Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the Rock Island Auction
Company looking at a Bazooka, the real thing.
This is actually not the first Bazooka, this is
either the second or the fourth pattern of Bazooka, depending on
how you want to count them. This is an M9A1, and is actually a
"Launcher, Rocket, 2.36 inch, M9A1", colloquially known as a Bazooka.
Now when the United States entered World War Two
we really had nothing for a light infantry anti-tank weapon.
We had some anti-tank guns, which actually weren't all that good,
and we had some tanks.
But as far as if you have a bunch of infantry and they run into an armoured vehicle, they're kinda screwed.
So developing some sort of weapon that would allow infantry to
defend themselves against armoured vehicles was really quite a priority.
And in 1941 a pair of Army Ordnance guys, Captain Leslie Skinner and Lieutenant Edward Uhl,
were given the task of, "Hey, come up with something."
And what they did is they combined a couple of ideas. They figured if we take a hollow charge grenade,
like, that's got the explosive power to go through enough armour, the amount of armour we want.
Which, by the way, at that point their goal was 4 inches of armour penetration, about 100mm.
And that's what they ended up creating, and that worked at the beginning, early in the war.
But by the end of the war this was really substantially underpowered
for a lot of the German armour that was coming onto the battlefield.
Even more so in Korea, but we'll get to that later.
So now the problem is of course you ... need a longer range than just how far a guy can chuck a grenade.
So these two guys got the idea to put a rocket motor on the grenade, now it will go farther.
Then you have this issue of how do you protect the soldier from the exhaust from this rocket,
you know, the jet of fire coming out the back. And Uhl came up with the idea of, "Let's stick it in a launch tube."
And then the soldier's sitting here so the blast at the back is deflected back behind the soldier,
and then you've got a nice long run here for the rocket to actually burn
and protect the shooter from the rocket exhaust when it finally does leave the muzzle.
So that became the M1 Bazooka, or the "Launcher, Rocket, 2.36 inch, M1", aka the Bazooka.
Now this version, the M9, was actually introduced in 1943.
And the ... main difference is they replaced the firing mechanism with a magneto.
... Both of these have electrical firing systems. The original Bazooka
had a battery in the grip and when you pulled the trigger it connected a circuit and launched the rocket.
The problem was they had trouble with batteries, corrosion, had some problems on the circuits, and
even though there was a testing system, you could like put it to test and confirm that the battery was good before you actually fired.
Even with that, there were too many situations where guys basically
got lined up, had a good shot, pulled the trigger and nothing happened because the battery was dead.
So by changing to a magneto they were able to ... get rid of the batteries.
And when you click this trigger,
that's actually creating the electrical spark, or the electrical current, that you are going to need to fire the rocket.
So that was the big improvement to the M9, and then the M9A1 is the additional improvement of
it comes apart into two pieces. So now it's much more easily transported.
So the M9A1 version that you see here was introduced in June of 1944,
and the optical sight, which we'll look at in a moment, was introduced in September of '44.
So this is really the late World War Two version of the Bazooka.
However it kept the same bore diameter and used the same ammunition as the original M1
and M1A1 disassemblable versions.
So that would be
this guy. This is an M6 rocket, the original ammunition for the Bazooka. This one is of course inert.
And by the way, while the Bazooka here is being sold, it's actually live, it's a registered destructive device,
Rock Island are selling it. This is separate, and this doesn't come with it.
I scrounged this elsewhere just so I could show you what it looks like.
This guy is a hollow charge shell, we'll take a look at it up close up in a moment, but
basically it weighs about 4 pounds, it has allegedly a maximum range of about 300 yards,
but apparently in practical reality you can go to about 100 yards to get a reliable hit.
Because this travels relatively slowly, the muzzle velocity on this thing is 265 feet per second,
that's about 80 metres per second. So, if you think about a 300 metre shot,
that's going to take about 4 full seconds for the rocket to actually get there.
One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand.
That's a lot of time for wind to affect this, for the target to move if it's a vehicle,
especially if it's a light armoured wheeled vehicle that's moving fairly rapidly,
or even a tank that's moving fairly rapidly.
You know, at 20, 30, 40 miles an hour you can cover a lot of ground in 4 seconds. So
the maximum effective range isn't necessarily realistic.
Let's actually start with the ammunition here. This is an inert M6 rocket.
We have, the warhead is actually right in here,
this is just a nose cone basically, to make it nice and aerodynamic.
The warhead is back here and it's a hollow charge, which means, take this cone and basically invert it pointing that way
and you have this open hollow section on the inside of the charge, and that focusses the blast.
And that's what allows this to penetrate as much as 100mm or 4 inches of armour.
The section in here has the actual rocket motor.
And then we've got a series of six fins on the back, these are a little bent,
but you get the idea. These are not spring loaded, by the way.
Like on an RPG rocket you have fins that pop out after it clears the tube, these stay in this configuration.
And lastly, let's see ... there it is.
There is a wire that comes out the back of the rocket and that's for ignition.
This is not that unlike a modern model rocket in concept. So,
they are electrically fired, of course you saw that the early ones have a battery, the later ones have a magneto.
Well, in order to make that happen remember you've got a wire coming out here,
and this one has been clipped off, so normally it would be much longer.
Also note that you have little indentations in each of the fins, right here.
By the way, this pointed nose style of projectile would turn out to have some problems.
Primarily it was too likely to glance off a vehicle if it hit at a very shallow angle.
So they would actually revise this and come up with a new design of rocket
that had a much ... blunter round style of nose that was less likely to glance off of a vehicle.
Now bear with me for a moment, we are going to transition over to the firing mechanism.
We have our trigger here and a safety switch, so safe and fire.
Which doesn't actually block the trigger, but it does disconnect the electrical circuit
which is pretty effective at preventing it from firing.
Now, when you pull this trigger it's going to generate a little, very brief, electrical charge.
That charge is going to be transmitted through this wire down the length of the tube
all the way down here, and then to the back of the Bazooka. The wire frame bit is the back end.
Now once we get here, the wire is soldered onto this metal band.
That band is actually insulated from the body of the tube by this layer, this isn't metal.
... Honestly I don't know what it is, but it's wrapped around the tube,
so this is another layer of it, and it's non-conductive. And that's very important.
Connected to the band here that has the wire on it, we have these two
studs, or pegs. And that is where this end of the circuit stops.
So this is the positive end of the electrical firing circuit.
The negative side of the circuit, the ground, is from the grip connected to the actual tube of the rocket,
so the main metal body, and then connected to this spring clamp.
(... like that, right there.)
And then the rocket itself acts to connect these two together. So the positive goes to this wire, and the negative goes to the fins.
When I load this thing, what I am going to do is slide the rocket
into the ... tube, lift this up so it doesn't catch on the rocket head, we're going to slide it all the way up until
this clamp snaps into one of those little notches, right there.
There we go. That is going to do two things.
First off, that makes the negative connection from the ... rocket tube to the Bazooka shell,
and it also prevents the rocket from either sliding down into the tube or falling out the back
if you point this thing either up or down.
Then we are going to take that wire, which is right there, and we are going to move it out here
and wrap it around one of these two electrical connection studs, and that connects the positive end.
Then when you pull the trigger, the electrical charge sets off the fuse and ignites the rocket.
The next step of course is aiming it, no good to fire a rocket off if you can't actually hit the target.
So the original Bazookas, and even the early M9s, had what were called bar sights. Basically big open iron sights.
And you'll see them on the early Bazookas, there's this big ... rectangular ladder on the front end of the thing.
What they introduced ... in the fall of 1944 was the T90 Optical Sight.
So we can lift the cover there, and then this whole thing pivots out and sits perpendicular to the actual launcher.
Our range is set right here, so
in theory this ... sight goes out to 600 yards, which seems incredibly optimistic.
Especially if you look at the angle of fire that that would involve, this is like indirect rocket artillery at that point.
So we'll move this down to something more reasonable, like 50.
The sight itself is actually kind of interesting, it's sort of an optical sight, but
it doesn't have crosshairs in it, instead it actually has a neurd [?] reticle.
If I tilt this just right, there it is, you can see the reticle pop up right there.
So, that's the nice kind of video-gamey bullseye sight that you have on this thing.
You can see it from the back here as well, not just from the front of course.
And that makes this a more precise weapon than it had been just with the fixed open sights.
Like I said, that was introduced in September of '44.
And then lastly for disassembly we have a spring-loaded pin here,
hold this open and then I can rotate this, take it apart.
You can see we have three big locking lugs that have
three big matching nesting claws, and that's what hold the two ends together, so.
A nice smooth transition from one end of the tube to the other in there, and away you go.
To put this together for transportation we have ... a hook here and a matching lug there.
That's going to fit in like so,
and then this spring-loaded catch right behind the trigger
which locks into this little piece.
And there you go, all packed up and ready to jump out of an airplane or pack along a trail.
So these were manufactured in pretty staggering numbers, we're talking like 8,000 a month for a couple of years.
The US military at the end of World War Two had a lot of Bazookas.
Part of the beauty of this thing is it's light, it's transportable, and it's really cheap.
It's basically a stove-pipe tube with a magneto and a little bit of wire on it, so why not make a ton of them?
Unfortunately it was becoming obsolescent by the end of World War Two.
And this is what the US military would go into the Korean War with, simply because they had so many of them on hand.
And this rocket, ... and even the updated versions of it (which didn't really change its armour penetration capability),
that wasn't sufficient for what were mostly T-34 tanks that the US was running into in Korea.
So ... they would do their best to improve on these and that would lead to the larger version, the M20 Bazooka,
which was enlarged from 2.36 inch (which by the way was chosen because it's 60mm,
so it's the same size as a standard mortar projectile, which simplified designing and developing the charges.)
however they increased it up to a 3.5 inch Bazooka, the M20, during the Korean War.
So that pretty much covers the life and lineage, the combat lineage of this guy.
Late World War Two and a lot of maybe not so effective use in Korea.
Still, it is one of the iconic weapons of World War Two, and of course General Eisenhower actually
rattled this off as, in his mind, one of the four most important aspects of the US military system
that allowed us to win in World War Two. The others of course being the Jeep, the C-47,
and something else, shoot, what was the fourth one?
Oh, and the atomic bomb. So anyway, this as I said is a registered, NFA transferrable, destructive device,
If you're interested in having it, or if you just want to know more about this, see Rock Island's
high resolution pictures, and value estimate, and description, you can take look at it in their catalogue.
If you take a look at the description text below, you'll find a link there to my web site, ForgottenWeapons.com,
and from there you can link across to Rock Island's catalogue page.
Thanks for watching.
Alright, so two more quick things. First off, you're probably wondering where does the name Bazooka come from?
After all, the last time I did a video about the M20 Bazooka I said I'd tell you and I never ended up doing that.
Well, it originated with a radio comedian by the name of Bob Burns and he had a device he called a bazooka
which was basically a fancified kazoo, you know where you actually use your lips as the reed,
to make a really annoying sort of quasi-musical sound.
Well he had a version that had a piece of tube on it that you could length or shorten like a trombone
and a bell end on the end.
And that got popularised I guess on radio music and comedy programs in the 1930s.
Well, comedy as in not serious music.
And when this thing got adopted in 1942, that was immediately what came to mind for a lot of GIs
and the name totally stuck. The bubble gum, by the way, came after the war.
The second thing I want to point out that I forgot to mention earlier is Edward Uhl,
that guy who was originally half responsible for designing and building this thing,
he really made a career out of destroying armoured vehicles. He would go on to become the president of the Fairchild Aircraft Company
and had a substantial hand in the development and the adoption and the production of the A-10 Thunderbolt II.
The probably coolest tank destroying aircraft ever built.
Anyway, that's all, just a couple of extra add-ons.
Thanks for watching.