(Ch1) How One Major's "Insane" Bazooka Mod Made His Cub Destroy 6 Panzers

PART I: THE MAN WHO WOULD NOT JUST WATCH

07:15 hours. September 20th, 1944.
Ford forward airstrip, near Arancourt, France.

Major Charles “Bazooka Charlie” Carpenter pulled his goggles down as the fog began to thin.

The runway in front of him was little more than a scar in the dirt, churned up by truck tires and tracked vehicles. Beyond it, fields disappeared into rolling gray. Somewhere out there—three miles, maybe less—the German Fifth Panzer Army was moving.

Forty-seven Panther tanks.
Thirty armored cars.
Enough steel to erase Combat Command A of the U.S. Fourth Armored Division before noon.

Carpenter sat in the cockpit of his L-4 Grasshopper, hands resting on the yoke, feeling the faint vibration of the Continental engine. Forty horsepower. Fabric wings. No armor. No guns.

A flying clipboard.

He was thirty-one years old. A former high school history teacher from Illinois. Four hundred flight hours as an artillery spotter. Zero tanks destroyed. Thousands of coordinates called in. Hundreds of men watched die.

That was the part no one wrote into field manuals.

The job description said: observe, report, adjust fire.

What it really meant was: watch.

Watch Shermans burn.
Watch crews crawl out on fire—or not crawl out at all.
Watch Panthers engage from two thousand yards while American tank commanders never even saw what hit them.

Three weeks earlier, near Lunéville, Carpenter’s division had lost forty-one Shermans in six days. Thirty-two crews killed. Panthers could see Shermans first. Panther guns could penetrate Sherman armor from distances American tanks couldn’t respond from. By the time a Sherman saw a Panther, it was already dead.

Carpenter had flown overhead every day.

He had marked the coordinates.
He had called for artillery.
He had listened to radios scream and then go silent.

And something in him had broken.

Not loudly.
Not all at once.

Just enough.

Two days earlier, Carpenter had cornered an ordnance technician and a crew chief beside a fuel truck.

“Can you mount bazookas on my airplane?”

They thought he was joking.

He wasn’t.

THE IDEA THAT SHOULD HAVE DIED

The L-4 Grasshopper was a military version of the Piper J-3 Cub. It existed to loiter, not fight. German soldiers nicknamed them Maytag Messerschmitts because the engine sounded like a washing machine.

There was an unspoken agreement in the war.

You didn’t shoot at liaison aircraft.

An unarmed Cub wasn’t worth revealing your position. Fire at it, and every Allied gun within ten miles would rain shells down on you. Most German troops let them pass.

That agreement had kept Carpenter alive.

It had also kept him helpless.

The idea came during a failed spotting mission. Carpenter had watched a German supply convoy roll through a forest road. Perfect target. He radioed it in. By the time artillery adjusted fire, the trucks were gone.

That night, in an officer’s tent, Carpenter talked with two other Cub pilots—Lieutenant Harley Merrick and Lieutenant Roy Carson.

Carson admitted something quietly.

“I strapped two bazookas to my wings last week,” he said. “Blew up two trucks near Metz.”

Command hadn’t approved it.

But they hadn’t stopped it either.

Patton’s Third Army wasn’t waiting for paperwork.

The next morning, Carpenter found Sergeant William Morrison, an ordnance technician from Iowa who believed that anything could be fixed if you were stubborn enough.

Morrison listened.

Then asked one question.

“How many you want?”

TURNING A CUB INTO A WEAPON

By dawn on September 20th, six bazooka tubes jutted from the Grasshopper’s wing struts.

Six M1 bazookas.
Six 2.36-inch rockets.
Each capable of punching through three inches of armor.

Carpenter had painted a name on the fuselage in white:

ROSIE THE ROCKETER

The technical problems were terrifying.

The Grasshopper’s maximum useful load was 232 pounds.

Six bazookas weighed seventy-eight pounds. Add wiring, mounts, firing switches, and rockets, and they were flirting with disaster.

Each launcher had to be angled upward—fifteen degrees—to allow shallow dive attacks and give Carpenter time to pull out before slamming into the ground or flying into a wall of machine-gun fire.

Morrison wired each launcher to a toggle switch installed beside Carpenter’s seat.

Flip the switch.
Battery fires the igniter.
Rocket leaves the tube at 280 feet per second.

Simple.

Deadly.

Insane.

Morrison tightened the last connection, stepped back, and stared at Carpenter.

“You sure about this, Major?”

Carpenter thought of burned tanks.
Of radio calls that went unanswered.
Of men who never climbed out.

“I’m sure.”

FIRST DIVE

The fog thinned enough to see movement.

Panthers.

Five of them, rolling northeast along a tree line.

Carpenter pushed the throttle forward.

The Grasshopper lifted into the air.

At 1,100 yards, he spotted the lead tank. At 800 feet, German machine guns opened fire. Tracers arced upward. Fabric tore. The aircraft shuddered.

Four hundred feet.

The Panther filled his vision. He could see the commander standing in the open hatch, pointing, shouting.

Carpenter flipped the first toggle switch.

Nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

Electrical failure. Dead battery. Crossed wire. It didn’t matter.

Three hundred feet.

The turret began to turn.

That 75mm gun could erase him in one shot.

Carpenter flipped the second switch.

The bazooka fired.

The rocket screamed away trailing white smoke. The Grasshopper lurched sideways. Carpenter fought the controls as the projectile arced downward.

Direct hit.

The rocket slammed into the Panther’s engine deck.

The explosion sent metal fragments spinning. Black smoke poured out. The tank lurched and stopped.

One Panther immobilized.

Five rockets left.

Carpenter yanked the stick back, climbing hard. Machine-gun fire chased him upward. A bullet shattered his instrument panel. Glass sprayed across his lap.

At eight hundred feet, he banked left.

The remaining Panthers scattered.

They had realized something new and terrible.

The little airplane had teeth.

Carpenter circled, hands shaking, heart pounding.

An armored car broke from cover, racing toward a farmhouse.

He dove again.

Six hundred feet.
Five hundred.
Four hundred.

Third switch.

Direct hit.

The armored car exploded, ammunition cooking off, tearing it apart.

Now the Grasshopper wanted to roll. Two rockets gone from one wing. Asymmetry fought him constantly.

A Panther fired its main gun.

The shell missed by thirty feet.

Carpenter felt the pressure wave slam the aircraft.

For a heartbeat, he thought he was dead.

But the engine still ran.

Fourth rocket.

Miss.

Two rockets left.

And no altitude.

Carpenter pulled up, leveled at one thousand feet, fuel gauge dipping toward half.

Then he saw them.

American support units pinned behind a ridge. Forty men. Water trucks. Supply vehicles. Panthers advancing.

Five minutes, maybe less.

Carpenter turned south.

He was going back.

PART II: WHEN THE CUB BIT BACK

Carpenter brought Rosie down hard.

The Grasshopper bounced once, twice, then skidded to a stop in a cloud of dust and torn grass. He didn’t shut the engine down. He didn’t unstrap. He just sat there, chest heaving, staring straight ahead as if the runway might vanish if he blinked.

Sergeant Morrison was already running.

Behind him came six ordnance men carrying rockets like awkward, dangerous firewood.

“How many?” Morrison yelled.

“Two confirmed!” Carpenter shouted back. “Maybe three. Reload—now.”

They had practiced this.

Six men.
Six tubes.
Two minutes.

One man steadied a launcher. Another slid a rocket into the rear of the tube. Electrical leads snapped into place. Safety caps came off. The men moved like a pit crew, boots slipping in the dirt, hands blackened with soot and grease.

Carpenter checked his watch.

Those support units were still pinned. German tanks were still advancing. Every second on the ground was a second closer to massacre.

“One-forty,” Morrison called.

He gave a thumbs-up.

Carpenter released the brakes.

Rosie rolled forward and lifted off again, clawing into the air with everything her forty horses could give.

Twelve minutes after his first attack, Carpenter was back over Arancourt.

THE GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT DIES

The battlefield had changed.

The Panther he’d hit first still smoked, black oil staining the earth. The others had regrouped, forming a loose defensive ring. German infantry had dismounted from armored cars and were moving through a wheat field toward the trapped Americans.

This time, Carpenter came in from the east.

The sun was behind him.

The Panthers never saw him until he was at six hundred feet.

He fired two rockets in quick succession.

The first struck dirt between two armored cars.

The second hit an Sd.Kfz. 251 halftrack dead center.

The explosion was violent. Fuel ignited. Flames raced through dry wheat. German infantry scattered, diving for cover.

Below, American drivers saw their chance.

Engines roared. Trucks lurched forward. Forty men broke cover and ran for friendly lines as Carpenter dove again, this time deliberately drawing fire away from them.

A Panther’s turret swung toward him.

Machine guns hammered the sky.

Carpenter fired again.

One rocket slammed into a Panther’s turret ring. The explosion jammed the traverse. The tank could still move—but it could no longer aim its gun.

Another rocket hit an armored car, disabling it.

Carpenter pulled up, climbed to fifteen hundred feet, and circled.

The German attack stalled.

The Panthers began to withdraw.

The support units were gone.

Alive.

Carpenter landed back at the strip and shut down.

His hands shook so badly he couldn’t reach the magnetos for a moment.

Morrison approached slowly.

“You okay, Major?”

Carpenter nodded.

“I think,” he said.

That afternoon, Carpenter flew a third sortie. Near Nancy, he found a German supply column and destroyed two trucks.

When he landed, fifteen people were waiting for him.

Pilots. Ground crew. And a war correspondent from Stars and Stripes named Wes Gallagher, notebook already open.

By evening, Major General John Wood, commander of the Fourth Armored Division, arrived in person.

He looked at Rosie.

He looked at the bazookas.

He looked at Carpenter.

“Can other pilots do this?” Wood asked.

“Yes, sir,” Carpenter said. “If they’re willing to fly low and get shot at.”

Wood nodded once.

“That’s what I thought.”

NOW THEY SHOOT AT CUBS

Within days, three more L-4 pilots had bazookas mounted on their aircraft.

Lieutenant Ralph Whitel.
Captain James Parker.
Lieutenant George Wilson.

None matched Carpenter’s kill rate—but they proved the concept.

A $20,000 observation plane could damage or destroy tanks worth ten times that.

The Germans noticed.

On September 25th, new orders went out.

All American liaison aircraft are priority targets.
Cubs with weapons under the wings are to be shot down immediately.

The gentleman’s agreement was over.

Carpenter felt it instantly.

Before, German troops ignored him.

Now, every machine gun opened fire the moment he appeared.

Flak batteries tracked him across the sky.

Panther commanders rotated turrets toward him instead of toward ground targets.

On October 5th, a Panther fired its main gun at him from nine hundred yards.

The shell missed by thirty feet.

That was close enough.

The Germans had learned something too.

You didn’t need a direct hit to kill a Cub. The blast wave alone could tear it apart.

So Carpenter adapted.

He flew lower.

Fifty feet above the ground.

He hugged tree lines. Followed rivers. Popped up behind ridges. Came in from the sides instead of above.

Once, he flew straight down a river valley and rose behind a German supply depot before anyone knew he was there.

The Cub had become a predator.

MORE TEETH

The M1 bazooka was adequate—but German armor was getting heavier.

Panther G models had improved turret protection. Tiger IIs were appearing with armor the M1 rocket couldn’t reliably penetrate.

Morrison found the answer.

The M9 bazooka.

Same weight.
Better reliability.
Fired the M6A3 HEAT rocket, capable of penetrating nearly four inches of armor.

The M1’s firing system failed fifteen percent of the time.

The M9 almost never did.

Six hours later, Rosie the Rocketer was rearmed.

Ballast was added to the tail. Wiring redone. Angles adjusted.

On October 10th, Carpenter destroyed three German trucks.

On the 11th, an armored car.

On October 13th, he caught a Panther with its hatches open.

The crew was smoking.

They never heard him until he was two hundred yards away.

Carpenter fired from one hundred feet.

The rocket hit the engine deck.

The Panther burned.

That made four confirmed tanks destroyed.

Unofficially, the number was higher.

German radio intercepts began referring to him as “Der verrückte Major.”

The Mad Major.

Warnings spread.

Small plane with rockets. Avoid if possible. Shoot down if not.

Carpenter told the reporter, “They must be getting annoyed. They never used to bother cubs.”

OCTOBER 19, 1944

At 0530, Fourth Armored Division received new intelligence.

German armor massing near Château-Salins.

Forty Panthers.
Seventeen Tiger IIs.
Dozens of armored vehicles.

The largest formation Patton’s Third Army had faced in six weeks.

General Wood called Carpenter in.

“I need eyes out there,” Wood said. Then paused.

“And if you see targets of opportunity…”

Carpenter nodded.

He wasn’t being sent just to observe.

At 0700, Rosie lifted off.

Two other armed Cubs joined him.

Three L-4s.
Eighteen rockets.
Against sixty armored vehicles.

They found the Germans at 0740.

Tanks dug in along a ridgeline, turrets exposed, hulls hidden. Perfect defensive terrain—if the enemy came from the ground.

Carpenter didn’t.

He circled north, came in from the east, sun behind him.

The Germans never looked up.

At four hundred feet, Carpenter fired all six rockets in fifteen seconds.

Three hit.

Two Panthers burned.
One Tiger II was immobilized.

Whitel and Parker followed him down.

Eighteen more rockets.

Twelve hits.

By the time they climbed away, seven German tanks were burning or disabled.

The defensive line collapsed before American ground forces even arrived.

Carpenter landed at 0830.

Reloaded.

Back in the air by 0900.

Second sortie: a German fuel convoy.

Four trucks destroyed.

Two hundred thousand gallons of fuel gone.

Third sortie: self-propelled artillery.

Two vehicles destroyed.

By 1500 hours, Carpenter had flown six combat sorties.

Fired thirty-six rockets.

Official tally for the day:

Four tanks destroyed

Two damaged

Six armored vehicles destroyed

Four artillery pieces destroyed

One supply column eliminated

Château-Salins fell that afternoon.

Not because of overwhelming artillery.

But because a history teacher kept diving out of the sky in a fabric-covered airplane and blowing up tanks.

That evening, a colonel arrived from Third Army headquarters with orders signed by General George S. Patton.

The Army wanted to expand the program.

They wanted Carpenter to train others.

They wanted to turn a one-man experiment into doctrine.

And Major Charles Carpenter had no idea that he had just invented the conceptual ancestor of the modern attack helicopter.

PART III: THE LEGACY OF ROSIE

The Army did not like improvisation.

It tolerated it in war—but it never trusted it.

Major Charles Carpenter’s bazooka-armed Grasshopper was everything doctrine warned against: unauthorized modification, undocumented tactics, unacceptable risk. No manual described attacking tanks in a fabric-covered observation plane. No regulation allowed it.

And yet the numbers refused to be ignored.

By October 30th, 1944, Fourth Armored Division records credited bazooka-equipped L-4s with:

14 German tanks destroyed or disabled

27 armored vehicles destroyed

18 supply trucks eliminated

3 artillery positions neutralized

All for zero American aircraft losses.

A cost comparison made the point brutally clear.

One L-4 Grasshopper: $20,000

Six bazookas and modifications: ~$2,000

One Panther tank: $250,000

One Tiger II: over $500,000

Carpenter’s aircraft alone had destroyed more enemy armor than some entire Sherman tank companies.

On November 6th, 1944, Third Army issued Technical Bulletin 44-3:
Employment of Bazookas on L-4 Type Aircraft.

Everything Carpenter and Sergeant Morrison had learned through trial, error, and incoming fire was now official doctrine. Mounting angles. Wiring diagrams. Firing techniques. Attack profiles. Escape maneuvers.

Nine more L-4 squadrons received authorization.

Not everyone volunteered.

Flying into machine-gun fire at eighty-five miles per hour in an unarmored airplane required a very specific temperament. Courage and insanity lived close together in that cockpit.

But enough men stepped forward.

By December, 47 bazooka-equipped Grasshoppers operated across France, classified as tactical harassment units. They didn’t replace fighter-bombers. They didn’t level cities.

They did something more disruptive.

They appeared where no one expected.
They struck where defenses were weakest.
They forced German armor to look up instead of forward.

Panzer units adapted. Extra machine guns were mounted for air defense. Some platoons assigned one tank purely to watch the sky. Flak batteries repositioned along likely approach routes.

It didn’t solve the problem.

Gunners trained to track Thunderbolts at 300 miles per hour couldn’t adjust to a target moving slower than a truck. By the time they acquired the Cub, it had already fired and vanished behind terrain.

On December 14th, Major General Wood recommended Carpenter for the Silver Star.

The citation read simply:
“For gallantry in action against the enemy.”

Wood added a handwritten note:
“This officer’s innovative tactics saved American lives and demonstrated exceptional courage under fire.”

Carpenter received the medal on January 3rd, 1945.

By then, his official tally stood at six German tanks destroyed—two Tiger IIs and four Panthers.

Unofficially, the number was higher.

Carpenter never argued about it.

He didn’t count tanks.

He counted men who made it home.

THE COST OF WAR

In March 1945, Carpenter began feeling weak.

Night sweats.
Weight loss.
Exhaustion that sleep didn’t fix.

A flight surgeon grounded him and sent him to a field hospital.

Three weeks later, the diagnosis came.

Hodgkin’s disease.

Cancer.

The prognosis was grim. In 1945, treatment options were limited. Radiation therapy helped some. Experimental drugs helped few.

Doctors gave him two years.

Maybe less.

Carpenter was discharged in April 1946. Promoted to Lieutenant Colonel. Given his medals. Sent home to Illinois.

In September, he walked into Urbana High School and asked for his old job back.

The principal stared at him.

“You’re supposed to be dying.”

Carpenter smiled faintly.

“I’d rather die teaching than waiting.”

He taught American history for twenty years.

He never talked much about the war.

When students asked about the Silver Star on the classroom wall, he changed the subject. The Constitution. The Civil War. Reconstruction.

Anything but himself.

His daughter later said he believed the real credit belonged to the tank crews and infantrymen on the ground.

He had just been an observer who happened to carry rockets.

AFTER THE WAR

When Carpenter died on March 22nd, 1966, forty-seven former Army aviators attended his funeral.

Men who had flown Cubs with bazookas in France, Germany, and Italy.

Every one of them said the same thing.

“He proved it could be done.”

Rosie the Rocketer survived the war.

The Army left the aircraft in Europe as surplus. An Austrian pilot bought it, painted it yellow, flew it for years—never knowing its history. Eventually, it was donated to a museum in Graz, where it sat forgotten in storage.

Until 2017.

Researchers at the American Heritage Museum traced the serial number.

43-30426.

Rosie.

The restoration took three years.

They stripped layers of paint. Found bullet holes patched with fabric. Discovered the original mounting brackets where Morrison had welded the bazooka tubes.

Every scar told the story.

Today, Rosie the Rocketer hangs in the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts—suspended in mid-attack behind a German Panther tank.

Six replica bazookas jut from the wing struts.

Visitors stand beneath it.

Look up at the fabric wings.

And try to imagine flying that thing into combat.

The placard lists the facts:

6 tanks destroyed

47 combat sorties

0 times shot down

America’s only airborne tank ace

But numbers miss the point.