Hi guys, thanks for tuning in another
video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at the Morphy Auction House taking a look at a German World War Two Bazooka. Well, the German equivalent, the German copy of the Bazooka. This is a Raketenpanzerbüchse 54, or as it is
much more commonly known, a Panzerschreck. Now the Germans first started
encountering the Bazooka in Tunisia in 1943. And they took one look at that thing and realised that
was a much better solution to their anti-tank problems than the gun that they were currently .... finishing the
development of which was a thing called the Raketenwerfer 43, the "Puppchen", which ... was a rocket launcher,
sort of, but it fired from a closed sealed breech. And it was this thing built on a
carriage like a small anti-tank gun. So it really wasn't anywhere
remotely as portable as a Bazooka. They ... started seeing Bazookas and
went, "Oh, we should have thought of that." And what they did in order to speed
development they adapted the Bazooka up from 2.36 inch like the Americans had,
to 88mm, which is a little over 3.5 inch. And they did that so that they could take
their existing ammunition from the Puppchen and only have to redesign the tail end of it with the
rocket system to get it working in the Panzerschreck. They were able to leave the warhead, the fusing, all that
stuff exactly the same. So this has led to a long-standing misunderstanding that the Puppchen and the
Panzerschreck used the same ammunition. They don't, even though they're the same
calibre and they're used for the same purpose. They actually adapted the one to work in the other. So. Late 1943 these start getting produced, and the most distinctive
thing about them at that point is they don't have this shield. And the Germans have ... While they've got a larger warhead, and it is a much
more effective warhead than the American Bazooka, the problem is their rocket motors have a bit of an issue. Namely, they don't extinguish inside the tube.
One of the nice things about the American Bazooka was that once the rocket left the front end
of the tube the engine had finished burning, and so there was no exhaust left
to be a problem for the shooter. Now, there's a huge back blast, but that
goes over behind the shooter's shoulder. With the German ones the rocket kept burning for
about 2 metres, about 6 feet, after it left the barrel. And that meant you had to wear some protective gear or you were
gonna burn the crap out of your face and hands when you fired a rocket. So the initial versions of the Panzerschreck, because they
didn't have a shield, they had these fairly elaborate instructions. You had to wear some sort of face protection,
which was typically a gas mask without a filter, (although they did also actually issue a face shield).
You had to wear gloves to protect your hands. It was not convenient at all. It
was the sort of thing where having to put on that sort of gear, because you're
certainly not gonna be running around in it all the time, having to put on that gear meant you probably missed your
opportunity to take a shot with this thing and actually hit a tank. So instead, what a lot of troops
started doing is making their own shields to bolt onto the front
of the tube and fix this problem. And it wasn't long before the officialdom
realised, "OK, yeah, that's a good solution." And so they made a bunch of shields.
It took about eight or nine months, so well into 1944, close to 1945, before they were
actually producing guns brand new with shields. But they sent out the shields as a conversion kit, and virtually
all of these things were updated to include those shields. So let me go ahead and show you the details of that, as well as
the sights and how this thing actually mechanically works. So this is obviously not the original paint. This has been repainted,
but it was a pretty good condition one when that was done. If we look at the front of the ... shield,
there's an interesting feature here, which is they kind of knew that putting a little
glass plate in here was asking for problems. Because if that gets broken, or if it becomes unclear,
you know, if it gets spider webbed, or scorched, you can't just take it out and not use it, because then you're gonna
get rocket exhaust straight through the hole right to your eye. So what they did was they made it with
this hinged holder and little panes of glass. And so you could actually
interchange those panes of glass. Nice and easy to snap them in there. And then on the inside they have a little storage compartment
that holds a couple more panes of glass. So you always had spares with you,
which is a really important thing because the viability of that window is literally
essential to being able to use the weapon. Now there was a virtually continuous stream
of upgrades being designed for these things over the course of the last year or two of the war. In
particular the sights went through a bunch of different iterations. This one ... has one of the
mid-level upgrades added to it. Where originally it just had this
fixed bracket with a rear notch, well, they widened the rear notch, they cut
these two oval holes, and they added a plate to it, so that you can loosen the screw and slide
the plate back and forth to adjust for windage. The front sight has been similarly upgraded. it has a nice big square front post in it, and then
that big ol' thumb screw so that you can loosen it and adjust it up or down to change your elevation. Or in theory to aim at longer ranges if you're in a position
and you know the range to where you're going to be shooting, like if you're overlooking a road
or an intersection or a bridge, you can set that front sight to
whatever fixed elevation you anticipate. Now the firing mechanism for these things is pretty
cool. And it's totally different from the Bazooka. So, this looks like a trigger, but it's not,
this is actually a cocking lever. And this one ... the firing mechanism here is only partially
intact, but I can show you how it's supposed to work. As you can see, when I squeeze this back I'm compressing this spring and pulling back
this bar and there's a safety on it, this guy. This by the way is actually a late-war
upgraded safety that you don't find all that often. Anyway, what you do is you cock that, that safety
locks it in place, and now this bar is sticking out. So what's in here is actually
an electromagnetic generator. There's a winding of copper and a magnet, and then
an iron core in the centre. And that iron core can move. When you pull the trigger, this rod gets shot backwards under
pressure from this spring, it hits the centre of that moveable core, throws it backwards, and that core moving
inside the copper winding and the magnet generates an electrical impulse, which is
transmitted in this wire to the back of the gun. We'll get to the back of the gun in a minute. You might notice that there's a hole here and this
wire doesn't go into it. That's supposed to be that way. This hole is actually for the welding jig to attach
the shoulder support, so that's not broken there. Now the way this is supposed to work is you cock the
thing like this, the safety engages, you then load the rocket. Then when you release the safety, this
rod is actually held in place by the trigger. Which has been deactivated. The
trigger isn't working as it's supposed to. But what you actually do is release this handle,
this remains cocked until you pull the trigger, then it snaps backward and
generates that charge and fires. The wire is then going to come all
the way here to the back of the tube where we've got this box.
And we've got three items here. This is actually a pin that goes all the way through
the tube, I'll show you the inside in a moment, and that acts as a stop pin so you
know how far to insert the rocket. This is a slightly shorter and pointy pin which acts
as the electrical connection, the ground, to the rocket. And then this is actually a plug connection. So where the American Bazooka rockets were made with wires
coming out the end that you'd have to wrap around a connection stud, the German rockets just had a wooden plug, with its
electrical connections, hanging out the back of the rocket. You'd load the rocket in the tube and then plug the connection
in here, and that would connect you to the firing system. There is also, just like on a Bazooka, there's
a spring-loaded latch here (the spring's gone), but this acts to prevent the rocket from sliding
out the back of the tube after you've loaded it. So looking up here inside the tube.
That pin, right there, is your electrical connection. This pin is a stop pin. And its surface is kind of
rounded so ... the rocket motor can shove past it. And in the training manual it was noted that it's important
to get the rocket on this pin, but not over that one. And as long as you had it in the right
place the front end of the fins would hit this, and the back end of the fins would be held just in front
of this, and everything would be in position to launch. Overall, this thing was a really quite effective anti-tank weapon.
It had a ... combat effective range of about 150 metres. They tried to extend that later in the war with
adjustable sights, but nyah, let's be realistic. And it could penetrate, thanks to that large 88mm
warhead, it could penetrate 17cm of armour at any range. Because ... armour penetration was based
on a shaped charge effect, and not on velocity. So 17 centimetres was plenty
to take out pretty much any Allied tank. One of the interesting aspects of the Panzerschreck
construction that the Bazooka did not have was the fact that the Panzerschreck was actually about
a 91mm tube that then was crimped in three places. And you can see them very nicely here. The idea was these crimps brought the internal
diameter to 88mm to properly hold the rocket, they reduced the friction because the rocket
body would only be rubbing on these three points, and they allowed a little bit of fouling or even really minor
dents in the tube without restricting or causing real problems. By the end of the war they'd made a tremendous number of
these things, something like 107,000 if not even more than that. Obviously, they're a great weapon for last-ditch German industry,
because they require very little in the way of raw materials. You know, you don't have to be heat treating
any of this stuff. It's a pretty simple weapon. But even even as simple as this is, by the
end of the war they actually experimented with a compressed cardboard version of this thing,
if you can believe that level of desperation. There was also an RPzB 54/1, Raketenpanzerbüchse 54/1,
which was a shortened version. They cut a little bit off the back of
the tube to make it lighter and handier. Those are pretty scarce, and those were only introduced in
1945 and not a whole lot of those are floating around. So. This is a pretty cool example of the standard
version and it is still completely intact. Now as you saw, the firing
mechanism needs a little work, but there aren't any big holes that have
been drilled in the side of this thing. So it is, of course, duly registered as a
destructive device under the National Firearms Act. All legal to own. And if you'd be interested in having
it yourself take a look at the description text below. You'll find a link there to ForgottenWeapons.com,
which then has a link to the Morphy Auction catalogue where you can take a look at their pictures, their
description, their price estimate, all that sort of stuff. See if it's the sort of thing
that you'd like to have yourself. Thanks for watching.
Interestingly this weapon was not actually created until after US entered the war and seeing how well the bazooka was used in Africa.
Never forgot this shit face in sniper elite 2
medal of honor allied assault vibes.
Panzerschreck is not forgotten for me! I hope DICE will give us this weapon in the future.
If we could get a "compressed cardboard" skin for the schreck that would be awesome
WAS MACHST DU IN MEIN SUMPF