Rockets were used for centuries on the world’s battlefields, principally as a form of artillery. Deployed and fired in concentrated masses, they made up for limited accuracy with their considerable striking power and their in-comparable psychological effect on their victims. Eclipsed by the rapid improvement of artillery during the nineteenth century, they made a wide-spread comeback in World War II. One reason for rockets’ renewed popu-larity was the technological advances made in the 1920s and 1930s: liquid fuels, gyroscopic guidance systems, and so on. Another reason was the de-velopment of vehicles—airplanes, trucks, landing craft—whose structure enabled them to carry rocket launchers but not heavy cannon.
Rockets were used in three distinct roles during World War II. The first role was centuries old: barrage rockets, fired rapidly and in quantity in order to saturate a large area of the battlefield in a short time. The sec-ond was relatively new, having been pioneered by the French air force in World War I: direct-fire rockets, aimed singly or in small numbers at specific targets. The third role was entirely new: rocket propulsion systems for air-craft and guided missiles. Rockets made a significant contribution to the war in their barrage and direct-fire roles, altering the course of battles and the tempo of entire campaigns. Rocket propulsion had a far smaller impact during the war, but an enormous impact afterward. An extraordinary range of innovative weapons were developed during World War II, but none
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(even the nuclear bomb) has changed warfare more than the rocket-propelled guided missile.
B A R R A G E R O C K E T S
Cannon had been the backbone of the world’s artillery units for 500 years before World War II. They continued in that role throughout the war itself.
When handled by skilled crews, cannon remained unmatched in their abil-ity to deliver accurate, sustained, heavy fire from a distance. Cannon also, however, retained their traditional shortcomings. They were complex and expensive to manufacture, difficult to move on short notice, and (because of their ferocious recoil) capable of being fired only from a solid foundation.
Rocket launchers were less technologically sophisticated than even the simplest cannon. Most consisted of little more than a set of launching rails or tubes, mounted in parallel on a metal frame that could be rotated or tilted in order to aim them. Most of the rockets they fired were equally straightforward: unguided, solid-propellant weapons with diameters under 6 inches and warheads measured in tens of pounds. The individual barrage rockets fired in World War II used more potent propellants and explosives, and more sophisticated fuses, than the barrage rockets of the nineteenth century. Barrage rockets as a system, wever, were still nearly as simple as the system developed by Congreve in the early 1800s.
Barrage rockets’ simplicity made them an ideal battlefield complement to large cannon. Because they were not precision machines, rocket launchers could be built quickly and cheaply in virtually any well-equipped factory.
Because they were relatively light and produced no recoil, they could be mounted on any vehicle larger than a motorcycle. The ease of building and deploying rocket launchers encouraged commanders on both sides of World War II to bombard enemy positions with rockets as a prelude to attack. Elec-tric ignition systems, standard by the 1940s, facilitated such barrages by al-lowing the rockets from a single launcher to be “ripple fired”—launched one after another at precise split-second intervals. Ripple firing multiplied the psychological impact of rocket barrages, subjecting the target to a steady cascade of explosions.
Germany began developing rocket artillery in the 1930s, as part of therearmament program begun by the Nazis. The standard German armyrocket launcher, first deployed in 1940, consisted of six short, wide tubesarranged in a circular cluster (like chambers in the cylinder of a revolver)and mounted on a lightweight gun carriage. The launcher looked like astubby six-barreled cannon, and with good reason: it was adapted from amortar designed to lob smoke and gas shells onto enemy positions. Its
name—Nebelwerfer (smoke thrower)—was a legacy of that early stage in its development, and was retained as a way of masking the weapon’s true func-tion. The Nebelwerfer was far from an ideal weapon: its range was limited, its accuracy was atrocious, and the 300-yard smoke trails of its rockets instantly revealed its position for enemy gunners. Like the military rockets of earlier centuries, however, its projectiles took a psychological toll as well as a phys-ical one. Rifle and machine gun bullets, moving at supersonic speed, were invisible, but the Nebelwerfer’s rockets arced toward their targets whistling and trailing smoke. Soldiers under attack by them could only take cover and wait for impact, knowing that if they survived they’d have to do it all again moments later. Even those who were not physically injured suffered intense emotional stress.
The Nebelwerfer’s capacity for physical destruction was also impressive.
The original six-tube model could launch six 150 mm rockets, each with a 5.5-pound warhead, in under ten seconds. The later five-tube model, which fired 210 mm rockets with 22-pound warheads, could hit even harder (al-though even less accurately). A battery of well-concealed, well-positioned Nebelwerfers could saturate a large area with high explosive in a matter of seconds. Used against soldiers massed for an attack, they could be deadly, as Allied troops discovered after the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
The Soviet Union’s prewar involvement in rocket research and its pref-erence for simple, robust, mass-produced weapons made it, too, a natural setting for the development of barrage rockets. The Soviet army was the first to deploy a vehicle-mounted multiple-rocket launcher, a weapon that Soviet troops called the Katyusha (roughly, “Little Katie”) and their German adversaries called the “Stalin Organ.” The Katyusha consisted of eight par-allel steel rails roughly 18 feet long, mounted atop a steel frame that lifted them above the vehicle and held them at the desired launch angle (usually about 30 degrees above horizontal). Each rail carried two rockets: one at-tached to its top edge and one to its bottom edge. Each rocket, a little over 6 feet long and 5 inches (132 mm) in diameter, could carry a 44-pound warhead about 5 miles. The rockets were inaccurate but, especially when fired in massive quantities at the beginning of an attack, highly effective at breaking up German defenses. Designed in 1938–1939 and tested in De-cember 1939, they were first used in combat during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 and remained in active service throughout the war. Katyushas could be mounted on tanks or other tracked vehicles, but they were most often mounted on ordinary military trucks—
a cheap, durable, readily available platform.
The U.S. Army experimented along similar lines, producing a varietyof vehicle-mounted launchers. The first to enter service was the T27 Xylo-phone, named for the side-by-side arrangement of its eight launching
tubes. Variations on the theme included the T27-E2 (a twenty-four-tube successor to Xylophone), the T44 (a 120-tube launcher fitted to amphibi-ous trucks like the DUKW), and the T45 (a fourteen-tube launcher for mounting on jeeps). The most innovative launcher in the U.S. Army inven-tory was the T34 Calliope: a sixty-tube launcher mounted, in a wooden frame, on the turret of a Sherman tank. Calliope had two significant ad-vantages over truck-mounted systems. First, because the launcher turned with the turret and raised or lowered with the tank’s main gun, it could be aimed quickly and easily. Second, compared to trucks and jeeps, tanks were better equipped to withstand enemy counterattacks and fight on their own once their rockets had been fired. Calliope-equipped Shermans were, in theory, capable of jettisoning their launchers in a matter of moments and becoming ordinary tanks again. Until the last months of the war, all U.S.
Army rocket launchers fired the standard M8 4.5-inch rocket: short-ranged and highly inaccurate, but effective as a barrage weapon.
The Army’s attitude toward multiple-rocket launchers was ambivalent at best. On one hand, the launchers were deployed in both the European and Pacific theaters, and at least one complete artillery battalion was equipped with them. They were used in combat from June 1944 onward, but nearly all multiple-rocket launchers carried official designations begin-ning with T (for “test”)—a sign that they were regarded only as a tempo-rary experiment.
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, by contrast, embraced rocket ar-tillery and made extensive use of it. The Marines saw lightweight, vehicle-mounted rocket launchers as artillery support that could be brought intoaction quickly when assaulting enemy-held beaches. Their training schoolfor rocketeers, established on the Hawaiian island of Oahu early in 1944,graduated its first class in April of that year. The first of six “provisionalrocket detachments” was formed the same week. Each detachment con-sisted of one officer, fifty-seven enlisted men, and (initially) a dozen 1-tontrucks with 1-ton trailers. All six rocket detachments eventually saw actionin the Pacific, first at the invasion of Saipan in June 1944 and later in the in-vasion of the Philippines in late 1944 and the inin-vasions of Iwo Jima andOkinawa in 1945. The Marines developed their rocket tactics through trialand error, learning from battlefield experience how to use rocket artillerymost effectively. The most critical lessons involved the vulnerability of thelaunchers and the unarmored trucks that carried them. The Marines origi-nally deployed their launchers ahead of the front line of troops to maximizerange, but soon shifted them back to protect the rocketeers from being over-run by the enemy. They also learned, as Army rocketeers in Europe hadlearned, to move their launchers immediately after firing in order to avoid
“counter-battery fire” by enemy artillery and mortars. Photographs show that the Marines experimented with tank-mounted launchers (offering both protection and mobility), but there is no official record of such a program.
The U.S. Navy’s commitment to barrage rockets was even stronger. In-deed, the United States led the world in developing rockets as a naval bom-bardment weapon. Rockets’ relatively light weight and minimal recoil enabled the Navy to mount them on landing craft originally designed to ferry troops onto enemy-held beaches (see Figure 4.1). Rocket-firing land-ing craft filled a crucial role in amphibious invasions. Designed to operate in shallow water, they could accompany the invasion force to the beach and blanket it with high explosives just moments before the first troops went ashore. Conventional naval bombardment—cannon fire from battleships, cruisers, and destroyers stationed offshore—had to be halted or moved in-land when the invasion force neared the beach, for fear of hitting friendly troops. Rocket barrages fired from incoming landing craft could hit the beach itself moments before the assault troops. Enemy troops would thus be forced to remain under cover longer, making it more difficult for them to mount an organized, effective defense.
The Navy first used rocket barrages during Operation Torch—the in-vasion of North Africa—in 1942, and they soon become a standard part of amphibious operations. They were used extensively in the invasions of Normandy and southern France in 1944, and in virtually every Pacific the-ater invasion from January 1944 on. The vessels used ranged from Landing Craft Infantry (Rocket) carrying launchers for sixty 5-inch rockets up to Landing Ships Medium (Rocket) carrying launchers for nearly 500. The landings at Iwo Jima in February 1945 were preceded by two complete barrages fired by a line of twelve LSM(R)s. The destructive power of such a bombardment was staggering: more than 10,000 rockets poured onto the beach in a matter of minutes. The psychological effect was equally so:
thousands of screaming projectiles trailing fire and smoke as they arced across the sky.
D I R E C T- F I R E R O C K E T S
Direct-fire rockets were used, in combat, as though they were cannon: theoperator pointed the launcher at a target and pulled the trigger. At shortranges, against stationary targets or vehicles with limited mobility, they wereaccurate enough to be effective. Their light weight and nonexistent recoilmeant that they could be carried by individual soldiers or mounted (six or
minutes. U.S. Navy photograph. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, image number LC-USZ62-92435.
eight at a time) on aircraft. A rocket could hit harder, however, than the shells from any gun that a man or a typical airplane could carry. The com-bination of light weight and devastating power gave direct-fire rockets their appeal. They put the power of a small cannon in the hands of individual soldiers, and enabled fighter planes to destroy targets that would once have demanded a squadron of bombers.
The most famous direct-fire rocket launcher of the war was the U.S.
M1A1 type, universally known to American troops as the “bazooka” be-cause of its resemblance to a trombone-like folk musical instrument with the same name. The bazooka was invented in 1942 by Captain (later Colo-nel) Leslie Skinner, who saw it as a way for infantry soldiers to defend themselves against enemy tanks without relying on artillery support. The bazooka consisted of a steel tube—4 feet long with a 2.36-inch inside diameter—with wooden handgrips and a wooden shoulder rest attached to the outside. The bazooka’s “ammunition” was a small solid-fuel rocket, ig-nited by a simple electrical circuit connected to the trigger. The rocket could theoretically travel 400 to 500 yards, but was truly effective only at much shorter ranges: 120 yards or less. The rockets carried a special 3.5-pound “shaped charge” warhead capable of crippling a heavy tank or de-stroying a lighter armored vehicle, but they left a smoke trail that could betray the position of the launcher. Bazooka teams (one soldier aiming and firing, one preparing and loading rockets) thus required steady nerves. Like the crews of larger, vehicle-mounted rocket launchers, they had to master a rhythm of firing, moving, and firing again.
The bazooka was, by far, the most effective infantry antitank weapon of the war. It was used by U.S. armed forces in every theater, and exported to the Soviet Union for use by the Red Army. Partly in response, German tanks began to sport “skirts”: vertical armor plates suspended along their sides to protect their vulnerable tracks and suspensions. The German army, mean-while, studied captured bazookas and developed a very similar weapon nick-named the panzershreck (“tank terror”). Slightly longer than the bazooka, it fired a rocket with a heavier warhead and a longer burning motor, which made it more effective at longer ranges. According to some reports, it could destroy stationary, lightly armored targets at 1,000 yards—ten times the ef-fective range of the bazooka. The bazooka itself was steadily improved dur-ing the war. The M9 model, introduced in 1944, had an improved ignition system and a tube that could be broken down into two sections for ease of transport. It remained a short-range weapon, however; more powerful, longer ranged projectiles did not become available until after the war.
Direct-fire rockets launched from airplanes were a more efficient toolfor destroying armored or reinforced targets. Bigger and heavier than their
shoulder-launched counterparts, they could deliver a larger explosive charge. The standard British rocket (called the RP, for “rocket projectile”) consisted of a 3-inch-diameter tube with four fins at the tail and a 65-pound, 5-inch-diameter warhead at the front. The standard American rocket from December 1943 on was the 5-inch FFAR (“forward-firing aircraft rocket”): essentially a rocket motor capped with a shell from a 5-inch antiaircraft gun. An upgraded version of the FFAR, using a larger motor and the same warhead, entered service in July 1944 under the desig-nation HVAR (“high-velocity aircraft rocket”). Nearly twice as fast as its predecessor (485 versus 950 mph), it could penetrate 1.5 inches of steel ar-mor or 4 feet of reinforced concrete. The exclamations of pilots startled by its power gave it a nickname: “Holy Moses.” Even the 6-foot-long, 140-pound Holy Moses was dwarfed, however, by the ironically misnamed
“Tiny Tim.” Ten and a half feet long, nearly a foot in diameter, and weigh-ing over 1,200 pounds, the Tiny Tim used a 500-pound armor-piercweigh-ing bomb for a warhead and was designed for use against Japanese ships.
Smaller rockets could be fired from beneath the wings of airplanes (the British RP from rails, the American FFAR and HVAR from stubby, stream-lined pylons), but the Tiny Tim had to be slung beneath an airplane’s belly and dropped free before its motor was ignited. One of the most powerful air-launched weapons of the war, it was deployed by the Navy in the Pacific but (apparently) never fired in anger.
Direct-fire rockets, because they could not be steered in flight, were of limited use against highly maneuverable targets—aircraft in flight, or motor vehicles moving on open ground. They were devastating, however, against vehicles that were dug into defensive positions, grouped into tight forma-tions, or traveling in columns along roads. After the tide of the war in Eu-rope began to turn in late 1942, German motorized units were frequently forced into such positions. The air forces of the three major Allied powers thus found themselves, by mid-1943, in position to use air-launched rockets to deadly effect. Two battles from that period will serve as illustrations here, but air-launched rockets were equally critical in dozens of others.
The battle of Kursk, on July 5–13, 1943, marked the turning point ofthe war in Russia, and the turning point at Kursk came on July 7. The RedArmy and Air Force mounted a massive counterattack against advancingGerman forces, and the Illyushin Il-2 Shturmovik (Storm Bird)—a heavilyarmored airplane designed specifically for ground attack—played a decisiverole. Armed with eight 82-milimeter rockets as well as cannon and bombs,the Shturmoviks took a heavy toll of German tanks and motor vehicles. So-viet reports credit one attack with destroying seventy tanks in twenty min-utes, and a four-hour series of attacks with destroying 240 of the Seventeenth
Panzer Division’s 300 tanks. The air assaults intensified over the next three days, and by July 10 the German forces were in disarray.
The battle of Mortain took place two months after D-Day, on August7, 1944. The Allied attempt to break out of Normandy and press deeperinto France was well underway, and Hitler had ordered his commanders toresist the breakout at all costs. German forces under the command of Gun-ther von Kluge counterattacked at the village of Mortain—the weakestplace in the Allied lines—on that morning. Von Kluge had two infantry di-visions and five armored didi-visions but not command of the skies abovethem. German fighters appeared over the battlefield, but were quickly shotdown or driven off. By the time the German armored forces had been lo-cated, Allied ground-attack aircraft were able to fly mission after missionagainst them, unmolested. British pilots flying Hawker Typhoons
The battle of Mortain took place two months after D-Day, on August7, 1944. The Allied attempt to break out of Normandy and press deeperinto France was well underway, and Hitler had ordered his commanders toresist the breakout at all costs. German forces under the command of Gun-ther von Kluge counterattacked at the village of Mortain—the weakestplace in the Allied lines—on that morning. Von Kluge had two infantry di-visions and five armored didi-visions but not command of the skies abovethem. German fighters appeared over the battlefield, but were quickly shotdown or driven off. By the time the German armored forces had been lo-cated, Allied ground-attack aircraft were able to fly mission after missionagainst them, unmolested. British pilots flying Hawker Typhoons
