bazooka from world war two magazine

Edward Uhl demonst rates the

army's new weapon in 1942

The Man Behind The Bazooka 2

World War II Magazine, November/December 2010

liant one at that. The tube was just long

enough so that the rocket would finish

its 1/50th-of-a-second burn by the time

it emerged from the front opening. The

whole thing weighed a mere 13 pounds

and could easily be carried in the field.

It took only two men to operate, one to

load the rocket into the back end of the

tube and hook up a wire that trailed out

of the rocket's tail, the other to aim and

fire by pulling a trigger that sent an

electric current to the igniter from a

battery in the stock of the launcher. It

could hit a tank or pillbox from 300

yards, putting a hole through four

inches of steel plate.

'I was walking by this

scrap pile, and there

was a tube that was

five feet long and 60

millimeters in

diameter...

I said, That's the

answer!'

Probably the real breakthrough for

Uhl and Skinner, though, came shortly

afterward. One day in May 1942 they

were firing some dummy rounds at a

moving tank at Aberdeen Proving

Ground in Maryland when Brigadier

General Gladeon Marcus Barnes, the

head of ordnance research and development,

happened to pass by with some

other visiting brass. Noticing all of the

flames and whooshes, they came over

to see what was going on. Skinner saw

his chance and—taking a certain

calculated risk—handed the launcher to

Barnes and offered to let him take a

shot. Barnes nailed the tank on his first

try, and pretty soon the visitors had

fired off all of the available rounds.

The weapon was ordered into

production that day; in one of the

fastest development contracts in history,

General Electric was given 30 days to

deliver an initial 5,000 launchers—and

finished the order with 89 minutes to

spare.

By the end of the war, 440,000

bazookas had reached the field. (The

name came from a joke musical instrument

comedian Bob Burns has made

famous in his 1930s radio shows; made

of 3-inch gas pipe and sounding like a

"wounded moose," it bore a definite

resemblance to the rocket launcher.)

Uhl left the army as a lieutenant

colonel in 1947 and went on to become

chairman of the giant defense contractor

Fairchild Industries, but he never forgot

the lesson of what a small team of

innovative thinkers can do. "We have

gotten into the bad habit of heaping

people onto projects," he once said.

"The trap we've fallen into is to believe

that a thousand incompetents properly

organized can do the job of a few dozen

outstanding people."

EDWARD UHL was barely out of

college and barely into uniform when he

found himself constituting 50 percent of

the U.S. Army's rocket research

program. Along with another engineer,

a young major named Leslie Skinner,

Uhl was to figure out some way that

armor-piercing could hurl an armorpiercing

grenade at a target.

The grenades were extremely effective,

using a hollow explosive charge to

form a focused funnel of gas that cut

through armor like a blowtorch. But at

nearly four pounds, they weighed too

much to throw by hand or be fired from

the end of a rifle barrel. So far, the only

idea anyone had for delivering it was

for some poor sap to run up and stick it

directly on the surface of an oncoming

enemy tank.

The army had done a few experiments

with rocket-propelled projectiles as

early as the end of World War I. The

catch was finding some way to shield

the soldier who fired it from the jet of

flame and hot gases that spewed

directly back as the rocket took off. Uhl

was probably engaging in a little

hyperbolic hindsight when he told the

story years later of the eureka moment

he had one day in the spring of 1942

that solved the problem: "I was walking

by this scrap pile, and there was a tube

that was five feet long and 60

millimeters in diameter, which

happened to be the same size as the

grenade that we were turning into a

rocket. I said, 'That's the answer! Put

the tube on a soldier's shoulder with the

rocket inside, and away it goes."

But it was no exaggeration that the

firing tube was the solution, and a bril-