50 Weapons That Changed Warfare

by William Weir

  Politicians and much of the public — and certainly Hollywood — want to believe it is possible to field mini-supermen. President John F. Kennedy believed that the Special Forces, the “Green Berets,” were the answer to troubles in Vietnam, but it didn’t turn out that way. Achilles is out of date. The strongest and toughest man ever born can be killed instantly by a bullet from a .22 short — the least-powerful cartridge generally available. Beyond a certain reasonable limit, strength and toughness are irrelevant. Courage still counts, of course. So does confidence and skill with weapons. But no one became braver by doing 100,000 push-ups. No one became confident by listening to some leather-lunged jackass with stripes on his sleeve call him a maggot. And few people became notably better marksmen because of the crash course they got in basic training.

  The really skilled are those such as the New Zealanders in Crete, who had the skill before they enlisted. Courage is inborn, but it can be developed by confidence. Confidence comes from trusting the other soldiers in your unit. You trust them, and you know they trust you. Because they trust you, you don’t want to let them down. So you don’t, even though terrified. That’s courage.

  Another name for this is morale. And morale is what makes a good unit.

  Colonel David H. Hackworth, America’s most decorated living soldier, summed up what makes a good outfit when writing about one of his former regiments, the 27th Infantry (Wolfhound) Regiment. He said, “They weren’t a special unit, just a group of guys who thought they were good, so they were good.”

  Chapter 46

  From Sea to Shore: Landing Craft

  National Archives from Coast Guard

  Hundreds of drums of gasoline are brought ashore by Coast Guard landing craft to supply U.S. troops in the Philippines.

  World War II introduced a long string of firsts. One of these was the first modern amphibious war. The American Civil War included a few, very small-scale landings from seagoing ships or river boats. The ordinary whale boat, rowed ashore by sailors, was sufficient to get soldiers or marines to the beach. It also sufficed in the Spanish-American War, especially as most landings then were made where the enemy was not. In the many U.S. forays into Caribbean brush fires, including the Vera Cruz expedition in 1914, the overwhelming gun power of the U.S. Navy discouraged any attempt to bring troop-carrying rowboats or motor boats under fire. The United States did have some specialized landing craft, including some rowboats mounting cannister-firing cannon on the bow.

  World War II was different. Japanese strategists envisioned a huge number of landings on Pacific islands and the southern shores of East Asia. They prepared for it by building scores of flat-bottomed boats that could be run right up on the beach, or at least to where the water was shallow enough for men to wade ashore. Some of the boats could carry small tanks and light artillery. They had ramps to allow vehicles to be run right off the boat.

  The Japanese used these boats all over the far (from the United States) end of the Pacific following their attack on Pearl Harbor. They landed on the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies in several places. In Malaya, Japanese troops outflanked stronger British forces continually by landing behind their lines.

  They drove the British back to Singapore, then landed on that British fortress and added it to their explosively growing empire.

  By May of 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan controlled French Indo-China, Thailand (Siam at that time), Malaya, the Philippines, the Marianas, Wake Island, almost all of Burma, and all of the Dutch East except the southern shore of New Guinea. It controlled the northern shore of the other half of New Guinea, mandated to Australia. (The interior of New Guinea was controlled — as it always had been — by stone-age head-hunters.) The Japanese were attempting more landings — on southern New Guinea and the Solomon Islands — when the Pacific war suddenly began to change.

  The first check to Japanese plans was the air-sea Battle of the Coral Sea.

  That was followed quickly by another air-sea fight: the decisive Battle of Midway. After those two battles, America’s “island hopping” campaign began.

  The U.S. Marine Corps, whose main function was landing troops from ships, had been experimenting with light, specialized landing craft since the 1930s. The Japanese sea-borne Blitzkrieg shocked the United States and its ship-building industry into concentrating on bigger and better landing craft.

  The result was thousands of troop carriers, ranging from inflatable rubber boats for small-scale surprises to ponderous LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks) — flat bottomed but sea-worthy (although notably rough-riding) ships that could carry up to 20 tanks. The LST would run right up to the shore; its bow would open up like a mammoth garage door; a ramp would run down and the tanks would roll up on the beach, firing as they moved. The LCT (Landing Craft Tank) was smaller than the LST and had a flat front, like a modern Boston Whaler. The front would drop down and become a ramp for the tank or tanks to run down.

  The LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) was similar to the LCT, although, as its name indicates, it carried people but not tanks. It came in various sizes, the largest being able to hold 200 soldiers.

  The largest of these boats were armed with machine guns or light automatic cannons. One type of LCT, however, the LCT (R) [Landing Craft Tank (Rocket)] carried only weapons — not troops or tanks. The largest had 1,080 five-inch rockets mounted on its deck ready for firing. The rockets were fired in a continuous stream, a spectacular (and spectacularly deadly) fireworks display. Any but the strongest enemy fortifications were pulverized. The Japanese, however, routinely built bunkers that resisted anything but a direct hit from a 16-inch naval gun. Bigger than the LCT (R) and less specialized was the LSM (Landing Ship Medium) which was armed with guns as well as rockets and could also carry troops.

  Some landing craft were truly amphibious. One of these was the DUKW or Duck (nobody today is sure what the initials originally stood for). The Duck was a three-quarter-ton truck — an amazingly surefooted vehicle itself — surrounded by a boat hull. The Duck could take equipment, supplies or infantry from ship to beach and continue on to the firing line. A few Ducks are still running. One of them takes sightseers on the roads and waterways of Washington, D.C.

  Even more impressive was the LVT (Landing Vehicle Tracked), better known as the Alligator. It was a modification of the original Alligator, a swamp rescue vehicle developed in 1935. The Alligator was an amphibious tank and the star of many U.S. Marine Corps landings in the Pacific. It was propelled by scores of small paddles on it tractor treads. Alligators performed a variety of chores.

  Some carried infantry, some carried supplies, some acted as light tanks, and others as self-propelled guns. Some were armored, some were equipped with turrets and the 37 mm gun of the M 3 light tank (Stuart tank to the British), and others carried a 75 mm howitzer. All of them, in spite of the guns and armor, were light enough to float and seaworthy enough to make a sometimes lengthy trip from an anchored troop ship to the beach of a Pacific atoll.

  The expertise and weapons the United States had been developing in the Pacific were applied to the Mediterranean and Europe between the end of 1942 and 1944. The landings in Vichy French North Africa, being practically unopposed, presented no big problem. The landings on Sicily the next year, though, brought a demonstration of amphibious warfare technology new to the European continent. There had been sea landings there before, of course. The Germans had landed in several places in Norway in 1940, but given their overwhelming air superiority, they had no need for anything fancy. The British had been working on specialized landing craft for some time, but their raid on the French port of Dieppe in August 1942 was a disaster. More than half of the attacking force was killed or captured and they were never able to achieve their objective — taking and holding the port for a limited time.

  June 6, 1944 saw The Big One — the D-day landing in Normandy. In addition to the aerial bombardment and bombardment by both U.S. and British naval ships, the landing craft were supported by four LCGs (
Landing Craft Gun) firing 4.7 inch guns and 17 LCT(R)s blasting the beach with rockets.

  D day in Normandy saw the largest amphibious operation in history, made possible by the swarm of specialized landing craft that had been developed. It seems unlikely that a larger such operation will be needed in the foreseeable future.

  Chapter 47

  Shooting Across Oceans: ICBMs and Cruise Missiles

  National Archives from U.S. Information Agency

  V-1, the world’s first cruise missile, in flight over a London roof top.

  On June 13, 1944, people in London heard a peculiar buzzing sound.

  When they looked up, they saw a small airplane traveling across the sky at high speed. Then the plane’s engine stopped and it plunged to the ground. There was a terrific explosion. People were still wondering where the plane came from and what happened to it, when another plane just like the first appeared, and as the first did, crashed into the city and exploded. That was followed by another, then another, then several of the little planes. All crashed and exploded.

  The V 1 attack had been launched.

  For the first time, it was possible to bombard a target at distances beyond the range of even such hopped-up artillery as the 1918 “Paris gun.” The German were using unpiloted planes — really flying bombs powered by pulse-jet engines (the only time that type of engine has ever been used in combat). The Germans called the “buzz bombs” (British nickname) Vergelstungwaffe eins. To the rest of the world, the flying bomb was the V 1 — Hitler’s first “vengeance weapon.” It was also, although the name had not yet been invented, the world’s first cruise missile.

  The V 1 caught the British public by surprise and inflicted heavy damage at first. The flying bombs directed at England destroyed 25,000 houses and killed 6,184 people, almost all in London. It was, however, hardly the ultimate weapon.

  It had to be launched from a catapult — the only way its pulse-jet engine could be made to start. It cruised at about 3,000 feet, easily within range of antiaircraft guns as well as fighter planes. It was fast for a plane of those days — 559 miles per hour. It was a jet, after all. But it flew in a straight line and wasn’t so fast that slightly slower (about 100 mph slower) fighter planes couldn’t shoot it down. By August 1944, Allied fighters and antiaircraft guns were shooting down 80 percent of the V 1s.

  The next month, Londoners got another surprise — a nastier one than the first. The V 2s arrived. They arrived without warning. No noise announced their coming, and there was nothing to see. The first notice of their coming was a terrific explosion. The V 2 (the Germans called it the A 4) was a quantum leap ahead, technologically, of the V 1. It was a liquid-fueled rocket with a program-mable guidance system — a product of years of research into both space travel and weaponry. It was launched straight up, into outer space and described a high arc. Then its rocket engine stopped and it fell toward its target, powered only by gravity. That was enough to give it far more than supersonic speed, so there was no warning sound as there was with the “buzz bomb.” And it arrived so fast it was practically invisible.

  The main brain behind the V 2 was a scientist named Werner von Braun, who had been fascinated by the idea of space travel as a youth and built rockets as a teenager. Von Braun, it seems, had little interest in anything but rocket technology. Politics meant nothing to him. He just wanted to build rockets.

  What was done with them did not concern him. In 1932, he met an old artilleryman named Walter Dornberger. Dornberger, too, had an interest in rockets, but his reasons were different from von Braun’s. The Treaty of Versailles had forbid-den Germany from having any heavy artillery, but it said nothing about rockets.

  Dornberger saw that rockets could substitute for artillery. One result was Germany’s profusion of traditional solid-fuel rockets like the Nebelwerfer. Braun was not particularly interested in short-range solid fuel rockets. He had been working on liquid-fuel rockets, using an inflammable liquid combined with liquid oxygen — a system American, Robert Goddard, had pioneered a little earlier.

  Dornberger, too, was interested in long-range rockets — at least, rockets with a longer range than the “Paris gun.” The Paris gun, the ultimate long-range artillery piece, he said, would throw 25 pounds of high explosive 80 miles. He wanted the first rocket to throw a ton of high explosive 160 miles. But it would be a rocket that was militarily useful. It had to be accurate: it could not deviate from the target more than 2 or 3 feet for each 1,000 feet of range. And it had to be mobile: it could not be too large to transport by road.

  The prototype V 2 was successfully test fired in October 1942. By the end of that year, however, British intelligence learned of the V 2 program, and the next April it learned of the Luftwaffe’s development work on a flying bomb.

  Both projects were underway on the island of Peenemunde. Thereafter, the RAF bombed Peenemunde so heavily that neither weapon was ready until the summer of 1944.

  By the time the V 2 was ready, the Luftwaffe V 1 batteries had been driven out of any launching site within range of England, and the V 2s never got a chance to fire from the chosen sites in France. Germany produced 35,000 V 1s, but only 9,000 were launched against England, and of these 4,000 were destroyed before they got there. The Germans continued flying buzz bombs, though. Their main target was Antwerp, the principal Allied supply base. The V 2s continued to bombard London between September 8, 1944, and March 29, 1945, when Allied troops captured their base.

  While all this was going on, von Braun and other German scientists were working on a couple of projects that were really scary. Von Braun and Dornberger had written the specs for a new missile, the A 10, which would have more than one motor and would drop off each as it became exhausted. It would have a range of 2,800 miles — long enough to reach New York. At the same time, others in Germany had been working feverishly on a radically new payload: a nuclear bomb. Time ran out on the “thousand-year Reich,” and neither project was able to help Hitler.

  The ideas, of course, did not go away. One day short of three months after Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945, the United States dropped the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. As soon as possible, the United States brought Werner von Braun and many of his fellow rocket scientists to the United States. Russian officials brought other German scientists to the Soviet Union. Soon the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were building ultra-long-range rockets and testing nuclear bombs. The super-rockets were called Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) because, like the V 2s, when their engines stopped, they were guided by nothing but the laws of ballistics. They could not be turned back. Similar to the ICBMs are the IRBMs (Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles).

  Since then, guidance systems and other features of these rockets have greatly improved. The latest intercontinental missiles have multiple warheads. The first of these were Multiple Reentry Vehicles (MRVs), which scatter warheads around a single large target to multiply the destruction. A later development was Multiple Independently-targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRVs). As this rocket descends, warheads and perhaps some decoys are ejected at different points to hit a number of targets. Most diabolical is the MARV system (for Maneuverable Alternative-target Reentry Vehicle. With this system, each warhead has its own rocket, and the warheads can change course to an alternative target if anti-ballistic missile defenses appear.

  At present, all of these ICBMs are designed for nuclear warheads. They are far too expensive to waste on mere high-explosive warheads. None of them have ever been used. And the world hopes, they may never be used. All wars and all foreign policy, however, have been conducted with fear of the nuclear-armed ICBM in the background influencing every decision.

  Superpowers and even great powers refuse to be stymied because they can’t use the long-range nukes. They do avoid conflict with each other because of the nuclear danger, and they do not even use their nukes on small powers for fear that such action might provoke others to use nuclear weapons. They do, however, use long-range missiles. These missiles, carr
ying high explosive warheads are much cheaper than ICBMs. They are a development of the old V 1.

  Cruise missiles were a major U.S. weapon in both the Gulf War of 1991 and the Iraq War of 2002. There were two types: the Tomahawk and the CALCM (for Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missile). In both wars, the Tomahawk was launched from both surface ships and submarines. Some subs are equipped to launch the missiles through the deck the same way the Polaris ballistic missiles are, others are merely shoot out of the torpedo tubes, after which they rise to the surface and fly away. The CALCMs are launched from B 52 bombers.

  They have less range than the Tomahawks, because their launching vehicles can get closer to most targets, but they carry a bigger warhead.

  In one way the modern cruise missiles are similar to their V 1 ancestor.

  They’re also powered by jet engines (turbofan jets in this case), and they both have a maximum speed of around 590 miles per hour. Their range and accuracy has vastly improved, though. The Tomahawk can travel 1,550 miles and, even at maximum range, it can hit “within meters” of its target. Tomahawks in the Gulf War were guided by a radar system which noted terrain features of the land it was flying over and electronically compared them with topographical information programmed into it. In the Gulf War, this was largely replaced by a global positioning satellite system that was even more accurate.

  Tomahawks were the weapon of choice not only in the two Mesopotamian conflicts but in such other situations as during the Clinton administration when U.S. Navy cruise missiles flattened a Sudanese chemical plant that was believed to be producing nerve gas for Al Qaeda and some public buildings in Baghdad in reprisal for an attempt to assassinate former president George H. W. Bush.