By Will Dabbs, MD
The tank was first used in combat on September 15, 1916, at Flers-Courcelette by the British during the Battle of the Somme. Those early Mk I tanks weighed 31 tons, sported a crew of eight, and had a top speed of 3.7 mph on a proper road. They were slower over broken ground. German soldiers who faced these armored monsters for the first time frequently threw down their weapons and fled.
The subsequent Second World War saw the most transformational advances in military technology in all of human history. The prospect of utter annihilation can be an excellent motivator. Over the course of six years, the state of the art in armored vehicles leapt ahead apace. One side made a better tank, while the other made a better antitank weapon. We see this curious tit-for-tat play out even today in Ukraine via YouTube.
an Engineering Solution to Every Problem
In 1888, Charles Edward Munroe was a civilian chemist working at the U.S. Naval Torpedo Station at Newport, Rhode Island. When he detonated a container of explosive guncotton against a metal plate, he observed that the manufacturer’s lettering that had been embossed on the tin guncotton container was cut deeply into the target. In 1894, he weaponized this curious bit of physics into the first practical shaped charge.
A shaped charge is a sort of explosive lens that focuses the cumulative force of the device onto a single point. These things will cut through astronomical amounts of steel. The challenge was getting the warhead onto the target without dying.
The solution began with Robert Goddard, America’s alpha rocket scientist. Goddard pioneered rocketry in the years immediately following World War 1, transforming this nascent tech for the modern battlefield. These early efforts eventually also filled the night sky with satellites and put men on the moon.
In the early 1940s, the U.S. Army fielded the M10 antitank grenade. This handheld shaped charge weapon was capable of defeating most period armored vehicles, particularly if deployed against the sides or top. However, the M10 weighed 3.5 pounds. It was a big ask to expect some grunt to run up to a tooled-up panzer and touch that bad boy off. American troops desperately needed some way to get the grenade onto the tank without getting pulverized in the process.
Serendipity — The Bazooka
In 1942, an Ordnance officer named Lt. Edward Uhl was tasked with solving that very problem. Uhl first mounted the M10 warhead atop a small rocket. Now the challenge was figuring out how to launch the thing safely.
Lieutenant Uhl found himself among the detritus from his machine shop when he had an epiphany. In his own words, “I was walking by this scrap pile, and there was a tube that…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.'”
Lieutenant Uhl bodged together a crude launcher out of pipe scraps and charged it with his homemade antitank rocket. He donned a welding helmet for his first test shot just to make sure he didn’t burn his face off. Not only did he toss the M10 quite a respectable distance, the rocket effluvium was not nearly as violent as expected.
There followed a practical test of the new DIY rocket launcher against five different competing designs at Aberdeen Proving Ground with the objective of hitting a moving tank. On the morning of the competition, Lt. Uhl realized that his contraption lacked any sights. He quickly improvised some using a nail and scrap of coat hanger wire. His was the only one of the six weapons to hit the tank.
Lieutenant Uhl’s bazooka begat the German panzerschreck that begat the M72 LAW that eventually led to the FGM-148 Javelin Advanced Anti-Tank Weapon System-Medium that has done such a splendid job of decommissioning Vladimir Putin’s once-vaunted tank force in Ukraine. Shaped charge warheads ride atop the RPG-7, the Hellfire missile, and many others. And to think that all of this began with Lt. Uhl’s scrap of pipe, a nail, and a bent piece of coat hanger.
