From: Steve Grammont (islander@midmaine.com)
Date: Sat Dec 04 2004 - 12:20:33 PST
Hi Dan,
>Jonathon pointed out a mistake of mine and I thought that I should pass
>it along. I had thought that Rudolf Nebel (of German rocket fame)
>invented the nebelwerfer but he did not. Nebel's name beans "fog" and
>it is just a coincidence.
Yup. The weapon was developed during the 1920s and 1930s, with the first
model entering service in 1940. They were initially issued to
specialized "Nebeltruppen", which in English we'd call "Smoke Troops".
Their original role was to provide massive smoke cover, but they also had
the ability to lay down HE barrages. The latter quickly became the
standard after its first use on the Eastern Front in 1941 and later that
year against the Allies on North Africa. The weapon was super secret at
the time so the "Nebel" designation probably caused some initial
confusion for Soviet and Allied intelligence. And once a name sticks...
it stays!
The weapon was highly effective and early on a single barrage was likely
to completely take the fight out of the enemy. The same was said of the
Soviet equivalent, the Katyusha ("Stalin's Organ"), which also made its
debut in 1941. And as a piece of trivia... the Germans like the Katyusha
so much that the Waffen SS set up mass production of an exact copy
because they were having difficulty getting Nebelwerfer systems from the
Heer (Army). As with many Soviet weapons systems, the Katyusha was both
cheap and effective compared to the typically expensive and difficult to
produce German equivalent.
Steve
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