By the spring of 1945, American ordnance depots across Europe and the Pacific bulged with one of the most transformative infantry weapons of the war. Intelligence estimates placed the total number of M1A1 and M9A1 bazookas in theater at over 400,000. A figure that excluded the hundreds of thousands more held in reserve depots stateside.
The bazooka had, in the space of barely 3 years, moved from an untested curiosity demonstrated on a golf course in Washington to the standard anti-armor weapon of the infantryman. Now, with Germany’s surrender and Japan’s capitulation imminent, the question facing the War Department was one of almost industrial scale.
What, precisely, was to be done with all of them? The answer would prove far more complicated than anyone in Washington anticipated. It would involve frantic redistribution across four continents, the silent transfer of technology to former enemies, catastrophic battlefield lessons in a peninsula few Americans could locate on a map, and the quiet disappearance of hundreds of thousands of weapons into scrapyards, foreign arsenals, and, in a handful of cases, display cases of military museums.
The bazooka’s post-war story is, in many respects, the story of American military thinking in the decade after 1945. Confident, sometimes confused, and ultimately forced into humbling reassessment. The rocket launcher, M1, had entered service in 1942, taking its informal name from a novelty musical instrument played by radio comedian Bob Burns.
The weapon weighed just over 5 and 1/2 lb unloaded and fired a 2.36-in 60-mm or shaped charge rocket capable of penetrating roughly 3 in of armor plate. By 1944, the M9A1 variant had introduced a two-piece design for easier carrying and a more reliable ignition system. Approximately 476,628 units were manufactured between 1942 and 1945 by firms including General Electric and Cheney Bigelow Wire Works.
At the moment of German surrender on 8 May 1945, an estimated 110,000 were forward deployed in the European theater alone. American ordnance officers faced an immediate and unglamorous task. Before any decision about disposal or redistribution could be made, every weapon had to be accounted for, inspected, and categorized.
Teams from the 9th Ordnance Battalion moved through former combat zones in France, Belgium, and Germany during the summer of 1945, collecting abandoned or surrendered weapons from unit dumps, farmyard hedgerows, and the rubble of German depots. Many bazookas were found still crated and unfired.
Captured German stocks had revealed that Wehrmacht engineers had examined and reverse-engineered the weapon as early as 1943, producing their own Panzerschreck, which fired a larger 88-mm rocket. Ironically, a significant number of the American weapons recovered in 1945 were found alongside their German imitators, sitting in Luftwaffe stores that had been overrun before they could be distributed.
The debate within the War Department about the bazooka’s future fell into three broad camps. A vocal faction within Army Ordnance argued that the 2.36-in rocket was already obsolete against the heavier armor of Soviet tank designs then being observed by intelligence officers in Eastern Europe. The IS-2 heavy tank, capable of fielding armor exceeding 100 mm in thickness, was impervious to the standard M6A3 rocket at any practical combat range.
A second camp urged retention of existing stocks against future conventional warfare requirements, pointing to the expense of replacement and the unsettled conditions in occupied Germany, Korea, and China. A third, smaller group began drawing up specifications for a replacement, a larger, more powerful weapon capable of defeating any foreseeable armor threat.
The Americans’ approach to post-war bazooka management differed significantly from how the British and Soviets handled their own anti-armor inventories. The British, who had relied primarily on the PIAT, a Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, throughout the war, held a relatively modest stock of approximately 115,000 units, and moved quickly to rationalize their inventory by 1947, placing most PIATs into reserve storage at Donnington Ordnance Depot in Shropshire whilst retaining only training quantities in active units.
The Soviets, who had received an estimated $8,500 American bazookas under the Lend-Lease program, treated the weapon less as a front-line item and more as a subject for technical study. Soviet engineers at the NII-13 Research Institute near Moscow produced detailed assessments of both the M9A1 bazooka and the German Panzerschreck during 1945 and 1946, findings that would inform the development of the RPG-2, introduced to Soviet service in 1949.
If you’re finding this deep dive into post-war military history interesting, consider subscribing to the channel. There is much more to come. American redistribution began in earnest during the second half of 1945. Under the terms of the Military Assistance Program and a series of bilateral agreements, the United States transferred bazookas to 17 countries before the end of 1946.
France received approximately 22,000 M9A1 launchers, many of which were promptly dispatched to Indochina, where French forces were already encountering the early stages of what would become a prolonged insurgency. The Nationalist Chinese government received 30,000 units through the China Theater Transfer Program, though a significant proportion of these would ultimately fall into People’s Liberation Army hands following the Communist victory in 1949, a transfer of military technology that American planners had not anticipated.
Greece received 5,000 bazookas under the Truman Doctrine Assistance Package in 1947, weapons that saw immediate action during the final stages of the Greek Civil War in the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia. Within the American inventory itself, the drawdown was rapid. By January 1947, the War Department had reduced active issue stocks from roughly 350,000 to approximately 180,000 launchers.
The remainder were placed in long-term storage at three principal sites: the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania, the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, and the San Antonio Arsenal in Texas. Storage conditions were adequate but not meticulous. Cosmoline coated weapons were crated and stacked in climate variable warehouses with the reasonable expectation that they would either be disposed of permanently within 5 years or upgraded to a new standard.
Neither assumption proved correct. The Korean War, which began on 25th June 1950, exposed these bazooka’s shortcomings with brutal clarity. When North Korean T-34-85 tanks crossed the 38th parallel and drove south through unprepared American positions, infantry units armed with the M9A1 bazooka discovered that their rockets were failing to penetrate the T-34’s frontal armor at combat distances.
At the Battle of Osan on 5th July 1950, Task Force Smith’s bazookas fired 22 rockets at advancing T-34’s and achieved no confirmed kills. The shaped charges were simply insufficient against the 45 mm glacis plate of the Soviet-built tank when fired from the angles typically available in a defensive position. Reports from the field reached Washington within days and produced immediate crisis.
The response revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the American ordnance system. At the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, engineers who had already been developing a 3.5-in launcher, the M20, informally known as the super bazooka, accelerated their program. The M20 had actually been standardized in 1944 but had never entered widespread production with only a limited number of units held in reserve.
Within weeks of the first Korean reports, Picatinny was producing M20’s at emergency rate and by September 1950, the weapon was reaching front-line units in Korea. The M20 fired a 3.5-in rocket capable of penetrating 8 in of armor, more than sufficient against the T-34. It weighed 11 lb loaded, considerably more than its predecessor, but in the circumstances, weight was an acceptable compromise. The old 2.
36-in bazookas now faced a clear verdict. During 1951 and 1952, the army formally declared the M9A1 obsolete and initiated a systematic disposal program. At Anniston and Letterkenny, workers cut and crushed approximately 140,000 launchers. The steel going to scrap dealers and ultimately into civilian manufacturing.
A further 45,000 were transferred to Allied Nations. South Korea received 12,000 in 1951. Turkey received 8,000 under NATO standardization agreements. And the remainder went to smaller recipients including Ethiopia, Thailand, and the Philippines under military assistance program allocations. The wartime production records suggest that of the 476,628 M1 and M9 series bazookas manufactured, approximately 67% were either scrapped, expended in combat, or lost to accident and deterioration by the end of 1953.
The disposal of ammunition was a parallel and equally substantial challenge. The M6A3 rocket, the standard anti-armor round, had been produced in quantities exceeding 3 million by the war’s end. Post-war testing at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during 1946 found that roughly 12% of stored rockets showed signs of propellant deterioration after less than 2 years in storage, raising concerns about both safety and reliability.
Between 1947 and 1952, approximately 800,000 M6A3 rockets were destroyed at demolition ranges at Fort Ord in California and Camp Gruber in Oklahoma with smaller quantities incinerated at depots in Hawaii and Okinawa. An additional 400,000 practice and illumination rockets were disposed of at sea, a practice then considered environmentally acceptable, but now recognized as a significant source of historical contamination in coastal waters off California and New Jersey.
The super bazooka, the M20, fared somewhat better in terms of longevity, but followed a broadly similar trajectory. Produced in quantities of approximately 100,000 between 1950 and 1955, the weapon served with American forces in Korea and remained in active service until 1957 when it was supplemented and eventually replaced by the M72 LAW, the light anti-armor weapon, a single-shot disposable launcher that offered comparable performance at a fraction of the weight.
Surplus M20s were transferred to reserve components and National Guard units through the late 1950s, with final disposal of the last Army Reserve stocks completed at Anniston in 1963. In terms of physical survivors, the attrition has been considerable. The National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia, holds four examples of the M1A1, M9, and M9A1 launchers in restorable condition, along with two M20 Super Bazookas.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington holds three examples, including one captured Panzerschreck recovered in Normandy in 1944, which provides a useful comparative display. The West Point Museum maintains two M9A1s in display condition. Internationally, the Imperial War Museum in London holds two American Bazookas acquired through wartime lend-lease channels, and the Musée de l’Armée in Paris retains three examples from French Army stocks.
In private hands, complete and functional Bazookas are regulated as destructive devices under the National Firearms Act of 1934, requiring registration and a $200 transfer tax. A status that has, somewhat paradoxically, helped preserve a modest number of functional examples that might otherwise have been scrapped.
Estimates suggest that between 600 and 900 registered Bazookas remain in private American collections, making a complete and functional M9A1 a moderately rare, but not irreplaceable artifact. The Bazooka’s legacy in weapons development is, if anything, more substantial than its physical survival. The shaped charge technology refined in the M6 rocket series directly informed the development of the 66 mm M72 LAW in the early 1960s, and American research into rocket-propelled shaped charges contributed to NATO standardization
efforts during the 1950s that produced the German Panzerfaust 3 and the Belgian RL-83 Blindicide. The fundamental principle, a man-portable, shoulder-fired, rocket-propelled shaped charge capable of defeating vehicle armor remains the defining characteristic of infantry anti-armor weapons from the RPG-7 to the modern Javelin.
Though the latter’s fire and forget guidance system represents a sophistication undreamt of by the engineers at Aberdeen in 1942. What the bazooka’s post-war story illustrates with particular clarity is the speed with which even a revolutionary weapon can pass from indispensable to obsolete. In 1944, the bazooka was the infantryman’s answer to the tank.
A weapon that genuinely altered the tactical balance of ground combat. By 1950, it was inadequate against the armor it was designed to defeat. By 1957, it was surplus. The hundreds of thousands of weapons that survived the war were within a decade scattered across foreign arsenals, crushed into scrap, sunk into coastal waters, or mounted in museum cases.
The handful that remain tell a story not only of wartime ingenuity, but of the relentless pace at which military technology consumes and discards its own inventions. If you found this video insightful, watch what happened to America’s M4 Sherman tanks after World War II next. It explores how thousands of surplus Shermans were redistributed, modified, and fought in conflicts from the Middle East to South America for decades after VE Day.
Like this video, subscribe, and hit the bell for more, huh? Thanks for watching.
What REALLY Happened to America’s Bazookas After WW2
By the spring of 1945, American ordnance depots across Europe and the Pacific bulged with one of the most transformative infantry weapons of the war. Intelligence estimates placed the total number of M1A1 and M9A1 bazookas in theater at over 400,000. A figure that excluded the hundreds of thousands more held in reserve depots stateside.
The bazooka had, in the space of barely 3 years, moved from an untested curiosity demonstrated on a golf course in Washington to the standard anti-armor weapon of the infantryman. Now, with Germany’s surrender and Japan’s capitulation imminent, the question facing the War Department was one of almost industrial scale.
What, precisely, was to be done with all of them? The answer would prove far more complicated than anyone in Washington anticipated. It would involve frantic redistribution across four continents, the silent transfer of technology to former enemies, catastrophic battlefield lessons in a peninsula few Americans could locate on a map, and the quiet disappearance of hundreds of thousands of weapons into scrapyards, foreign arsenals, and, in a handful of cases, display cases of military museums.
The bazooka’s post-war story is, in many respects, the story of American military thinking in the decade after 1945. Confident, sometimes confused, and ultimately forced into humbling reassessment. The rocket launcher, M1, had entered service in 1942, taking its informal name from a novelty musical instrument played by radio comedian Bob Burns.
The weapon weighed just over 5 and 1/2 lb unloaded and fired a 2.36-in 60-mm or shaped charge rocket capable of penetrating roughly 3 in of armor plate. By 1944, the M9A1 variant had introduced a two-piece design for easier carrying and a more reliable ignition system. Approximately 476,628 units were manufactured between 1942 and 1945 by firms including General Electric and Cheney Bigelow Wire Works.
At the moment of German surrender on 8 May 1945, an estimated 110,000 were forward deployed in the European theater alone. American ordnance officers faced an immediate and unglamorous task. Before any decision about disposal or redistribution could be made, every weapon had to be accounted for, inspected, and categorized.
Teams from the 9th Ordnance Battalion moved through former combat zones in France, Belgium, and Germany during the summer of 1945, collecting abandoned or surrendered weapons from unit dumps, farmyard hedgerows, and the rubble of German depots. Many bazookas were found still crated and unfired.
Captured German stocks had revealed that Wehrmacht engineers had examined and reverse-engineered the weapon as early as 1943, producing their own Panzerschreck, which fired a larger 88-mm rocket. Ironically, a significant number of the American weapons recovered in 1945 were found alongside their German imitators, sitting in Luftwaffe stores that had been overrun before they could be distributed.
The debate within the War Department about the bazooka’s future fell into three broad camps. A vocal faction within Army Ordnance argued that the 2.36-in rocket was already obsolete against the heavier armor of Soviet tank designs then being observed by intelligence officers in Eastern Europe. The IS-2 heavy tank, capable of fielding armor exceeding 100 mm in thickness, was impervious to the standard M6A3 rocket at any practical combat range.
A second camp urged retention of existing stocks against future conventional warfare requirements, pointing to the expense of replacement and the unsettled conditions in occupied Germany, Korea, and China. A third, smaller group began drawing up specifications for a replacement, a larger, more powerful weapon capable of defeating any foreseeable armor threat.
The Americans’ approach to post-war bazooka management differed significantly from how the British and Soviets handled their own anti-armor inventories. The British, who had relied primarily on the PIAT, a Projector Infantry Anti-Tank, throughout the war, held a relatively modest stock of approximately 115,000 units, and moved quickly to rationalize their inventory by 1947, placing most PIATs into reserve storage at Donnington Ordnance Depot in Shropshire whilst retaining only training quantities in active units.
The Soviets, who had received an estimated $8,500 American bazookas under the Lend-Lease program, treated the weapon less as a front-line item and more as a subject for technical study. Soviet engineers at the NII-13 Research Institute near Moscow produced detailed assessments of both the M9A1 bazooka and the German Panzerschreck during 1945 and 1946, findings that would inform the development of the RPG-2, introduced to Soviet service in 1949.
If you’re finding this deep dive into post-war military history interesting, consider subscribing to the channel. There is much more to come. American redistribution began in earnest during the second half of 1945. Under the terms of the Military Assistance Program and a series of bilateral agreements, the United States transferred bazookas to 17 countries before the end of 1946.
France received approximately 22,000 M9A1 launchers, many of which were promptly dispatched to Indochina, where French forces were already encountering the early stages of what would become a prolonged insurgency. The Nationalist Chinese government received 30,000 units through the China Theater Transfer Program, though a significant proportion of these would ultimately fall into People’s Liberation Army hands following the Communist victory in 1949, a transfer of military technology that American planners had not anticipated.
Greece received 5,000 bazookas under the Truman Doctrine Assistance Package in 1947, weapons that saw immediate action during the final stages of the Greek Civil War in the mountains of Epirus and Macedonia. Within the American inventory itself, the drawdown was rapid. By January 1947, the War Department had reduced active issue stocks from roughly 350,000 to approximately 180,000 launchers.
The remainder were placed in long-term storage at three principal sites: the Letterkenny Army Depot in Pennsylvania, the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama, and the San Antonio Arsenal in Texas. Storage conditions were adequate but not meticulous. Cosmoline coated weapons were crated and stacked in climate variable warehouses with the reasonable expectation that they would either be disposed of permanently within 5 years or upgraded to a new standard.
Neither assumption proved correct. The Korean War, which began on 25th June 1950, exposed these bazooka’s shortcomings with brutal clarity. When North Korean T-34-85 tanks crossed the 38th parallel and drove south through unprepared American positions, infantry units armed with the M9A1 bazooka discovered that their rockets were failing to penetrate the T-34’s frontal armor at combat distances.
At the Battle of Osan on 5th July 1950, Task Force Smith’s bazookas fired 22 rockets at advancing T-34’s and achieved no confirmed kills. The shaped charges were simply insufficient against the 45 mm glacis plate of the Soviet-built tank when fired from the angles typically available in a defensive position. Reports from the field reached Washington within days and produced immediate crisis.
The response revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of the American ordnance system. At the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, engineers who had already been developing a 3.5-in launcher, the M20, informally known as the super bazooka, accelerated their program. The M20 had actually been standardized in 1944 but had never entered widespread production with only a limited number of units held in reserve.
Within weeks of the first Korean reports, Picatinny was producing M20’s at emergency rate and by September 1950, the weapon was reaching front-line units in Korea. The M20 fired a 3.5-in rocket capable of penetrating 8 in of armor, more than sufficient against the T-34. It weighed 11 lb loaded, considerably more than its predecessor, but in the circumstances, weight was an acceptable compromise. The old 2.
36-in bazookas now faced a clear verdict. During 1951 and 1952, the army formally declared the M9A1 obsolete and initiated a systematic disposal program. At Anniston and Letterkenny, workers cut and crushed approximately 140,000 launchers. The steel going to scrap dealers and ultimately into civilian manufacturing.
A further 45,000 were transferred to Allied Nations. South Korea received 12,000 in 1951. Turkey received 8,000 under NATO standardization agreements. And the remainder went to smaller recipients including Ethiopia, Thailand, and the Philippines under military assistance program allocations. The wartime production records suggest that of the 476,628 M1 and M9 series bazookas manufactured, approximately 67% were either scrapped, expended in combat, or lost to accident and deterioration by the end of 1953.
The disposal of ammunition was a parallel and equally substantial challenge. The M6A3 rocket, the standard anti-armor round, had been produced in quantities exceeding 3 million by the war’s end. Post-war testing at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland during 1946 found that roughly 12% of stored rockets showed signs of propellant deterioration after less than 2 years in storage, raising concerns about both safety and reliability.
Between 1947 and 1952, approximately 800,000 M6A3 rockets were destroyed at demolition ranges at Fort Ord in California and Camp Gruber in Oklahoma with smaller quantities incinerated at depots in Hawaii and Okinawa. An additional 400,000 practice and illumination rockets were disposed of at sea, a practice then considered environmentally acceptable, but now recognized as a significant source of historical contamination in coastal waters off California and New Jersey.
The super bazooka, the M20, fared somewhat better in terms of longevity, but followed a broadly similar trajectory. Produced in quantities of approximately 100,000 between 1950 and 1955, the weapon served with American forces in Korea and remained in active service until 1957 when it was supplemented and eventually replaced by the M72 LAW, the light anti-armor weapon, a single-shot disposable launcher that offered comparable performance at a fraction of the weight.
Surplus M20s were transferred to reserve components and National Guard units through the late 1950s, with final disposal of the last Army Reserve stocks completed at Anniston in 1963. In terms of physical survivors, the attrition has been considerable. The National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, Georgia, holds four examples of the M1A1, M9, and M9A1 launchers in restorable condition, along with two M20 Super Bazookas.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington holds three examples, including one captured Panzerschreck recovered in Normandy in 1944, which provides a useful comparative display. The West Point Museum maintains two M9A1s in display condition. Internationally, the Imperial War Museum in London holds two American Bazookas acquired through wartime lend-lease channels, and the Musée de l’Armée in Paris retains three examples from French Army stocks.
In private hands, complete and functional Bazookas are regulated as destructive devices under the National Firearms Act of 1934, requiring registration and a $200 transfer tax. A status that has, somewhat paradoxically, helped preserve a modest number of functional examples that might otherwise have been scrapped.
Estimates suggest that between 600 and 900 registered Bazookas remain in private American collections, making a complete and functional M9A1 a moderately rare, but not irreplaceable artifact. The Bazooka’s legacy in weapons development is, if anything, more substantial than its physical survival. The shaped charge technology refined in the M6 rocket series directly informed the development of the 66 mm M72 LAW in the early 1960s, and American research into rocket-propelled shaped charges contributed to NATO standardization
efforts during the 1950s that produced the German Panzerfaust 3 and the Belgian RL-83 Blindicide. The fundamental principle, a man-portable, shoulder-fired, rocket-propelled shaped charge capable of defeating vehicle armor remains the defining characteristic of infantry anti-armor weapons from the RPG-7 to the modern Javelin.
Though the latter’s fire and forget guidance system represents a sophistication undreamt of by the engineers at Aberdeen in 1942. What the bazooka’s post-war story illustrates with particular clarity is the speed with which even a revolutionary weapon can pass from indispensable to obsolete. In 1944, the bazooka was the infantryman’s answer to the tank.
A weapon that genuinely altered the tactical balance of ground combat. By 1950, it was inadequate against the armor it was designed to defeat. By 1957, it was surplus. The hundreds of thousands of weapons that survived the war were within a decade scattered across foreign arsenals, crushed into scrap, sunk into coastal waters, or mounted in museum cases.
The handful that remain tell a story not only of wartime ingenuity, but of the relentless pace at which military technology consumes and discards its own inventions. If you found this video insightful, watch what happened to America’s M4 Sherman tanks after World War II next. It explores how thousands of surplus Shermans were redistributed, modified, and fought in conflicts from the Middle East to South America for decades after VE Day.
Like this video, subscribe, and hit the bell for more, huh? Thanks for watching.
