In May 1942 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a lieutenant in a welding helmet fired a weapon built from a scrap metal pipe with a bent coat hanger for a sight, and it hit a moving tank target while five established mortars missed. General George C. Marshall ordered 5,000 units on the spot. This episode traces the improbable history of the bazooka, from Robert Goddard and Clarence Hickman’s tube-fired rocket demonstrated five days before the 1918 armistice, to the shaped-charge M10 grenade that was too heavy to throw, to Edward Uhl’s junkyard discovery of a tube that matched the rocket’s diameter.

We follow the weapon into combat: the untrained, disastrous debut in Operation Torch, the German capture and upgrade into the 88 mm Panzerschreck, ambush tactics against Tiger tanks, fuses that failed against coconut-log bunkers in the Pacific, and Major Charles Carpenter strapping six bazookas to a tiny L-4 Grasshopper to hunt armor from the air. The story ends with the Korean War, where obsolete 2.36-inch rockets bounced 22 times off a single T-34 before the shelved M20 Super Bazooka was rushed to the front.

• How the Monroe Effect lets a shaped charge punch through tank armor
• Why a rocket motor in an open tube solved the recoil problem a gun could not
• How comedian Bob Burns’s homemade instrument gave the Rocket Launcher M1 its name
• The Panzerschreck: what happened when Germany reverse-engineered captured bazookas
• Task Force Smith at Osan and the cost of peacetime neglect of anti-tank weapons