inch like the Americans had, to 88mm, which is a little over 3.5 inch.
And they did that so that they could take their existing ammunition from the Puppchen
and only have to redesign the tail end of it with the rocket system to get it working in the Panzerschreck.
They were able to leave the warhead, the fusing, all that stuff exactly the same. So this has led to a long-standing
misunderstanding that the Puppchen and the Panzerschreck used the same ammunition.
They don't, even though they're the same calibre and they're used for the same purpose.
They actually adapted the one to work in the other. So.
Late 1943 these start getting produced, and the most distinctive thing about them at that point is they don't have this shield.
And the Germans have ...
While they've got a larger warhead, and it is a much more effective warhead than the American Bazooka,
the problem is their rocket motors have a bit of an issue.
Namely, they don't extinguish inside the tube. One of the nice things about the American Bazooka
was that once the rocket left the front end of the tube the engine had finished burning,
and so there was no exhaust left to be a problem for the shooter.
Now, there's a huge back blast, but that goes over behind the shooter's shoulder.
With the German ones the rocket kept burning for about 2 metres, about 6 feet, after it left the barrel.
And that meant you had to wear some protective gear or you were gonna burn the crap out of your face and hands when you fired a rocket.
So the initial versions of the Panzerschreck, because they didn't have a shield, they had these fairly elaborate instructions.
You had to wear some sort of face protection, which was typically a gas mask without a filter,
(although they did also actually issue a face shield). You had to wear gloves to protect your hands.
It was not convenient at all. It was the sort of thing where
having to put on that sort of gear, because you're certainly not gonna be running around in it all the time,
having to put on that gear meant you probably missed your opportunity to take a shot with this thing and actually hit a tank.
So instead, what a lot of troops started doing is making their own
shields to bolt onto the front of the tube and fix this problem.
And it wasn't long before the officialdom realised, "OK, yeah, that's a good solution."
And so they made a bunch of shields. It took about eight or nine months,
so well into 1944, close to 1945, before they were actually producing guns brand new with shields.
But they sent out the shields as a conversion kit, and virtually all of these things were updated to include those shields.
So let me go ahead and show you the details of that, as well as the sights and how this thing actually mechanically works.
So this is obviously not the original paint. This has been repainted, but it was a pretty good condition one when that was done.
If we look at the front of the ... shield, there's an interesting feature here, which is
they kind of knew that putting a little glass plate in here was asking for problems.
Because if that gets broken, or if it becomes unclear, you know, if it gets spider webbed, or scorched,
you can't just take it out and not use it, because then you're gonna get rocket exhaust straight through the hole right to your eye.
So what they did was they made it with this hinged holder and little panes of glass.
And so you could actually interchange those panes of glass.
Nice and easy to snap them in there.
And then on the inside
they have a little storage compartment that holds a couple more panes of glass.
So you always had spares with you, which is a really important thing because
the viability of that window is literally essential to being able to use the weapon.
Now there was a virtually continuous stream of upgrades being designed for these things
over the course of the last year or two of the war. In particular the sights went through a bunch of different iterations.
This one ... has one of the mid-level upgrades added to it.
Where originally it just had this fixed bracket with a rear notch,
well, they widened the rear notch, they cut these two oval holes, and they added a plate to it,
so that you can loosen the screw and slide the plate back and forth to adjust for windage.
The front sight has been similarly upgraded.
it has a nice big square front post in it, and then that big ol' thumb screw so that you can loosen it
and adjust it up or down to change your elevation.
Or in theory to aim at longer ranges if you're in a position and you know the range to where you're going to be shooting,
like if you're overlooking a road or an intersection or a bridge,
you can set that front sight to whatever fixed elevation you anticipate.
Now the firing mechanism for these things is pretty cool. And it's totally different from the Bazooka.
So, this looks like a trigger, but it's not, this is actually a cocking lever.
And this one ... the firing mechanism here is only partially intact, but I can show you how it's supposed to work.
As you can see, when I squeeze this back
I'm compressing this spring and pulling back this bar and there's a safety on it, this guy.
This by the way is actually a late-war upgraded safety that you don't find all that often.
Anyway, what you do is you cock that, that safety locks it in place, and now this bar is sticking out.
So what's in here is actually an electromagnetic generator.
There's a winding of copper and a magnet, and then an iron core in the centre. And that iron core can move.
When you pull the trigger, this rod gets shot backwards under pressure from this spring, it hits the centre of that moveable core,
throws it backwards, and that core moving inside the copper winding and the magnet
generates an electrical impulse, which is transmitted in this wire to the back of the gun.
We'll get to the back of the gun in a minute.
You might notice that there's a hole here and this wire doesn't go into it. That's supposed to be that way.
This hole is actually for the welding jig to attach the shoulder support, so that's not broken there.
Now the way this is supposed to work is you cock the thing like this, the safety engages, you then load the rocket.
Then when you release the safety, this rod is actually held in place by the trigger.
Which has been deactivated. The trigger isn't working as it's supposed to.
But what you actually do is release this handle, this remains cocked until you pull the trigger,
then it snaps backward and generates that charge and fires.
The wire is then going to come all the way here to the back of the tube
where we've got this box. And we've got three items here.
This is actually a pin that goes all the way through the tube, I'll show you the inside in a moment,
and that acts as a stop pin so you know how far to insert the rocket.
This is a slightly shorter and pointy pin which acts as the electrical connection, the ground, to the rocket.
And then this is actually a plug connection.
So where the American Bazooka rockets were made with wires coming out the end that you'd have to wrap around a connection stud,
the German rockets just had a wooden plug, with its electrical connections, hanging out the back of the rocket.
You'd load the rocket in the tube and then plug the connection in here, and that would connect you to the firing system.
There is also, just like on a Bazooka, there's a spring-loaded latch here (the spring's gone),
but this acts to prevent the rocket from sliding out the back of the tube after you've loaded it.
So looking up here inside the tube. That pin, right there, is your electrical connection.
This pin is a stop pin. And its surface is kind of rounded so ... the rocket motor can shove past it.
And in the training manual it was noted that it's important to get the rocket on this pin, but not over that one.
And as long as you had it in the right place the front end of the fins would hit this,
and the back end of the fins would be held just in front of this, and everything would be in position to launch.
Overall, this thing was a really quite effective anti-tank weapon. It had a ... combat effective range of about 150 metres.
They tried to extend that later in the war with adjustable sights, but nyah, let's be realistic.
And it could penetrate, thanks to that large 88mm warhead, it could penetrate 17cm of armour at any range.
Because ... armour penetration was based on a shaped charge effect, and not on velocity.
So 17 centimetres was plenty to take out pretty much any Allied tank.
One of the interesting aspects of the Panzerschreck construction that the Bazooka did not have
was the fact that the Panzerschreck was actually about a 91mm tube that then was crimped in three places.
And you can see them very nicely here.
The idea was these crimps brought the internal diameter to 88mm to properly hold the rocket,
they reduced the friction because the rocket body would only be rubbing on these three points,
and they allowed a little bit of fouling or even really minor dents in the tube without restricting or causing real problems.
By the end of the war they'd made a tremendous number of these things, something like 107,000 if not even more than that.
Obviously, they're a great weapon for last-ditch German industry, because they require very little in the way of raw materials.
You know, you don't have to be heat treating any of this stuff. It's a pretty simple weapon.
But even even as simple as this is, by the end of the war they actually experimented with
a compressed cardboard version of this thing, if you can believe that level of desperation.
There was also an RPzB 54/1, Raketenpanzerbüchse 54/1, which was a shortened version.
They cut a little bit off the back of the tube to make it lighter and handier.
Those are pretty scarce, and those were only introduced in 1945 and not a whole lot of those are floating around. So.
This is a pretty cool example of the standard version and it is still completely intact.
Now as you saw, the firing mechanism needs a little work, but
there aren't any big holes that have been drilled in the side of this thing.
So it is, of course, duly registered as a destructive device under the National Firearms Act.
All legal to own. And if you'd be interested in having it yourself take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com, which then has a link to the Morphy Auction catalogue
where you can take a look at their pictures, their description, their price estimate, all that sort of stuff.
See if it's the sort of thing that you'd like to have yourself.
Thanks for watching.