Bazooka: "The Anti-Tank Rocket M6" 1943 US Army Training Film; M1 & M1A1 Bazookas

• Report rights infringement
• published: 08 Sep 2016
• views: 149836

US Army Training Film playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0C7C6CCF1C0DEBB3 Firearms playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL22A5611941174745 US Army training film covering use of the M1 and M1A1 bazooka and the M6 and M6A1 rocket ammunition, plus M7 and M7A1 practice ammo. Also shows how to jerry rig bazooka rockets as booby trap mines against enemy tanks. US Army Training Film TF18-1166 Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazooka Bazooka is the common name for a man-portable recoilless antitank rocket launcher weapon, widely fielded by the United States Army. Also referred to as the "Stovepipe", the innovative bazooka was among the first generation of rocket-propelled anti-tank weapons used in infantry combat. Featuring a solid rocket motor for propulsion, it allowed for high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) warheads to be delivered against armored vehicles, machine gun nests, and fortified bunkers at ranges beyond that of a standard thrown grenade or mine. The bazooka also fired a high explosive squash head (HESH) round, effective against buildings and tank armor. The universally applied nickname arose from the M1 variant's vague resemblance to the musical instrument called a "bazooka" invented and popularized by 1930s U.S. comedian Bob Burns. During World War II, German armed forces captured several bazookas in early North African and Eastern Front encounters and soon reverse engineered their own version, increasing the warhead diameter to 8.8 cm (among other minor changes) and widely issuing it as the Raketenpanzerbüchse "Panzerschreck" ("Tank terror"). The term "bazooka" still sees informal use as a generic term referring to any ground-to-ground shoulder-fired missile weapon (mainly rocket propelled grenades)... World War II Secretly introduced via the Russian front and in November 1942 during Operation Torch, early production versions of the M1 launcher and M6 rocket were hastily supplied to some of the U.S. invasion forces during the landings in North Africa. On the night before the landings, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was shocked to discover from a subordinate that none of his troops had received any instruction in the use of the bazooka. Initially supplied with the highly unreliable M6 rocket and without training, the M1 did not play a significant armed role in combat in the North African fighting, but did provide a German intelligence coup when some were captured by the Germans in early encounters with inexperienced US troops. A US general visiting the Tunisian front in 1943 after the close of combat operations could not find any soldiers who could report that the weapon had actually stopped an enemy tank. Further issue of the bazooka was suspended in May 1943. During the Allied invasion of Sicily, small numbers of the M1A1 bazooka (using an improved rocket, the M6A1) were used in combat by US forces. The M1A1 accounted for four medium German tanks and a heavy Tiger I, with the latter being knocked out by an improbable hit through the driver's vision slot. A major disadvantage to the bazooka was the large backblast and smoke trail (in colder weather), which gave away the position of the shooter, mandating quick relocation of the squad. Moreover, the bazooka fire team often had to expose their bodies in order to obtain a clear field of fire against an armored target. Casualties among bazooka team members were extremely high during the war... The M1 bazooka fared much better on the rare occasions when it could be used against the much thinner armor typically fitted to the lower sides, underside, and top of enemy tanks. To hit the bottom panel of an enemy tank, the bazooka operator had to wait until the tank was surmounting a steep hill or other obstruction, while hitting the top armor usually necessitated firing the rocket from the upper story of a building or similar elevated position. Even the heavy King Tiger tank only possessed hull and turret top armor thicknesses of 44 mm (1-3/4 in) thickness at best, capable of being pierced by the American bazooka's shaped-charge rocket ordnance...