Red Glare Everywhere: Small Rockets

^{Nineteenth‑century rocket battery firing.}

The rocket is one of the oldest of explosive weapons. The Chinese were using rockets before they – or anyone else – had guns. Rockets appeared in Europe around 1250 – again, before any Europeans had guns. Rockets may have been even more useful than guns for scaring horses (the chief effect of the earliest guns). They could also set fires. But rockets weren’t worth a hoot for knocking down stone walls, which was what interested most belligerents at that time, so they were soon dropped by most armies.

They came back into fashion in the early 19th century when an Englishman named William Congreve, impressed by rockets the Indians were using, invented an improvement. Congreve’s rockets were iron and carried a warhead of either gunpowder or incendiary material. He built several sizes, and all were stabilized by a long pole fastened to the body of the rocket. They were launched from a long ramp and used by both armies and navies. Ships using rockets had sails set back from the front of the ship, which was reserved for rocket launching, and some had chains, instead of rope, for rigging. The rocket’s back blast as always been a factor that must be reckoned with. During the Napoleonic Wars, British ships used rockets to burn down Copenhagen, and in the War of 1812, they used rockets in the unsuccessful bombardment of Fort McHenry.

Later, rockets were stabilized by either propellant gases pushing vanes at the rear of the rocket, which set it spinning, or by tail fins. Rockets were easier to move than artillery, but they were much less accurate, so they remained a secondary weapon until World War II. Changed conditions combined with improvements in rocket engines made rockets important weapons. Continued improvement after the war has led to rockets replacing guns in many situations.

This trend is particularly noticeable in navies. All the world’s huge 16‑inch‑gun battleships are now out of service, and their places have been taken by smaller ships armed principally with rockets and guided missiles. In the Iraq War, Coalition naval forces included four carrier battle groups, including four of the giant nuclear Nimitz class carriers, each displacing more than 93,000 tons, as well as slightly smaller carriers like the 81,990 Kitty Hawk class. There were scores of smaller ships: cruisers, destroyers and frigates. None carried many guns, and those were comparatively light antiaircraft or dual purpose guns, fast‑firing lightweights for which shore bombardment was little more than an afterthought. Instead of heavy guns, the fleet carried hundreds of antiaircraft, anti‑ship, and other surface‑to‑surface rockets in addition to cruise missiles.

For ground fighting, rockets turned out to the perfect antitank weapon for infantry. A rocket launcher has no recoil, because it’s just a hollow tube. There’s no internal pressure, as there is in a gun. All the internal pressure is in the rocket itself, so the launcher can be quite light. The bazookas, short‑range point‑and‑shoot weapons, were fired from one man’s shoulder. There are still modernized forms of the bazooka in service, but there are also much longer ranged antitank rockets, which are guided by signals coming over a thin wire (the Brennan torpedo – see Chapter 26 – was a century ahead of its time). Other antitank rockets home in on reflected laser light. All of them are much lighter and more mobile than any kind of artillery.

World War II produced many situations that required a sudden, intensely heavy bombardment for a short period. For this, the rocket was ideal. Landing craft equipped with masses of rockets delivered more explosives on enemy beaches in a shorter time than any battleship could. Both the Germans, with their Nebelwerfer, and the Russians, with their Katyusha, laid down massive rocket bombardments on the Eastern Front. Rockets were especially important for air defense in World War II. Planes were flying higher and faster, only rockets could reach the necessary altitude, and only rockets could be programmed to home on the planes. After the war, rockets also gave the infantry a way to cope with low‑flying enemy planes attempting to strafe them. Shoulder‑fired rocket launchers as the United States’s Stinger now allows the dogface to fight back effectively. Unfortunately, they also give terrorists something to use against civilian airliners.

Aircraft, too, found rockets essential. German night fighters, confronted with Allied bombers flying in tight formation for mutual defense, simply launched their rockets at the formations as if the rockets were torpedoes and they were submarines attacking a convoy. In dogfights, fighter pilots on both sides used rockets extensively. A rocket packed a much heavier punch than a .50 caliber bullet or a 20 mm shell. Rockets could also be made to home in on enemy planes – to turn with them, dive with them, outrun them and blow them up.

For strafing ground targets, the rocket was also ideal. World War II ground fighting saw the obsolescence of dive bombers such as the German Stuka. Dive bombing was an extremely hazardous occupation if the enemy had any decent ground fire capability, because the bomber appeared to be almost motionless to those immediately below it. The only reason for dive bombing was that it was the most accurate way to drop an unguided bomb. Rockets had accuracy built in. The fighter‑bomber (pure fighters were also becoming obsolete) would approach its target at high speed in a rather shallow dive and fire rockets when the target was in range. Rockets for antitank use, of course, had shaped‑charge fillings.

During the Cold War, all the nations of the world feared the nuclear‑armed intercontinental ballistic missile. They still do. Witness the flap over nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran. Although the ICBM has strongly affected nations’ political and military strategy, it has never been used. That’s not true of its smaller cousins. They have already changed the nature of war on land, sea, and air.