We are accustomed to thinking of the American army in World War II as an endless conveyor belt. The richest economy on the planet, flooding the front lines with canned meat, jeeps, and Sherman tanks. An army that had everything and always in abundance. But there was one area where this powerful military machine behaved like a beggar, rummaging through the trash.

While Stalin was already [music] burning German columns with kachuchas and Hitler was frightening the allies with the howl of navalers, American engineers had nothing. No blueprints, no factories, no interest from the command. To catch up with the enemy, a US Army colonel had to go not to a secret laboratory, but to a scrap metal dump.

 [music] and what he found there became the basis for the weapon that was to be America’s answer to the Reich’s army. This is the story of how the most technologically advanced army in the world fought with rockets made from discarded fire extinguishers. This is the story of Colliopy. A tank that looked like a musical instrument sounded like a banshee and turned its own crew into a target for every German gunner within a kilometer.

 And to understand [music] how such an engineering Frankenstein ended up on the [music] front lines, we need to go back to the 1930s to one stubborn officer who was laughed at by the entire Pentagon. By the summer of 1943, the rocket salvo war was in full swing, but only two sides were playing. On the Eastern front, Soviet BM13s turned German columns into burning [music] scrap metal in a matter of seconds.

 A battery of four launchers unleashed 1/2 tons of high explosive shells on an area that conventional artillery would have taken half an hour to cover. On the Western Front, German naval Verer rockets howled so loudly that the sound alone was enough to make untrained infantrymen press themselves into the ground before the first rocket reached its target.

 And the richest and most numerous army in the Western world had absolutely nothing. Not a single serial system capable of responding even remotely in kind. At the same time, proof [music] that the rocket salvo worked had been obtained two years earlier and at the [music] cost of blood. On July 14th, 1941, Captain Ivan Flareoff, a student at the artillery academy, was appointed commander of a formation with no analoges in any army [music] in the world and brought seven experimental BM13 installations [music] into position east of Orcha. At 3:15

p.m., he ordered the firing on the railway junction, which was packed with German trains carrying equipment [clears throat] and fuel. A few seconds later, the junction was gone. A concise entry appeared in the combat log. Excellent results. A sea of fire. An hour and a half later, a second salvo destroyed the pontoon bridge across the Orchitza River, and the Vermach’s 17th tank division was out of action for 3 days.

 The Germans immediately began hunting for the new weapon. They needed a working model, rockets, and live crews. For 3 months, Flareoff’s battery evaded pursuit, striking near Smolinsk, Yato, and Yelna. But in October, the ring closed near the village of Bogatier in the Smalinsk region. The column was ambushed. There was no fuel left. Flareoff ordered a final direct salvo at the approaching tanks and then to blow up the installations.

 Seriously wounded, he blew up the lead vehicle when the Germans were 50 m away. Of the 170 men, 46 made it back to their lines. None were taken prisoner. Not a single installation fell into enemy hands. Flareof died, but the idea he proved at the cost of his own life could no longer be stopped. By the end of the war, the Soviets would produce more than 10,000 launchers and 12 million rockets.

 The Germans would produce 5.5 million Nebulver rockets. By that time, the Americans would be desperately trying to catch up with both sides using methods that might seem comical if they weren’t putting real people’s [music] lives at risk. The man who was trying to close this gap had been banging his head against a brick wall for 11 years.

Colonel Leslie Skinner began tinkering [music] with solid fuel rockets at the Aberdine proving ground back in 1932 [music] when Pearl Harbor was still almost a decade away and the word rocket elicited at best an indulgent smile in the corridors of the War Department. He was given no money, nor was he given any instructions on what to develop.

 He experimented in his spare time at his own expense, assembling prototypes from discarded artillery shells and whatever he could salvage from the scrap metal dump behind the workshop. In 1938, the command sent him to Hawaii, not as a reward, but to get him away from the test site, where he was getting in the way with his useless rockets.

 The war changed everything, but not as quickly as he would have liked. In the fall of 1941, Skinner was tasked with creating a 4.5 [music] in aircraft missile. The problem was that no factory produced bodies of the required diameter. They simply did not exist. Skinner solved the problem the way he [music] had solved all problems for the past 10 years. He went to the junkyard.

He machined the casings for the first prototypes of the M8 rocket from old fire extinguishers, which happened to be exactly the right size. This accidental diameter, 114 mm, became the standard for all American rockets of this class for years to come. By 1943, millions of M8 rockets were already being produced.

They worked well from the air. Fighters and attack aircraft dropped them on ground targets with sufficient accuracy. However, trouble began when they were launched from the ground. The folding tail stabilizers, which held the missile perfectly at the speed of an air launch, did not have time to open and stabilize the flight at the low initial speeds of a ground launch.

 The missile drifted in the first moments after launch, and it was impossible to predict exactly where it would land. The army gave the M8 an honest classification. A barrage rocket, not for precision strikes, but to blanket an entire area with shells and hope for the best. They tried launching it from everything they could find, trucks, jeeps, and landing ships.

 The result was the same everywhere. The rockets flew in roughly the right direction. But in war, roughly is the difference between [music] a destroyed position and a volley into thin air. The Americans needed a platform that could bring these 60 unguided rockets as close as possible to the enemy, fire a volley, and survive the return fire.

 In other words, they needed a tank. And by 1943, the engineers of the Army Artillery Department had come up with an idea that seemed as crazy as it was logical. Take the Sherman workhorse and mount 60 rocket tubes on its turret. [music] The solution proposed by designer Victor Hawkins was elegant in its crudeness. 60 launch tubes assembled in two tiers, 36 in the upper block and 24 in the lower, were attached to the Sherman’s turret cheeks with a steel frame and hung about a meter above the turret roof. The entire structure weighed 835

kg and transformed the Sherman’s familiar squat silhouette into something completely different, as if a giant organ had been placed at top the tank. This contraption was to be aimed using the tank’s standard weaponry. The missile grid was connected to the barrel of a 75 mm cannon by a rod. When the barrel was raised or lowered, the grid moved with it.

 Horizontally, it moved with the turret’s rotation. The launch was electric. Cables ran through the commander’s hatch, and he controlled the volley from a panel inside. 60 rockets could be fired sequentially or all at once. A full salvo took about 30 seconds. In half a minute, one tank could unleash as much explosive power on the enemy as an entire battery of howitzers could in half an hour.

 On paper, it looked like the answer to all prayers. A mobile armored missile platform capable of approaching enemy positions, firing a salvo, and leaving. The collap was supposed to be the American answer to the Kachushia and even surpass it because the Soviet installations were mounted on unprotected trucks.

 While here the rockets were mounted on a tank. About 200 Collapes were produced and sent to Great Britain with a specific task. On D-Day they were to destroy the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall right from the beaches of Normandy. However, as is often the case in war, there was a huge gap between the plan and reality. The first problem was discovered even before they were sent to the front.

 835 kg of rocket grids raised 1 m above the turret critically shifted the tank’s [music] center of gravity upward. On flat ground, this was tolerable. on the deck of a landing ship in the swell of the English Channel. It was deadly dangerous. The Sherman with Colli could simply capsize before reaching the shore.

 Thus, [music] the weapon created specifically for D-Day missed the most important day of the war. But the problems were only just beginning. In the original design, the rocket frame blocked the gun barrel. The tank could not fire its main weapon while the installation was mounted. This meant that the 30-tonon combat vehicle was deprived of its main purpose, the ability to fire at enemy armored vehicles.

 Collopy turned the Sherman from a tank into a disposable launcher. Expensive, slow, [music] and defenseless. After the last rocket left the barrel, the crews found a partial solution themselves. In the field, they disconnected the guidance rod from the barrel and attached it to the gun shield, allowing them to fire the gun, but limiting the rocket’s elevation angle.

 The engineering problem that the designers had failed to solve was solved by the tankers with wire and frontline ingenuity. Then there was reloading, or rather the impossibility of it. 60 rockets were all the crew had, one volley. After that, the tubes were empty, and to reload them, it was necessary to stop the tank, climb out, [music] and manually insert each rocket from the rear of the grid connecting the electrical contacts.

 Under fire, this was tantamount to suicide. In practice, after firing, the crews tried to drop the empty rack and return to the role of a regular Sherman, [music] but the release mechanism regularly jammed, and the tank was left with a useless 800 kg structure on the turret, which now provided nothing but extra weight and an unmistakable silhouette.

 And the silhouette was the main problem. A meter of steel pipes above the turret was visible from afar and instantly recognizable. Collapy was the most conspicuous tank on any battlefield and the Germans quickly realized this. Colliap finally made it to the war, albeit with a delay that boarded on the absurd.

 In December 1944, 30 Shermans from the 743rd Tank Battalion received rocket launchers to support the advance of the 30th Infantry Division. However, the Germans chose this very moment to strike in the Arden and all 30 Collapes were dismantled without firing a single rocket. The [music] weapon created for D-Day and missed D-Day now missed the largest German counter offensive on the Western Front.

 Its hour came only in February 1945 when the Collapes returned to tanks [music] as part of General Patton’s third army. In March during the breakthrough through Sarland, they [music] finally spoke and spoke loudly. The rocket launchers were used by the 2nd, 4th, 6th, [music] 12th, and 14th armored divisions, as well as several separate tank battalions.

 [music] And here it became clear that no engineer had included in the design. Colliapy’s main weapon was not a high explosive shell, but sound. When 60 rockets flew out of the tubes in 30 seconds, the roar was so loud that it could be heard for miles. The M8 rockets emitted a piercing, crescendoing howl in flight, the very same sound that [music] gave similar systems around the world their musical nicknames.

The German infantry caught in Collapy’s volley reacted in the same way they reacted to the crocodile flamethrower tanks. They abandoned their positions and ran. Not because the rockets were accurate. They still scattered unpredictably across the area. But because the sound and sight of 60 fiery tales simultaneously bursting into the sky had a stronger effect on the nervous system than any shrapnel.

 Colliopy won not with shrapnel but with decibb. 30 seconds of terror. And then the pipes are empty and a completely different story begins. That very different story is told by Glenn Lamb, a tankman with Company C of the 714th Tank Battalion, 12th Armored Division. Lamb commanded a regular Sherman tank named coming home with the inscription persuader on the barrel of the gun and his tank was in the column next to the collapse.

He is the only one who left direct evidence of what the price of this music [music] was for those who performed it. According to Lamb, the Germans quickly learned to distinguish between regular Shermans and vehicles with rocket grills. The meter of steel pipes above the turret was visible long before the tank entered the effective firing range.

And the Germans used this knowledge with surgical precision. They let the ordinary tanks pass without revealing their positions and waited. They waited until the characteristic silhouette with pipes appeared in the column. One of Lamb’s best friends was the driver of such a vehicle. Once the entire column passed along the road without a single shot being fired and when the Collapy bringing up the rear came around the bend, the Germans opened fire with a 20 mm anti-aircraft gun.

 The driver’s head was blown off. This testimony encapsulates the entire fate of the Collapy in a single episode. A weapon created to instill terror became itself the object of the hunt. The same story was repeated across the front. Crews did not like collapse because the rocket grid turned them from one tank among many into the only target that the enemy saw first and [music] destroyed first. The circle was complete.

 In 1941, the Germans hunted Fluros Kushas and in 1945 they hunted Lamb’s Collopy. The rocket salvo was still terrifying, but those it terrified had learned to strike first. Of the 200 collapse produced, most never fired a single shot in battle. Those that did fire fired a handful of salvos in the last weeks of the war in Europe and were decommissioned.

No army in the world adopted the Collapy after 1945. No post-war tactics textbook cited it as a [music] model to emulate. The idea of bolting unguided rockets to a tank turret died with the war that gave it birth. However, only the specific design died, not the idea itself. The idea that a tank could and should carry missile weapons outlived Collopy by decades.

 It simply evolved in a different direction from 60 unguided missiles flying roughly in the direction of the enemy to a single guided missile flying straight [music] to its target. Anti-tankg guided missiles which appeared in the 1950s and 1960s solved the problem that Collapy could not solve.

 giving a tank firepower beyond the range of its gun without sacrificing armor protection, accuracy or second shot. And the very concept of a massive rocket barrage across an area pioneered by Katusha and adopted by all the waring parties has grown into modern multiple launch rocket systems from the Soviet GRD to the American highars whose rockets unlike the M8 know where they are going.

Colonel Skinner retired in 1948 with a single award, the Legion of Honor. The editor of Ordinance magazine called him America’s almost forgotten rocket man. Captain Flarov was listed as missing in action for half a century until German staff documents revealed the truth about his last battle.

 [music] He was postumously awarded the title of hero 54 years later. Glenn Lamb returned home in his Sherman tank, but the sound of the 20mm anti-aircraft gun, and the face of his friend, the driver, [music] remained with him forever. Three people, three wars within one great war, and all three converged at one point.

 The idea that a rocket salvo could change the course of battle. Flare proved it near Orcha. Skinner at the Aberdine proving ground scrapyard using fire extinguishers and wire hangers. The Collapy crews did it on the roads of Sarland where 30 seconds of thunder forced the German infantry to abandon their trenches.

 The Collapy did not become a great weapon. It was too late for its war, failed to find its doctrine, and was forgotten faster than the paint on its launch tubes dried. But it remains one of the most honest monuments [music] to how war really works. Not elegant blueprints or parades on the shams, but rockets made from fire extinguishers, sights [music] made from hangers, and tankers who knew that the meter of steel pipes above their heads was not a weapon, but a target.

 Three armies, three organs, three ways [music] to play the same melody. Collapy played louder than anyone else, but was remembered as the quietest.