Bazookas

[Psyched]

Is there any other use for Bazookas other than attacking armor?

For instance, does firing a bazooka at infantry or at a building have any suppressive value, or can you even DO that?

Sorry for all the Newbie questions, but a guy's gotta learn somewhere, right?

[Patgod]

yes, yes, and yes.

[Conscript Bagger]

If you look at the unit stats (select the bazooka and hit Enter) I think it lists the blast value. It's pretty low, however, so don't expect a single bazooka to have much effect.

[Psyched]

Thanks, thanks, and thanks.

[Len]

When it was the only thing I had handy, an AP bazooka round caused one casualty and a withdrawal of a HMG team from a foxhole.

Regards, Len

[YankeeDog]

Usefulness of Bazookas against infantry is limited, but it exists.

The one use of zooks not mentioned above is as MG bunker and Pillbox busters.

Against wooden log bunkers, zooks can KO the bunker from the side or rear. I suppose they could do it from the front, too, but this is usually suicidal. You'll usually get a few non-killing hits before you finally KO the bunker, but in my experience this tactic works very well when you can't get all the way around behind the bunker, or you can't get infantry close enough to grenade the thing.

Against concrete pillboxes, you need to get all the way behind the pillbox so the zook can target the access door. Of course, regular infantry squads can do this with grenades (or demo charges if they have them), but sometimes you can't get squads close enough to use these weapons, so again the zook can be handy.

Cheers,

YD

[Silvio Manuel]

If you bazooka is firing at a target that's in a building, there's a small chance that the bazooka round will ignite the building, forcing its occupants to run out (*small* chance).

OTOH, if YOUR bazooka is in a house, the backblast from the rocket can/will suppress your bazooka, or worse it may ignite the house, forcing your bazooka to run out.

The 'ignite your own house' thing applies to Bazookas and Panzerschrecks (maybe Panzerfausts, too?), but not to PIATs, since their firing mechanism is more like a horizontal mortar than a rocket.

[ June 15, 2002, 09:49 PM: Message edited by: Silvio Manuel ]

[Brightblade]

Igniting the houses where they are fired from happens also to Panzerfaust, as I had to lern in a not so funny way when the whole squad ran out of the now happily burning house, right into the fire of some waiting Grayhounds...

Well, lerning often consists of much pain, but most of the painful lessons have to be taught only once :cool:

[Psyched]

As Winston Churchill once said:

"I'm always willing to learn, but sometimes I don't like to be taught."

[Conscript Bagger]

In view of the examples posted, I'll amend my previous statement:

Bazookas can accomplish extraordinary feats against infantry, but with their low blast value, you're playing the lottery if you expect them to.

[Moriarty]

Originally posted by Silvio Manuel:

If you bazooka is firing at a target that's in a building, there's a small chance that the bazooka round will ignite the building, forcing its occupants to run out (*small* chance).

OTOH, if YOUR bazooka is in a house, the backblast from the rocket can/will suppress your bazooka, or worse it may ignite the house, forcing your bazooka to run out.

The 'ignite your own house' thing applies to Bazookas and Panzerschrecks (maybe Panzerfausts, too?), but not to PIATs, since their firing mechanism is more like a horizontal mortar than a rocket.

It can also ignite the house and kill the zook team and anyone else in it. (Yes, I speak from experience).

Most susceptible are small, light buildings.

[rumplemintz]

Perhaps I shouldn't tell you this, Psyched, since I am likely to be on the receiving end of my own advise, but what the hey...

I have found that zooks positively ROCK against guns. Twice now I have managed to sneak a zook within about 100 or 150 m of a gun position and the gun is destroyed instantly. Impressive.

[Psyched]

Originally posted by rumplemintz:

Perhaps I shouldn't tell you this, Psyched, since I am likely to be on the receiving end of my own advise, but what the hey...

I have found that zooks positively ROCK against guns. Twice now I have managed to sneak a zook within about 100 or 150 m of a gun position and the gun is destroyed instantly. Impressive.

I'll take that advice with a grain of salt, rumplemintz, considering you and I are in the midst of a PBEM right now, and, even more importantly, you are only a JUNIOR MEMBER in this forum, lest you need reminding.

[Stalin's Organ]

Hey - leave he newbies alone ya big bully!

In fact bazooka vs gun isn't such a bad option - or shouldn't be IMO - hat is a HEAT round going to do if it heits a gunshield or mechanism or barrel??

It's going to treat it like tank armour and penetrate - or try to.

End of gun - no need to cause any casualties if yuo've bored a hore in the breach or recoil mechanism!!

[Frunze]

The AI seems to agree that 'zooks and 'schrecks are good against guns; I've lost a couple guns this way.

[Ace Pilot]

I know in CM, bazookas have only one kind of ammo. Was this also true in real life, or did bazookas have separate anti-armor and anti-infantry rounds?

Ace

[YankeeDog]

Originally posted by Ace Pilot:

I know in CM, bazookas have only one kind of ammo. Was this also true in real life, or did bazookas have separate anti-armor and anti-infantry rounds?

Ace

Smoke and Incendiary rounds were manufactured for the Bazooka. It's possible that there was an HE round was well, but I've never been able to find mention of it anywhere.

Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any information about when these different types of round were first used in action, or how common they were.

'Zook smoke rounds strike me as being of very limited use in CM, and may well have primarily been for target-marking purposes anyway. I suppose incendiary rounds might be useful in a city fight.

Cheers,

YD

[John Kettler]

Well, according to my now dead Uncle George, who served in Europe from D+1 in the Navy (LCMs) with Patton's army, troops made a marvelous discovery. It seems that the HEAT warhead for the bazooka and the 60mm mortar warhead both had the same threads.

This allowed soldiers to make a nasty conversion for streetfighting. Instead of firing the standard bazooka round at the wall below a window from which fire was coming, hoping to take out the firer and anyone else present in a narrow cone behind the wall, the version bearing the 60mm HE warhead could be fired through the window, hitting the back wall and hosing everyone in the area with a contained 60mm mortar burst. Even if the window had antigrenade screens, the firer behind them was in dire trouble. Worked great.

Regards,

John Kettler

[YankeeDog]

John -

Wow! A neat little tidbit from your Uncle there. That's definitely one for the engine rewrite. Some sort of system that automatically substituted 2-3 "HE" (i.e., 60mm mortar shell-tipped) and/or incendiary (if verification of deployment can be found) rounds for HEAT rounds in the zook's ammo loadout on urban maps would be the way to do it, I think. Of course, loadout would be customizable for scenario designers. I suppose that BFC would want a little be more verification than just one anecdotal story, but I'm sure that can found with a little effort.

Probably not worth the work for CMBB, though. I know a few zooks made it over to Russia on lend-lease, but IIRC it wasn't very many. The only warhead I know of the the Shreck other than the HEAT one was an experimental AA warhead that was never deployed.

Thanks again for the great info.

Cheers,

YD

[JonS]

Originally posted by YankeeDog:

... That's definitely one for the engine rewrite. Some sort of system that automatically substituted 2-3 "HE" (i.e., 60mm mortar shell-tipped) and/or incendiary (if verification of deployment can be found) rounds for HEAT rounds in the zook's ammo loadout on urban maps would be the way to do it, I think ...

LOL. And, given that the threads were the same, you could change a couple of the 60mm mortar rounds to HEAT for that nasty top-attack against otherwise invincible uberCats

[YankeeDog]

Originally posted by JonS:

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by YankeeDog:

... That's definitely one for the engine rewrite. Some sort of system that automatically substituted 2-3 "HE" (i.e., 60mm mortar shell-tipped) and/or incendiary (if verification of deployment can be found) rounds for HEAT rounds in the zook's ammo loadout on urban maps would be the way to do it, I think ...

LOL. And, given that the threads were the same, you could change a couple of the 60mm mortar rounds to HEAT for that nasty top-attack against otherwise invincible uberCats </font>

[Stalin's Organ]

Except of course the Bazooka is 57mm, so you can't fit a 60mm round in hte tube, and you're going to lose heaps of accuracy firing the Bazooka w/head out of the mortar tube with 3mm windage!!

[JasonC]

No StalinsOrgans, the bazooka was not 57mm. It was 60mm, just like the mortar. 57mm was the caliber of the towed ATGs, and the earliest recoilless rifles. But the zook was 60mm until Korea, when the larger 3.5 inch module (88mm, also known as a panzerschreck clone) was fielded. 2.36 inch was the designation, incidentally, in English units, whereas the 57mm is 2.25 inches.

[Tarquelne]

? IOW, if you removed the safety pin, could you close assault a tank with the zook rocket by, say, dropping it onto the top of the tank from an upper floor window?? I wonder. . .

Two GIs, somewhere in France, around 1944, maybe 45, late evening. Evening-ish, at least.

"You know that last tank?"

"What last tank?"

"You know... the Tiger."

"Yeah."

"Well, I thi..."

"That weren't no Tiger!"

"You just agreed it was!"

"That weren't no Tiger!"

"Then what was it?"

"It were a Panzer IV J."

"Was not."

"Take a look."

"...... OK. You know that last tank?"

"What tank."

"The f*cking Panzer IV!"

"Yeah, what about it?"

"It was... I dunno... too easy."

"You figure 100 yards isn't sportin' anymore?"

"No, I don't think it is."

"So.... You wanna plant a mine?"

"Nah... that's what we got the Tiger with."

"What Tiger?"

"The tank before the Panzer IV."

"Oh, yeah, sorry. Ok..... we havn't done Molotov's in awhile."

"Are the bottles empty?"

"No."

"Drink up. Maybe tomarrow."

"You wanna dig a tank trap?"

"Do I look like a want to dig a tank trap?"

"I dunno, do you?"

"Guess."

"Yes."

"Wrong."

"You do, you know. You look like you wanna dig a tank trap."

"Give me some of what you're drinking and shut up."

"That's not very nice."

"Shut up!"

"........ Um, I've got an idea."

"Do we have to leave the building? Or dig?"

"No."

"Do we have to pour out any of the al-cho-hol?"

"No."

"Ok, what is it?"

"You know the bazooka?"

"You mean the one we shot your precious Panzer IVG with?"

"No."

"What!?"

"It were a IV J, remember?"

"Just tell me the f*cking idea."

"Well.... we take a bazooka shell, and we pull out the pin..."

"This isn't going to be like that time in Gournay, is it?"

"No."

"Or the time in Reims? With the Colonel and all those sheep?"

"No. You know I swore I wouldn't do that again."

"Then what is it?"

"Well, we take a bazooka shell and we pull the pin out."

"You said that already."

"Um... I didn't say "out" before."

"Where are you from again? Never mind. We take out the safety. Then what?"

"Then we just drop it."

"That doesn't sound very clever."

"On a tank, I mean."

"...... It'd have to get pretty close."

"Yeah."

"Really close."

"Yeah."

"Right under the window."

"Yeah."

"And then I lean out and drop it. On a tank."

"Yep!"

"You go first."

"Nah..."

"No, really. I got the last tank, the Tiger."

"Ok....I've already taken out the pins, see?"

"You... what!?"

"I was going to make mines. Maybe put 'em in a tank trap, just to make sure. Something."

"All the shells?"

"Panzer IV!"

"What? Where?! Get down! All our ammo is about to go off, you idiot!"

"... right over there. The last tank were a Panzer IV J, not a Tiger, remember?"

[Olaf]

The Bazooka round could be used if dropped from a distance that would activate the fuze upon impact with the top of the armored vehicle. (I am guessing that US rocket launchers, mortar rounds, etc did not have an arming distance back then.) This would not take much, only a few feet as the fuze would be activated by only a few pounds of pressure. I tried to find the technical information on the Bazookas- but no luck. I was looking to see if these weapons had an arming distance. If so, then the distance dropped would have to exceed the arming distance. The US has been making weapons with arming distances to make sure the soldier does not kill himself by hitting something too close. The arming distance is farther than the effective burst radius of the round. For example, the rifle grenades shot from underneath an M16/M4 have and arming distance of around 3-5 meters. This does not always work as I know a guy who was wounded in the stomach by a 40mm M203 HE fragment and had to go to the hospital. This saftey feature costs money and US/NATO countries are willing and able to spend the money. Countries such as Russia, China etc. did not/do not have arming distances on their weapons. Maybe an ordnance expert could enlighten/correct me so as to educate other readers. Thanks.