Fun little known fact for you. The M20A1B1 Super Bazooka is actually one of the most effective weapons ever manufactured,
if judged on a weight to awesomeness ratio.
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the
James Julia Auction House taking a look at some of
... the anti-tank rocket launchers that are going to be
for sale in their upcoming fall of 2017 firearms auction.
And this specifically is an M20A1B1 Super Bazooka.
This was the standard, and really quite effective,
US anti-tank weapon in the Korean War.
Now unfortunately this one is actually deactivated and not a live weapon.
So I guess on the plus side that makes it a lot easier to own legally, on the downside
it's not actually functional, and I'll show you exactly what they did to deactivate it in a minute.
But a little bit of backstory on this first. The US is one of the few countries that
went into World War Two without really anything in the way of an infantry anti-tank weapon.
Most of the major militaries had some sort of weapon, usually an anti-tank rifle, that gave a
detached infantry unit some way to actually effectively fight light armoured vehicles.
So with the British this was the Boys anti-tank rifle, the Germans had a couple Panzerbüchse anti-tank rifles,
the Russians built anti-tank rifles, although they did it a little bit later in the war.
The US never had a heavy anti-tank rifle per se.
They did some experiments with turning the .50 calibre Browning M2 into one, but those never went anywhere,
and the closest thing the US ever had was anti-tank rifle grenades.
Well, the problem was they weren't very good at the beginning of the war,
and by late 1942 there was a solution to this problem, and that was the M1 Bazooka.
I'll touch on the name at the end of the video, where that came from. But the Bazooka is...
basically a 5 foot long metal tube that fires a self-contained rocket with a shaped charge warhead.
So the idea is ... by 1942 the ability of a typical conventional projectile weapon
to defeat tank armour was going fast, if not completely gone.
Those anti-tank rifles depended on simply velocity and the hardness and sharpness of a projectile
to be able to physically punch through armour. Well with a shaped charge warhead,
you ... had to have a bigger projectile, but you didn't have to have a conventional firearm action.
You can have something like a Bazooka that didn't have to contain all the pressure of a bullet firing,
and then that shaped-charge warhead could use basically chemical properties, the
shaping of an explosion to funnel the power in a directed area,
it could use that to become far more effective at armour penetration than just a kinetic projectile.
And that's the way armour perforating weapons have gone ever since.
So the US introduced the Bazooka in late '42. It was at that point a 2.36 inch weapon,
and it was pretty effective at first, started to have some trouble by the end of the war.
The US started developing this, the heavier 3.5 inch version of the weapon, even during mid to late World War Two.
The M20, which was the first main 3.5 inch US Bazooka, was type classified, or adopted, in 1945.
Although it didn't go into production until 1948, so really didn't see any World War Two use.
But it would see a fair amount of use in the early days of the Korean War. Troops in the Korean War
were armed initially with the old M1s, but they managed to get more and more of these M20s
into the hands of troops. And in the early period of the Korean War, when there was actually
a reasonable amount of tank combat, they proved to be quite effective.
It's interesting, ... the shell on this can penetrate like 11 inches of armour,
it's a ton of armour, and that's way up from the 3 inches that the original
M1 2.36 inch Bazookas were capable of going through.
However, this still had one potential flaw from sloped armour, ... I know what you're thinking,
that's not because the sloped armour makes it effectively a longer path to actually penetrate,
the problem is the Bazooka shell had an impact fuse.
So it would hit, crush and detonate and if you hit armour at too great of a slope,
you actually wouldn't hit the nose of the round square on enough to detonate,
and the round would simply skip off. Not because the charge was insufficient,
but because it didn't actually impact the target at the right angle to detonate in the first place.
I think there are a number of troops who didn't quite understand the mechanics of how that shell actually worked,
and were remarkably pissed off to see shells ... literally bouncing off of enemy tanks.
At any rate, as long as you understood how to use this weapon it was a really effective weapon.
A couple of advantages. It has literally no recoil, because nothing is contained here.
This isn't even like a quote-unquote recoilless rifle, which does actually recoil somewhat.
This is just a tube to guide the rocket. It has no muzzle flash although
it does have a remarkably huge amount of dangerous back blast.
The primary danger area on this thing is a 25 yard square area out to 75 yards where there's a potential hazard.
I read an interesting anecdote from the Vietnam War with some ARVN troops who had these and,
you know, when one of these things came up to a combat line you never really necessarily
knew exactly where they were going to be firing it, because maybe you
couldn't see the tank, or you didn't know if they saw something that you didn't.
But what you did know was that you did not want to be behind that thing,
because that's really dangerous to be behind.
And so there's this anecdote from an ARVN commander saying that when one of these things showed up on the line,
anyone who could see it - their immediate priority became getting away from the rear end of that thing.
And so people tended to stop shooting at the enemy and take cover.
And if the gunner of this thing was kind of searching for a target and aiming to one side and then moving,
it was like this comedy of errors where every time he moved, all the guys that were now behind him
would scatter to get away from the potential back blast, not knowing when it was going to fire.
How much of that was a real systemic issue well, probably not, more so in the jungle where guys are closer together.
That wasn't really reported as a real problem for American troops.
Anyway, this is the M20A1B1. So the M20 was the early version of this thing,
it actually had a bipod on it, had a rear monopod on it, had a couple other features,
that were deleted with the A1 version, and that saved a couple of pounds.
This thing only weighs 13 pounds, it is remarkably light for its size.
And then the B1 designation means... it's because there are two different manufacturing
methods for these. One was the M20A1 and one was the A1B1, just indicating the alternative manufacture.
So the significant majority of the ones that are out there are the B1 style, including this.
We have an optical sight, we have a couple other cool features.
So let me go ahead and show you how to take it apart, and how it actually functions.
And yeah, we'll take a look up close.
Alright, first things first. This Bazooka is too long for me to get the whole thing
in a close-up camera shot, so I need to make it smaller.
This is the same problem you would run into if you were trying to transport this thing around, or
in an armoured personnel carrier, or jumping out of an airplane, or any number of things.
So I'm gonna push this lever in, there we go, and then I can rotate
the front half of the barrel and unlatch it from the rear half. Now we have a much more compact piece.
If I want to transport this, I can now lock this into that and
then use this spring-loaded catch at the front and now,
I have something that's only about 2.5 feet long and you can actually carry around,
especially using the carry strap. So, much more convenient this way.
Pretty much all the cool bits are right here in the middle, so let's move on to that.
We have ... a reflector type optical sight that is mounted on an integral bracket here.
That's one of the changes to the A1 version, on the standard M20 this was bolted on.
And then we have, let's see, the sight itself folds out.
And then we've got this pivot.
This is our standard sighting position, goes from basically zero out to 450 yards in
... 100 yard increments, and then if you want to go farther you've got 500 through 900 out here.
The effective range of this thing was really like 200 to 300 yards.
But I suppose if you were just trying to fire area effect high-explosive, instead of targeting a specific vehicle,
... then those longer ranges could make sense.
And you'll note that in order to do that because of the drop of the rocket, they have to physically rotate the sight
to a significantly different angle than your direct fire or your close-range settings
There is also a little metal cover piece there, a lens cap, so you'd flip that up before you use it.
Firing this uses just a standard trigger. There is a safety selector on here, fire is at the top, safe is at the bottom.
Safe just blocks the trigger. The firing mechanism here is very simple, it's basically just an electrical connection.
When you click this trigger you are actually creating a spark, think of it like the spark igniter on a gas oven.
The original World War Two Bazookas used batteries.
It was superior to not have batteries and not need to worry about them.
What you have here
and then running all the way down the length of the Bazooka is the electrical connection.
And then it runs to this box with a lever on the back.
That lever is the really most significant improvement of the M20A1 over the M20.
On the original M20 you would put the rocket in the back, and then you would have to wind a wire from the rocket
around a contact post on the back of the Bazooka in order to make an electrical connection to fire.
That was a significant pain, and so they replaced it with this.
In this one, the forward position here is for loading, and once the rocket's loaded,
you flip that into the upward position, and it's ready to fire. What this does
when it's down it allows you to just push the rocket all the way in until it stops.
With the earlier model, and the World War Two Bazookas, you would kind of slide the rocket into the back,
or your assistant gunner would I should say,
and just you'd kind of roughly judge exactly where it was positioned.
It didn't make much difference as long as the electrical connections were in place.
On this one the electrical connections are now fixed into the back of the tube, and so with the lever down
you just push the rocket until it hits the stops, and then you know it's in the right position.
Once it's loaded, you put it in the fire position and that's going to lock the rocket in place so it can't slip out the back
Well, not lock it in place, it's going to prevent it from slipping out the back,
it will not prevent it from going rocketing out the front.
So we can see some of what's going on here by looking in the back of the tube.
There's a stop right there, this is the load position,
that's the fire position. This right here is actually your electrical connector, and it's spring-loaded.
So what you do is run the rocket in until it hits that fixed stop at the base,
at that point it will be pushing properly on that electrical connector, you then switch this
and now the stop at the front goes down, recesses into the tube, and you have a stop here
at the back that prevents the rocket from coming out backwards. So this is your second connector,
that's going to attach over the fin of one of the rockets, and that ensures that everything is properly lined up and ready to fire.
Back here we can also see one of the two things that was done to deactivate this.
In the US according to law, in order to deactivate a destructive device like this,
you have to have an obstruction in the bore that prevents a loaded round from being put in.
That would be this bar welded in place.
And then you also have to cut a hole that is the muzzle diameter in the body of the weapon.
It's a little hard to see, but that hole is right here. It's really obvious on the inside
This was originally cut in the main tube and then someone has patched it from the inside
with just a little thin sheet of tin or something
Looking down there you can see that patch on the inside.
... I mean even if you took the bar out, this would totally not be safe to shoot,
that would be a huge problem, the rocket would blow that thing right out.
However being patched like that and painted over, it looks really good as a display item.
Alright, the camera doesn't really want to focus on the reticle here, I can only get a little bit ... at a time.
But what you have are these centre stadia lines with ... wind holdovers,
because wind is going to have a huge impact on where your rocket goes. And then over here at the edge
we've got our range markings, so 0, 1, 2, 3 and 400 yards.
Now if I can see it at the bottom, there we go,
we have one other little marking about the actual shells being used in that reticle.
But then, that is what you would use to aim.
Sorry I can't get a better visual in there, some of these old optics are just really hard to get with the camera.
Ultimately these served in the Korean War as a primary weapon.
They were still in service, or used, in the Vietnam War both by the US and by ARVN, South Vietnam.
They were used by a wide variety of other countries. The French used these in both Algeria and Indochina,
you know, the US provided this sort of thing as military aid to a whole wide variety of countries.
By the later half of the 1960s, however, this was replaced as the primary US armament,
it was replaced with a 90mm recoilless rifle. ... Those had some pros and cons,
they were a lot heavier, ammo was lighter, they had a longer range, they were more accurate but...
And anyway, we'll talk about one of those on another day.
Ultimately we pretty much go back to rockets with the M72 LAW.
So if you'd like to have this one, of course the pro and the con is that it's deactivated.
That means it's a lot easier to own, no particular paperwork or anything to go through.
Doesn't even qualify as a firearm legally.
Of course it does mean if you happen to have a basement full of 3.5 inch Bazooka rockets
you are not able to use them in this, sorry, you'll have to find one somewhere else.
At any rate, take a look at the description text below if you're interested.
You'll find a link there to the Julia catalogue page on this guy.
You can take a look at their pictures and description, and you can place a bid online,
or over the phone, or you can come to Maine and participate live in the auction.
Thanks for watching.