What exactly is a bazooka

A bazooka is a special kind of gun. It was first used by United States infantry against enemy tanks, during World War II. The German tanks were covered with a steel armor so thick that no rifle or machine- gun bullet could go through it. Only a direct hit from a heavy cannon could stop them. To the soldier, these tanks were terrifying. His rifle, machine gun and grenades were useless against it. All he could do was crouch in his foxhole or trench and wait for the steel monsters to pass over his head, and hope that he would not be crushed, or killed by its machine guns. The commanders of the United States Army realized that the infantrymen had to have a weapon so light that a soldier could easily carry it, yet able to deliver a blow as powerful as that of a mediumsized cannon.

The answer to this problem was the bazooka, which was not really a gun but a rocket-launcher. It was a steel tube about five feet long and open at both ends. There were two handles attached to the bottom of the tube and a pair of sights on top, through which the soldier could look at his target. The forward handle was for the left hand and the rear handle had a trigger for the right hand. Bazookas were usually fired by a crew of two men. The man who aimed the bazooka held it by its two handles and placed the rear end of the tube on his right shoulder so that it stuck out past his back eight or nine inches. Then the second man put a small rocket into the rear of the tube and pushed it down into the firing place. When the trigger was pressed, the rocket gave off a stream of smoke and flame from its tail, which rushed out of the rear of the tube, while the rocket itself flew forward with great speed toward the tank. There was an explosive charge in the nose of the rocket that could do tremendous damage to the steel walls of the tank.

The armor at the front of a tank was so thick that very often the rocket had little effect Vvhen it struck there. The bazooka operators therefore fired at the treads, or tracks. Once these tracks were broken the tank could no longer move and was crippled, and was then an easy target for artillery firing from the rear over the heads of soldiers in the front lines. Another method of destroying tanks with bazookas was to wait in a hole in the ground until the tank came near enough so that the bazooka crew could fire rockets into the side of the tank, where the armor was thinner than in front. This often tore a hole in the side armor and killed the men in the tank. Sometimes rockets from several bazookas would hit a tank and cause it to explode. The word bazooka was the soldiers' name for the rocket-launcher. The name comes from a homemade horn made of a long, thick pipe, on which a famous radio comedian, Bob Burns, used to play. He called it a bazooka. The rocketlauncher looked somewhat like it.