Japan Stunned by America's M9A1 2.36-Inch Bazooka—And Their Lunge Mines Were Suicide

Japan Stunned by America's M9A1 2.36-Inch Bazooka—And Their Lunge Mines Were Suicide

Leyte Island, Philippines, December thirteenth, nineteen forty-four, zero six hundred hours, and Private First Class James McKinley of the United States Army's Seventh Infantry Division crouched behind a demolished stone wall, watching through the morning mist as something impossible emerged from the treeline three hundred yards ahead, a Japanese soldier sprinting directly toward Corporal Anderson's M four Sherman tank with what looked like a bomb strapped to the end of a bamboo pole, running straight into machine gun fire with the kind of desperate courage that made McKinley's stomach turn, because this wasn't the first time he'd seen it and it wouldn't be the last, these suicide attacks that American intelligence would later document as the Shitotsubakurai lunge mine, a weapon so desperate in its design that it guaranteed the death of anyone brave enough or indoctrinated enough to use it, while McKinley himself carried slung across his back the M nine A one two point three six inch Rocket Launcher, the weapon American troops called the bazooka, a reusable shoulder-fired anti-tank system that let him engage enemy armor from three hundred yards away without sacrificing his life in the process, and the contrast between these two weapons, between the American bazooka that could penetrate one hundred twenty-seven millimeters of armor plate from a safe distance and the Japanese lunge mine that required its operator to physically ram six point six pounds of T N T into the side of a tank knowing the resulting explosion would kill him instantly, told the entire story of the Pacific War in a single image, one side with industrial capacity and technological innovation that valued the lives of its soldiers, the other side with courage and fanaticism born from desperation and a military culture that celebrated death over defeat.

Видео Japan Stunned by America's M9A1 2.36-Inch Bazooka—And Their Lunge Mines Were Suicide канала WWII Battlefield Memoirs