What if Goddard "Bazooka" in WW I ?

Some background Information:

The development of the bazooka involved the development of two specific lines of technology: the rocket-powered (recoilless) weapon, and the shaped-charge warhead. It was also designed for easy maneuverability and access.
The Rocket-Powered Recoilless Weapon was the brainchild of Dr. Robert H. Goddard as a side project (under Army contract) of his work on rocket propulsion. Goddard, during his tenure at Clark University, and while working at Worcester Polytechnic Institute's magnetics lab and Mount Wilson Observatory (for security reasons), designed a tube-fired rocket for military use during World War I. He and his co-worker, Dr. Clarence Hickman, successfully demonstrated his rocket to the US Army Signal Corps at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, on November 6, 1918, but as the Compiègne Armistice was signed only five days later, further development was discontinued.

The delay in the development of the bazooka was as a result of Goddard's serious bout with tuberculosis.

Goddard continued to be a part-time consultant to the US government at Indian Head, Maryland, until 1923, but soon turned his focus to other projects involving rocket propulsion.
The shaped charge Development of the explosive shaped charge dates back to the work of American physicist Charles Edward Munroe, who carried out explosive shock focusing experiments in 1880.Although Munroe's discovery of the shaped charge was widely publicized in 1900 in "Popular Science Monthly", the importance of the tin can "liner" of the hollow charge remained unrecognized for another 44 years

The Question:

Lets say Goddard reads the article about the Monroe effect and remembers it when he starts working for the US Army. He alos doesn't get ill so his "Bazooka" is ready to be used against armored German vehicle. How does this change things?

Edit: Some Addition

Okay lets say we add the Burstyn Tank being developed and used by the Central Powers to the scenario to give the Bazooka a target. Would this lead to some heavier changes ?

Not much in WWI, German armoured vehicles bigger than cars were rare.

However, the development of such weapons in the interbellum could completely change the balance of infantry/tank combat by the start of *WWII.

WWI is unaffected, it's too late in the war and those tanks weren't exactly the most capable fighting vehicles. The real effect will be in the inter-bellum infantry vs. armor race. Even a relatively primitive bazooka gives infantry a much better option for anti-tank combat. This could effect the direction of tank development, delay the development of modern armored tactics until tanks seem less vulnerable, or increase early war armored casualties before the inevitable cycle of better bazooka, heavier tank begins.

Furthermore Goddards tube gun could lead directly to larger caliber recoiless artillery for the small infantry units; battalions, regiments, brigades... As I understand Goddards tube launcher came from a desire to replace the French 37mm Infantry Gun with something lighter - more portable.

Longer ranged indirect fire rocket artillery was the next logical step, so we would have seen at least experimental battalions before 1939, if not field service units.

As far as shaped charges and tanks: Given the thin armor of most 1939 tanks a shaped charge is not essential. The rockets could carry a much larger explosive charge than a similar caliber cannon projectile. The detonation of a two or three kilo HE charge against the side armor of a Pz MkIII, a H36, or a BT7 would have salutatory effects.

Carl Schwamberger said:

Furthermore Goddards tube gun could lead directly to larger caliber recoiless artillery for the small infantry units; battalions, regiments, brigades... As I understand Goddards tube launcher came from a desire to replace the French 37mm Infantry Gun with something lighter - more portable.

Longer ranged indirect fire rocket artillery was the next logical step, so we would have seen at least experimental battalions before 1939, if not field service units.

As far as shaped charges and tanks: Given the thin armor of most 1939 tanks a shaped charge is not essential. The rockets could carry a much larger explosive charge than a similar caliber cannon projectile. The detonation of a two or three kilo HE charge against the side armor of a Pz MkIII, a H36, or a BT7 would have salutatory effects.

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Except if such weapons exist those tanks are much more likely to resemble the heavily armoured British infantry tanks like the Matilda. Given how slow those tanks were that could have an impact on the 'Blitzkrieg' style tactics the Germans made such use of and the attack on France.

Interesting, had no idea Goddard's bazooka was being demonstrated in 1918. Beyond anti-tank uses, in World War I it seems like it would be quite useful against machine gun nests, pillboxes and other strong points, massed attacks on the forts that anchored the trench systems and often contained key forward artillery batteries (seems like these would be disabling against artillery pieces, mortar batteries, ammo stockpiles, parked aircraft, trucks, field cars, etc.).

So the "Blitzkrieg" or "Stormtroopers" of the Allied side might well be platoons of bazookas, Browning Automatic Rifles, trench shotguns, and sniper rifle Springfields (perhaps turned into assault rifles with the Pederson conversion also about to be rolled out when the war ended.) That'd be pretty devastating just like the 1918 German Stormtrooper units but with essentially man-portable light artillery.

Blasting through machine guns nests in Belleau Wood particularly seems useful. So more assaults are successful, penetration of German lines is deeper with fewer casualties (since the machine guns were disproportionately effective), forcing artillery and mortar batteries further back and in more elaborate emplacements, and destroying more rapidly expensive and difficult to replace armaments like Maxims and Krupp guns, it would have had many positive effects. Whether it would change the timing or outcome of the war is much harder to guess.

As it's the U.S. Army, development of the bazooka's technology and uses as well as troop training with it would fall under the between wars deterioration so rusty, long-stored 1918 bazookas being reissued in 1942 seems more likely than they would evolve into recoilless rifle artillery or still potent anti-tank weapons, logical development's rarely been the way to bet with our Army.

It doesn't have to be an anti-tank weapon. Most of the time Bazooka was used in the anti-field fortification role anyways.

The ordnance uses for ground forces are interesting, but

The ordnance uses for ground forces about two decades ahead of time are interesting, but I'd think the larger impact would be on rocketry generally.

If (as I would suspect) this was a solid rocket system, that opens a door for federal support of Goddard's research through either Army Ordnance, Navy Bureau of Ordnance, or both, beginning with solids and progressing to liquids.

Solids are useful less as ordnance in the 1920s and more as a JATO equivalent, which given the interest in operations from extemporized airfields and the necessary developments of both in-line/water-coolled and radial/air-coolled engines, could be seen as useful. That also brings BuAer and the Air Corps into it...

From there, bombardment rockets are a possibility, both surface and air-launched; from there, a switch to liquid-fuelled rockets for bombardment purposes is possible...guidance is limited, but given a constant thread of USG support for Goddard et al, it is possible a similar effort could follow in the SC and naval equivalents...

Even a small amount of constant funding from the USG in the 1920s and 1930s would have allowed Goddard's team - presumably something equivalent to GALCIT up and running in the 1920s - to make some really significant strides...couple that with the ARC/BuOrd/BuAer of WW II, and the GALCIT-ORDCIT-JPL-Aerojet line could have occurred almost immediately in 1940, rather than a half-decade later.

Add in the parallel developments that came along from people like Brossart et al, and a US equivalent of an Atlas launcher by 1950 is certainly possible; from there, it is not a huge step to a Atlas-Centaur or Titan I, which presumably push the accomplishments of reality in terms of astronautics forward by 5 to 10 years.

Tranquility Base in 1959?

Best,

I'm not sure they would be solid rockets in 1918. All they had for propellant, so far as I know, was black powder (or possibly smokeless powder), which is a pretty crappy rocket fuel. In reality, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory invented modern composite solid rocket fuels about 1940 for use in JATO units, but it wasn't until later, as far as I can tell, that it was fully militarized for small(er) arms.

On the other hand, for a short-range weapon black/smokeless powder isn't totally unserviceable...certainly the Chinese and Congreve rockets used it to some effect...so perhaps they were solid, after all. In that case, if they were put into service there likely would be some research (probably outside of the United States given the realities of the inter-war Army's budget situation) into advanced solid rocket fuels to improve versatility, package size (composite fuels are more efficient), and other usability aspects.

I'm not sure how much this would push spaceflight, the basics would certainly be more advanced but in some ways solids are a parallel dead end for exploring space. All-solid launch vehicles are possible, but not very efficient, and this would do nothing to improve knowledge of combustion chamber design or the necessary metallurgy for liquid vehicles or upper stages (and you definitely want liquid uppers, at least, for Moon missions). Besides, development of IRBMs or ICBMs is not likely until the development of the nuclear weapon, because otherwise missiles are not very efficient weapons compared to the bomber (which the US is heavily invested in), meaning that most of the complicated aspects of designing orbital vehicles are simply not going to be touched on.

Of course, developing this might give Goddard a thread of official support for experimenting, and given that he's, you know, Goddard, he's certainly going to have one eye on the Moon, as it were, and might play around with liquids regardless. Certainly he could justify liquids as possibly having advantages over solids (they don't, for terrestrial military uses, but we know that from experience).

All true, but along with the "he's Goddard" point, there's also this:

Workable Goblin said:

I'm not sure they would be solid rockets in 1918. All they had for propellant, so far as I know, was black powder (or possibly smokeless powder), which is a pretty crappy rocket fuel. In reality, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory invented modern composite solid rocket fuels about 1940 for use in JATO units, but it wasn't until later, as far as I can tell, that it was fully militarized for small(er) arms.

On the other hand, for a short-range weapon black/smokeless powder isn't totally unserviceable...certainly the Chinese and Congreve rockets used it to some effect...so perhaps they were solid, after all. In that case, if they were put into service there likely would be some research (probably outside of the United States given the realities of the inter-war Army's budget situation) into advanced solid rocket fuels to improve versatility, package size (composite fuels are more efficient), and other usability aspects.

I'm not sure how much this would push spaceflight, the basics would certainly be more advanced but in some ways solids are a parallel dead end for exploring space. All-solid launch vehicles are possible, but not very efficient, and this would do nothing to improve knowledge of combustion chamber design or the necessary metallurgy for liquid vehicles or upper stages (and you definitely want liquid uppers, at least, for Moon missions). Besides, development of IRBMs or ICBMs is not likely until the development of the nuclear weapon, because otherwise missiles are not very efficient weapons compared to the bomber (which the US is heavily invested in), meaning that most of the complicated aspects of designing orbital vehicles are simply not going to be touched on.

Of course, developing this might give Goddard a thread of official support for experimenting, and given that he's, you know, Goddard, he's certainly going to have one eye on the Moon, as it were, and might play around with liquids regardless. Certainly he could justify liquids as possibly having advantages over solids (they don't, for terrestrial military uses, but we know that from experience).

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All true, but along with the "he's Goddard" point, there's also this:

http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/corona/corona-abstract.pdf

CORONA and Grab were both envisioned as early as the mid-50s, and the idea of artificial satellites for navigational and communications purposes long pre-dates AC Clarke; and the US was VERY interested in high altititude flight and reconnaissance, as early as the mid-30s (see Explorer I and II, and then the XC-35.)

I could see some of those strands coming together in the 1940s, if Goddard et al have some actual funding since the 1920s... a "developed/propelled" Explorer as a suborbital MOL to rockoon to suborbital to orbital flights is not an obvious path to space, but it is certainly as rational as doing so using weapons delivery systems...



Pretty picture, isn't it?

The fact that Explorer had a pilot, copilot, and (what amounted to) an RSO is an interesting element of convergent thinking...

Best,

TFSmith121 said:

All true, but along with the "he's Goddard" point, there's also this:

http://www.nro.gov/history/csnr/corona/corona-abstract.pdf

CORONA and Grab were both envisioned as early as the mid-50s, and the idea of artificial satellites for navigational and communications purposes long pre-dates AC Clarke; and the US was VERY interested in high altititude flight and reconnaissance, as early as the mid-30s (see Explorer I and II, and then the XC-35.)

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Actually the (official) idea of a space-based reconnaissance system dates back to the 1940s, but it wasn't until the 1950s that the technology was there to make it practical (not just on the rocket, but on the camera end as well). It was repeatedly studied because everyone recognized that if you could get it to work it would have huge advantages over aerial reconnaissance systems, but it took a while for it to make sense to actually go ahead and do.

The 1920s are probably a bit too early for the military to seriously be looking at spy satellites--the technology is just not there--but there certainly will be people thinking about the possibility of looking at things on Earth from space...there were in reality...

TFSmith121 said:

I could see some of those strands coming together in the 1940s, if Goddard et al have some actual funding since the 1920s... a "developed/propelled" Explorer as a suborbital MOL to rockoon to suborbital to orbital flights is not an obvious path to space, but it is certainly as rational as doing so using weapons delivery systems...

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No, actually it is fairly sensible. Vanguard was partially derived from sounding rockets (which were, admittedly, derived from SRBMs/MRBMs, but that aside). One of the interesting things about rockoons is that they actually kind of suck--balloons are terrible at lifting big enough rockets--but for that very reason if they start experimenting with them for sounding rocket and research purposes, they'll probably quickly think of building a bigger rocket to lift the sounding rocket they're "really" interested in, since a bit of work will show that it's more efficient than having a balloon lift it. That lets you approach crab-wise...though you're still going to have to make a big jump to orbit, especially orbiting stuff big enough to carry people.

One thing your post made me think of was that if Goddard is working for the Army in the 1920s, his work is probably not as secret as it actually was. If the Army has a division working on tactical rockets, rocket artillery, and JATO units, that sort of practical small-scale stuff, then there's another path forward, the rocketplane. I have in mind Lockheed or Hughes or someone like that developing an X-1 analogue, perhaps in conjunction with NACA, to research transsonic and supersonic flight--the former of practical use (see: compressibility stall), the latter more blue-sky at this point in time--and flying it. That's certainly something solids can do, and, well, the X-15 almost beat Mercury into (suborbital) space...though on the other hand that relied on hypersonics information that required a number of breakthroughs outside of rocketry to motivate and enable, besides still having scaling problems into orbital flight. (On the third hand...er, well, anyways, "higher, faster" is going to be attractive until the shortcomings of that particular paradigm are demonstrated, a la the B-70 and Concorde)

However, I certainly would not expect a lunar landing in 1959, regardless of what advantages Goddard having official support might bring. The Apollo program was the product of a confluence of very specific factors that are rather unlikely to occur if rocket development, especially American rocket development, is advanced or delayed at all (to say nothing of the fact that it also relied on other technology, like digital computers, that would not be affected in the slightest by the proposed PoD, except possibly negatively if some of the talent and money directed at them is poured into rocketry). It's much more likely that development is slower, owing to the lack of practical uses for spaceflight, and at all events more cautious, following the station-first paradigm most writers and thinkers pushed beforehand.

I agree, any sort of Horizon/LUNEX/Luna would take a political reason;

Oh, true, but I wwas thinking of operational hardware projects, rather than the concept...we can go back to E E Hale and the Brick Moon for the concept.

I agree, any sort of Horizon/LUNEX/Luna would take a political reason; a "cold war" with someone is about all I can come up with...

If that someone is the OTHER scientific/engineering power with an undeniable astronautical engineering genius at work in the 1920s-30s, I think it would be a possibility by the 1950s...but that requires a very different 1940s than what we'd expect, even from a sucessful AT/bunker buster rocket in WW I...

As far as the rocketplane goes, I've always thought development of a couple of Jack Northrop's designs had some possibilities as an "early" rocket research airframe... take an XP-79...



and a XP-56


and something that crossed Reaction Motors with GALCIT, you could get something interesting...

Best,

Richard V said:

It doesn't have to be an anti-tank weapon. Most of the time Bazooka was used in the anti-field fortification role anyways.

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That's what I was thinking, maybe not for use against tanks but bunkers and pillboxes and such?

This ought to be interesting since it might just mean that tankettes don't immediately become obsolete.

as others said, no need for it to be only anti-tank.
just look at the current carl gustav, yes i has ant-use (it was designed for that) but it has several other uses, like anti-fortification uses.
and in the trenches short range isn't a problem, so you have a direct fire, man portable weapon that can give fire support at close distance.
I think it would be considered a nice addition to the various trench mortars.

Montanian said:

Interesting, had no idea Goddard's bazooka was being demonstrated in 1918. Beyond anti-tank uses, in World War I it seems like it would be quite useful against machine gun nests, pillboxes and other strong points, massed attacks on the forts that anchored the trench systems and often contained key forward artillery batteries (seems like these would be disabling against artillery pieces, mortar batteries, ammo stockpiles, parked aircraft, trucks, field cars, etc.).

So the "Blitzkrieg" or "Stormtroopers" of the Allied side might well be platoons of bazookas, Browning Automatic Rifles, trench shotguns, and sniper rifle Springfields (perhaps turned into assault rifles with the Pederson conversion also about to be rolled out when the war ended.) That'd be pretty devastating just like the 1918 German Stormtrooper units but with essentially man-portable light artillery.

Blasting through machine guns nests in Belleau Wood particularly seems useful. So more assaults are successful, penetration of German lines is deeper with fewer casualties (since the machine guns were disproportionately effective), forcing artillery and mortar batteries further back and in more elaborate emplacements, and destroying more rapidly expensive and difficult to replace armaments like Maxims and Krupp guns, it would have had many positive effects. Whether it would change the timing or outcome of the war is much harder to guess.

.

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That breaks the rules of AH forum. Only the Germans are supposed to have wonder weapons developed years in advance!