If you were an American tanker in 1945, there was one thing you feared more than enemy tanks or artillery. It was a single soldier with a cheap metal tube. One shot and your tank with your crew could be gone. By the end of the war, these disposable weapons knocked out more Allied armor than Tigers and Panthers combined. So how did the Germans create something so simple and so deadly? And why were some of the early attempts so bizarre?
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| A German Soldier with Sturmpistole (A Pistol Launched Grenade) |
The Problem Nobody Could Solve
When the war broke out in 1939, tanks had just enough armor to stop machine gun fire. The weapons designed to kill them were the same ones from the First World War. Anti-tank rifles and small caliber towed guns did the job, and nobody was rushing to replace them.
The Germans relied on the 37 millimeter towed anti-tank gun. Light, mobile, and effective against late-1930s tanks. Then they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and ran into T-34s and KV-1s. Suddenly, that 37 millimeter gun couldn't penetrate anything meaningful. Soldiers started calling it the door knocker because hitting a T-34 just made noise.
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| German 37mm "Pak 36" Towed Anti Tank Gun |
Anti-tank rifles had the same issue. Fine against light tanks early on, but useless as armor got thicker. Magnetic charges and mines existed, but using those meant physically climbing onto an enemy tank. These were last-ditch options.
What every army needed was something portable enough for infantry to carry, cheap enough to mass-produce, simple enough for anyone to use, and powerful enough to kill a modern tank at a reasonable distance. The shaped charge was the concept everyone was excited about. Unlike regular explosives that blast in all directions, a shaped charge focuses energy into a concentrated jet of superheated metal that melts its way through armor. Building the warhead wasn't the hard part. Delivering it accurately onto a tank from a safe distance was.
The Wrong Answers
Before anyone figured out the right solution, there were plenty of wrong ones. The Germans created the Panzerwurfmine, an anti-tank hand grenade shaped like a football. It weighed about 3 pounds, and the lethal radius of its explosion was actually greater than the throwing range for most soldiers. You'd throw it, dive into a foxhole, and hope for the best.
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| German Soldier thorwing the Panzerwurfmine |
Then came the Panzerbuche 42, an anti-tank grenade mounted on top of a flare gun. The recoil was so bad they had to add a stock to the pistol. Range and accuracy were terrible. Next were rifle grenades, shaped charges mounted on standard infantry rifle muzzles. Range improved to maybe 100 meters, but the recoil was punishing and hitting a moving tank while being shot at wasn't exactly easy.
The British developed the PIAT, which used a heavy spring-loaded spigot instead of a rocket. Its advantage was no back blast, so you could fire from inside buildings. But it weighed 32 pounds, the recoil was brutal, about a quarter of the grenades were duds, and when the spring failed to re-cock automatically, you had to stand up and pull it back with both arms while being shot at.
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| British Soldiers with a PIAT |
The American M1 Bazooka entered combat in late 1942 as the first practical rocket-propelled anti-tank weapon. A two-man team could carry it, and effective range reached 150 meters. But early models used batteries for ignition that failed in cold weather. The Soviets never developed their own equivalent during the war, sticking with anti-tank rifles and dangerous close-range methods like Molotov cocktails and satchel charges thrown onto tanks.
The Panzerfaust
Then the Germans figured it out. The Panzerfaust was a single-shot disposable launcher with a preloaded warhead. Almost anyone could use it with minimal instruction. Rest the tube on your shoulder, flip up the sight, squeeze the trigger. The back blast cancelled the recoil, giving it almost no kick.
The catch was range. The first model, the Panzerfaust 30, had an effective range of just 30 meters. Almost point blank. But the warhead could penetrate 140 to 200 millimeters of armor depending on the model. For 1943, that was enormous. It could defeat any Allied tank from the side or rear. The weapon weighed only five to seven kilograms. No loader needed, no special training, no batteries.
Alongside the Panzerfaust, the Germans developed the Panzerschreck, their own bigger version of the captured American Bazooka. It fired an 88 millimeter rocket with penetration up to 200 millimeters, enough to kill any Allied tank from any angle. It was reusable with better range, but required a dedicated two-man team and more training.
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| German Soldier with a Panzerfaust 30 |
The combination meant German infantry could threaten armor at multiple ranges. Panzerschrecks went to dedicated anti-tank teams. Panzerfausts went to everyone else.
The Numbers Tell the Story
German soldiers formed Panzerjagdkommandos, tank hunter teams that set up ambushes along likely tank routes, waited until enemy tanks exposed their vulnerable sides, then fired and escaped. The economics made sense. One cheap tube could destroy a tank that cost enormous resources to build.
In the final phase of the war, roughly 70% of Soviet armor losses came not from German tanks or the famous 88 millimeter guns, but from Panzerfausts. Most of this happened in urban combat where tanks were funneled into narrow streets. In Normandy, roughly a third of Allied tanks knocked out fell to Panzerfausts and similar weapons.
Tank crews started welding anything they could find onto their vehicles. Sandbags, spare track links, logs, wire mesh, even bed frames. The same concept as the cope cages we see on tanks today, trying to detonate the shaped charge before it reached the main armor.
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| SovietT-34-85 Tank with an Improvised Cope Cage |
The Panzerfaust kept evolving. The Panzerfaust 60 doubled the range and became the most widely produced model with millions manufactured by 1945. The Panzerfaust 100 pushed to 100 meters with penetration up to 220 millimeters. The Panzerfaust 150 was a serious redesign with improved explosives reaching 300 millimeters of penetration.
As the Reich collapsed, Panzerfausts were handed to the Volkssturm, anyone between 16 and 60 who could hold a weapon. In Berlin, untrained civilians with these weapons still managed to destroy a significant number of Allied tanks. That's how simple it was to use.
From Panzerfaust to Javelin
When the Soviets captured the Panzerfaust 150 factory and incomplete designs for the planned Panzerfaust 250, they studied everything. German engineers were interrogated. Four years later, the Soviet Union introduced the RPG-2, and the resemblance to the final German concepts was no coincidence.
The crude weapons that could barely hit a tank at 30 meters became the foundation for everything that followed. Today we have weapons like the Javelin and NLAW that calculate their own trajectories, choose their own attack angles, and deliver warheads that no modern tank can reliably stop. All of it traces back to those desperate years when soldiers needed a way to fight armor they couldn't otherwise touch.
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| A Soldier with Javelin |
A 3-pound anti-tank football with a lethal radius bigger than its throwing range. A flare gun with a grenade strapped to it. A spring-loaded tube that wouldn't re-cock. Those were the early attempts. Then someone figured out a disposable metal tube with a shaped charge, and tanks were never safe again.
Written by Andreja Rakočević, a military history writer and co-creator of the RogerRoger YouTube channel.