German Tanks vs. American Cropduster - Bazooka Charlie

Gene Razack from Starship Troopers, one of my favorite characters in cinematic history. The history and philosophy teacher that goes into combat when war starts and leads his former students. Well, I found the real-life version and it's even cooler than the movie. Today we're talking about Charles Carpenter. The Germans referred to him as the Mad Major while his men knew him as Bazooka Charlie. A 29-year-old history teacher from Moline, Illinois,

who would join the United States Army Air Corps after Pearl Harbor was attacked and his younger brother, who was a fighter pilot in the Philippines, was captured by the Japanese. Through a series of events, he would become one of the United States Army's first liaison pilots, a new experimental program where these men were tasked with flying the L4 Grasshopper,

basically a glorified crop duster with fabric wings and what amounts to a lawnmower blade sticking out of the front. They would fly out over the battlefield and use their altitude to spot enemy positions and call in accurate artillery fire. While this job was extremely valuable, dangerous, and did have a humongous impact on the battlefield, it didn't have the direct impact that Charles Carpenter wanted. So Carpenter decided he was going to mount six bazookas on the wings of his crop duster and begin flying combat sorties, quite literally dive bombing German tanks. He would later perfect this technique and use it to sway the entire battle of Arakor,

which is the largest tank battle on the Western Front in all of World War 2. And we're gonna get into everything right after a word from our sponsor. This video is brought to you by World of Warship Legends, the first and probably only video game I'm ever going to be in. Good game, everyone. That was a great battle. Now, previously, I was only available on PC, but to celebrate the Navy's 250th birthday, I am now available on consoles.

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of other freebies. Let's get back to the video. Our story begins August 29th, 1912. Charles Carpenter is born. He is the oldest of six kids. He has two brothers and three sisters. He grows up in Illinois and like pretty much every other World War II hero we talk about, he grows up dirt poor.

You guys know the drill. Unfortunately, the young Charles' dad was not that great of a guy. He had an alcohol problem. He had a gambling problem. And we don't really know how old Charles was when this happened, but in his childhood, his dad would end up losing their 1,000 acre farm in a gambling game and he would walk out of their lives forever, abandoning

his family, his wife, and all six kids. Now something like that happening would absolutely destroy most people, but Charles Carpenter is the main character and without a positive male role model in his life, he turns to books. He turns to literature and reads all the great books he can find. And that becomes his positive male role model. That's how he learns how to be a man. And it works, he's super hardworking,

he's very intelligent, does great in school, and he's a three-sport athlete playing football, basketball, and track. Quote, my creed, I have resolved to exert all of my efforts towards being a nobler and stronger fellow, a gentleman, a scholar, a friend, and a real man. To the best of my ability, I will ever strive for self-control, self-improvement, freedom, wisdom, courage,

generosity, truth, and the true nobility before God and men. I will be better. Charles Carpenter." Okay, he wrote that at 17 years old after his dad had lost everything and abandoned him and his family. Okay, the dude knew he was the main character all along. For high school, he gets a full ride scholarship to Roosevelt Military Academy, and then after that he gets a full ride scholarship to Center College in Kentucky, both for football and track. While he's there, he joins the Civilian Training Corps,

which is kind of like an old version of ROTC where you get to become a military officer when you do classes during college. Basically, he has to go off to two weeks of training every summer all four years of college, and then once he graduates from college and finishes a program, he's offered the spot as a second lieutenant in the army reserves as a pilot. So that's what he does. He goes off to college, studies history, studies philosophy, decides he wants to be a history teacher. He wants to be able to go into a classroom full of kids and find the kids that are like him and be their strong male role model that he never had. And that's what he does for years and when he's not teaching history he's a

flight instructor. But being the history guy he can also kind of see the future because history is the best predictor of the future and he sees all the tensions and everything rising in Europe and in his personal journal in the 1930s he would write and I quote life is far crueler than death and nations are feverishly preparing to slaughter again. So he knew that World War two was coming probably a lot sooner than most other people did but he's one man he's a history teacher in Moline Illinois what can he do so he just keeps living his life he keeps teaching history

in the day keeps teaching pilots at, and then on the weekends he would go to the next town over to go to the dance hall to try to find a wife, a big dance hall called the Coliseum. One night at the Coliseum, he picks a lovely young lady out of the crowd, Elda, also known as Bunny, asks her to dance. They dance all night, they have a great time. He's got a job, he's athletic, he's handsome, is hitting on her, and at the end of the night he asks her, Hey, could I take you out on a real date?

And she wasn't very confident and she panics and she's like, Um, I actually, I have a date with my girlfriend scheduled for that night already. So Charles Carpenter's like, Oh, okay, I guess. And that was the end of it. weeks and months just kicking herself in her own ass for shooting down this perfect ten of a man and then eventually after a couple of months they run into each other at the Coliseum again they dance all night, have a great time, and Charles Carpenter shoots his shot again. They go out on a date and three months later they were married according to Bunny and I quote

we were so in love we couldn't eat. Fast forward, Charles Carpenter is living the American dream. Despite his rough childhood, he's college educated, he's a high school history teacher, live in his dream job, he's happily married, his wife is pregnant with their first child, and then in 1941, Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. And at essentially the same time, they also attack the Philippines where his brother, the fighter pilot, is currently stationed, and they destroy his brother's plane in the opening attack his brother's now a POW all of his former students are getting drafted and going off

To war and he could probably get away from the draft being at home as a teacher is an important job He could probably get an exemption, but that's not the man that Charles Carpenter is so he volunteers to go off and joins the military Too at 29 years old now because Carpenter is already college-educated. he's already an army officer, he's already a flight instructor, the army determines they're not going to send him off into combat. They're going to send him to Miami where he's going to be an instructor and teach other people how to be officers and how to fly planes. And while that might be a dream job to most people, being able to stay stateside, safe, healthy, happy, it's not really what Carpenter wanted, but that's what the army he told him to do so he's gonna do it to the best of his ability. So in early 1942, he gets in his car in Illinois and drives all the way to Miami

and the road trip there is absolutely crazy. Pearl Harbor just happened and they're already rationing gasoline, they're rationing rubber for tires, they're rationing absolutely everything. At one point, Charles picks up a hitchhiker and that hitchhiker explains to him that he's a merchant marine and his ship had been sunk by a German U-boat and he's trying to make his way home to his parents because his parents think that he's dead. And

the entire thing is just surreal to him because he's read and studied so much history and he realizes during this road trip that he's now living through history. So he gets to Miami, starts doing his job and it's just, it's not his thing. I mean, he's good at it. He can train people how to do stuff. He's a teacher, he knows how to teach, he knows what he's talking about, but he just feels wrong about the fact

that he's teaching somebody how to go off and fight a war when he's never gone off and fought a war himself. So he decides that's what he needs to do. and go join a normal aviation unit and abandon this teaching job because he's the best man for that job. The only way he's gonna get out of these teaching orders is if he volunteers for something so dangerous that it's a volunteer-only basis, and he does exactly that.

He volunteers to be a glider pilot. Okay, what is a glider? They were used on D-Day. They're a really big deal. Not a lot of people have heard about them. a giant kite that's shaped like a plane. I know what you're thinking, why on earth wouldn't you just, I don't know, fly another plane into combat? Why are you gonna tow a plane-sized kite behind you?

Well, you gotta remember it's World War II, raw materials are scarce, they're rationing everything. We can't make planes fast enough. We need more planes, more planes isn't an option. So this is the next best thing, kite-shaped plane and tow it behind a C-47 into combat and then cut the ropes and they're gonna glide into the battlefield and have a controlled crash landing.

And I think we can all agree, pretty crazy proposition for a military job, so obviously not a ton of volunteers. So when Charles Carpenter does volunteer, he gets accepted pretty much immediately. He gets shipped off into the glider training pipeline. First, they send him to Tennessee, then they send him to Arkansas, then they send him to South Carolina. He's literally flying a giant kite. They're cutting the ropes and he's practicing his crash landings over and over and over again.

And this goes on for months and months and months. And you got to remember Charles Carpenter is a historian. He's always thinking the big picture. He's always known that these gliders were a bandage fix. They were just something that had to be done. They were not the ideal scenario. On top of that, they also have a very specific niche application of when and if these are ever going to be used. So he kind of starts to feel like maybe he's wasting his time because the longer this goes on, the more planes America is building and maybe they're not gonna have to use these gliders at all and maybe he's just wasting his time time and then one day on the bulletin board There's another list for volunteers for a different crazy flight program called a liaison pilot now conceptually this job is nothing new It's basically recon

It's just get up really high be able to spot the enemy Report what the enemy is doing back to your chain of command back in the day You'd send scouts up on the high ground back in World War one you had hot air balloons and now in World War II, they're gonna have liaison pilots. Why is that dangerous? Because they're flying an L4 grasshopper, okay, which is literally just a J3 Piper Cub, which is like the most mass produced trainer plane

at this point in time. Like if you were a pilot, you first learned how to fly a plane on a J3 Piper Cub. It's literally the Model T of airplanes. It's got fabric wings wings like an 80 horsepower engine and its top speed is like 85 miles an hour. It's basically a paper mache plane with a lawnmower blade sticking out of the front. And not only is it slow, it has no

offensive or defensive capabilities. It can't engage the enemy and it can't defend itself when it gets engaged. So literally, you're just going up in the air, getting eyes on the enemy, and hoping they decide not to shoot at you. And the reason the army wants to use this feeble aircraft is because it's super easy to fly on and you can land it in a random field, you don't need a runway, and you can take off and land in like 300 feet. Which is actually where it got the name the L4 Grasshopper because it's literally just a J3 Piper Cub,

but the army's got to give it a different name. And when the J3 Piper Cub was going through military testing, they were landing it in random fields, and this green little plane would hit the ground and skip and skid to a halt, and one of the generals said, it looks like a damn grasshopper. And that's how it got the name, the L4 Grasshopper.

So these liaison pilots are gonna be operating like a mile behind the front line, taking off from a random field, loitering over the battlefield for hours, calling in artillery and reporting back enemy troop movements to their chain of command. Basically, liaison pilots in the L4 Grasshopper is the world's first version of a recon drone, except for, you know, the whole point of a drone is you can go do dangerous shit and not put your men in harm's way, but that's not really an option here and Charles Carpenter is like sounds great whatever gets me into the battle sign me up and I mean to be fair He had already volunteered to crash land a giant kite with no engine

So now he's flying what amounts to a kite with an engine so I guess it is an upgrade from here He gets shipped off to Texas to learn how to fly the L4 grasshopper Which he already knows how to do because he's been a pilot instructor forever passes that with flying colors, then they send him off to Fort Sill, home of the artillery, where he gets to learn how to call in artillery while he's inside of his plane. Okay, and timeout, because I need you guys to understand how insane this job is. I don't want you to think I'm pumping up flying a crop duster like it's some incredible job, because I know it's not as glamorous or as glorious as being a fighter pilot.

This job is fucking nuts. A, he's alone almost always. The plane literally isn't big enough to carry two people in it and be fast enough to not get shot at. So he is alone inside of a plane. Inside of the plane, it is his job while 2,000 feet above the ground, traveling 85 miles an hour in a noisy-ass cockpit, being propelled by a lawnmower blade, to be able to look down, spot the enemy, and call in artillery, okay? And you're thinking like, like oh you just pick up the phone and say send the artillery no he has to be able to figure out while moving in one direction where the enemy is on the grid like get their coordinates and then call that in in relation to him as he's moving and the

enemies also potentially moving as well and he's trying to do math and trajectory problems while flying a fucking plane the The entire job is literally fly a plane, hope to God you don't get shot down, and while you're flying the plane, have the world's shittiest math quiz, and if you fail, you or your buddies die.

So is being a liaison pilot as glamorous as being a fighter pilot? No, absolutely not. But I would argue that they have way bigger balls. I mean, as an outsider looking in which job would you rather have? Option A, you could be a fighter pilot, basically take up what amounts to a hot rod covered in machine guns and zip around the battlefield

shooting at the enemy. Or B, you could take up your grandpa's crop duster traveling at the speed of smell with no weapons to fire at the enemy or defend yourself and the entire time that you're loitering over the battlefield hoping you don't get shot down you're doing Sudoku puzzles with life-or-death consequences for you and your buddies. Okay, if you're not picking up what I'm putting down, I'm trying to articulate to you that liaison pilots are highly underrated.

These are quite literally Iron Man flying paper planes. Sorry, I'm getting sidetracked. Charles Carpenter completes his training, gets his L wings, officially becoming a liaison pilot. From here, he gets assigned to the 4th Armored Division in Patton's 3rd Army. So he goes out with the 4th Armored Division, they're training out in the deserts of California, getting ready to go into theater, and very quickly he becomes the top liaison pilot in the entire 4th Armored Division.

He is essentially now the man in charge of all the other liaison pilots. Both because he's extremely capable, but also because he's like in his early 30s at this point in time. He's an older dude by standards. He's more mature. He's a teacher. He's college-educated. He's just the right guy for the job. Because of this, he essentially becomes the personal pilot for the general of the 4th Armored Division, John Shirley Wood, a man who's described as being broad in the shoulders and even broader in the waist. And remember, the L4 grasshopper not really meant to have two people inside of it and the general is a big boy Charles Carpenter Also a pretty big guy. They are way overweight when he's flying this general around So not only does he get used to flying a over encumbered L4 grasshopper

But he also ends up becoming really good friends with the general again because he's one of the only older guys around Everybody else is a 19 year old kid. He's super well read the generals probably super well read They become homies and both of these things are gonna save his ass later on Early 1944 Charles Carpenter and the rest of the 4th Armored Division head off to Great Britain. They're training there They're getting ready that goes on for a couple of months D-Day happens in June of 1944 and by July of 1944 Charles Carpenter and the rest of the 4th Armored Division go into France. Right out of the gate he's doing his job exactly how he's supposed to.

He's going up, he's doing recon, he's calling in artillery, he's being the personal pilot for the general whenever he needs it, and this goes on for a couple of weeks and the entire time, every mission, it just, it starts to eat at him more and more. He feels like he's not doing enough. He's not going out there and confronting the enemy. He's just loitering above the battlefield. He's just he's cutting himself and his contribution short.

And then he gets his chance to confront the enemy in person on August 1st, 1944, outside of a French town known as Avranche. I want to be clear, we don't know the exact context of how this unfolded, but we do know that he was in a Jeep by himself conducting forward reconnaissance, looking for an empty field to land his plane and all the other L4 grasshoppers. Now, the fact that he's going out by himself in a Jeep to look for a place to land his grasshoppers closer to the front line tells me that he's probably been up in the sky conducting reconnaissance

and come to the conclusion that there's no Germans in the area, so they're gonna move forward. That's just where my head is at and probably his too. While he's in his Jeep looking for a new operational base for all of his L4 grasshoppers He comes up on a bunch of American tanks and American infantry and they are in a firefight with the Germans So he hops out of the Jeep runs up to some of the infantry asks what's going on

They're telling them there's a ton of Germans in the area. They're pinned down. They can't punch through into this town and this is where I'm inferring something. I'm assuming he knows that that's bullshit. That's not a possibility He's probably been up in the air conducting recon for days. He knows that there's no massive German element here So he thinks that this is just some kind of German trick or some last stand But what we know for sure is that he then proceeds to run up to the nearest Sherman tank whose commander isn't there for one reason or another hops in the turret with the 50 cal and yells down to the crew. Let's go He's an officer. They're lower enlisted. They listen to him They drive straight into the Germans firing the 75 millimeter cannon on this Sherman with the other tanks and infantry

Following behind them and they start clearing the town block by block and every time they round a corner He yells down to the crew let it go and fire another round, forcing the Germans to retreat further, block after block, slowly clearing this entire town. As they round the last corner on the last block in this town, they're about to take the entire thing. Through the smoke and chaos of the battle, he sees a tank,

and he yells down to the crew, let it go, and as soon as the words leave his mouth, he sees through the smoke that it's another Sherman tank. He has the gut-wrenching, oh shit moment as time slows down and before he can say a word, the gun fires. And he watches in slow motion as his tank fires on another American Sherman tank that's got a bulldozer blade attached to the front of it. And thank God, the shell only hits the bulldozer blade, blows it off the tank, and nobody's hurt. Guess what?

What? Fuck you! Fuck you!

So that's great news. Nobody got hurt. Also great news. He just helped break through the German lines by leading this massive offensive into a French town. Bad news. The other tank commander who just got his bulldozer blade shot off

crawls out of his tank and starts walking over to Carpenter's tank Rightfully furious and pissed off and when he gets there, he's expecting to chew out I don't know another tank commander and what he finds is a liaison pilot. That's not even in this unit That's not supposed to be there that just commanded one of his tanks to shoot at his tank So he goes from being furious to absolutely mega pissed and to be fair

he's kind of justified. He immediately orders Charles Carpenter get arrested and says that he's going to do everything he can to make sure he faces the firing squad for fratricide.

What the f**k?

Luckily his homie, General Shirley Wood finds out that his pilot and buddy has been arrested. He goes, springs him out of jail, but it's the wrong chain of command, and he doesn't have enough sway to be able to get rid of the potential court-martial that Charles Carpenter is now facing. So, at the very least, he's not going to be facing the firing squad, but he's still potentially looking at getting dishonorably discharged from the military.

So, General Shirley Wood takes the case to the next tier higher somebody that can resolve this issue his buddy from West Point General Patton General Patton here's about what happened. He says something along the lines of and I quote that's the type of fighting man I want in my army and gets rid of the court-martial and wipes his slate clean altogether now that part We know happened for sure But I also believe that this is the point where Charles Carpenter was not only given a second chance, but I believe Patton also gave him the Bronze Star with V device and promoted him to Major at this point as well.

Unfortunately, I can't present that to you as a 100% fact because I cannot find any of his medal citations or promotions anywhere in the National Archives. I'm assuming he's in that 80% majority that lost all their personnel records in the fire in 1973. But I believe at this point, Patton did award him the Bronze Star with V device and promoted him to Major, which is absolutely on brand for General Patton. All right, so had a little oopsies, everything worked out all right.

He's back in the saddle. He's not in trouble. He's going out on missions. Everything's back in the saddle. He's not in trouble. He's going out on missions. Everything's back to normal And then there's a rumor going around in the liaison pilot community that apparently somebody somewhere on the Western Front Mounted a bazooka onto the wing of their L4 grasshopper fired it and the plane didn't blow up It didn't catch the wing on fire. It worked out. Okay. Now bear in mind. This is a rumor

This is 15 degrees removed some guy told another guy told another guy that apparently this happened But when Charles Carpenter hears that it happened, he's like I'm fucking doing it So he goes to his chain of command ask permission is like hey, I heard this was possible I want to give it a try his chain of command being cool as shit is like look I'm not saying you're allowed to do that I'm also not saying that if you did I'm gonna stop you which he takes as a green light and he does it okay bear

In mind this is a rumor. He heard from a guy who heard from a guy that this is theoretically possible, and he's gonna go out there and actually figure out how to do it. There's no YouTube tutorial, there's no how-to,

there's no pictures of how it was done. He's just gonna go out there and figure out Which to be fair doesn't sound like it would be that complicated until you actually start to think about the fact that this is Borderline approaching rocket science, right? I mean you can't just be strapping big heavy metal tubes onto the wings of aircrafts and expect it to not interfere with I don't know Aerodynamics weight distribution all the shit that goes into I don't know keeping a plane in the fucking sky

That's simply not possible. Why isn't it possible? It's just not why not you stupid bastard

And if you don't believe me go make a paper airplane throw it across the room watch it go and then pick it up Strap some weights to each wing and throw it again and see how different it flies. Oh

Man it slipped out of my hand

Regardless he's a smart guy. He figures it out You can't literally mount the bazooka on the wing because they're fabric wings, so he mounts it on the wing strut, and then he mounts it so that the actual weight of the bazooka with the shell is behind the rear tires and behind the pilot,

because the center of gravity on these Piper Cub planes is actually behind the pilot already, so he's using his own body weight to counteract the weight of these bazookas. Yes, science. So he ends up mounting one bazooka on each side of the plane, does a test run, it flies okay. Then he runs electrical wires into the cockpit on a panel where he can fire each bazooka individually

or both at once. Goes up on a test run, fires the bazookas, doesn't light the wings on fire, doesn't blow them out of the sky. he's actually able to semi-accurately shoot these bazookas. He lands and it's like the holy shit that actually worked, at which point he has a wonderful idea. You know what's better than two bazookas?

Double it!

That's right, four bazookas. So he mounts four bazookas on his plane, goes up, does a test run, it works, comes back down, lands. You know what's better than four bazookas? Six bazookas goes up, does a test run, it works again, comes back down and lands.

You know what's better than six bazookas on an L4 grasshopper?

Whoop whoop, here I come.

An L4 grasshopper with six bazookas and a dope-ass paint job where he names his plane Rosie the Rocketer after Rosie the Riveter. From here, he takes his grunts ands project into combat. From here things get a little bit fuzzy because again a lot of the documentation was probably lost in a fire in 1973 and there probably wasn't a lot of great documentation taken at the time to begin with because again he's a one-man show if there's not a witness to verify whatever he said happened they can't really prove it they can't officially say that it happened. But what we do know is outside of Sens France

there was some German tanks and some German armored cars that were now apparently on fire and blown up. We don't know if they were from his bazookas or from him calling in artillery or a combination of the two. I like to think it was a combination of the two. So Charles Carpenter,

after presumably destroying a German convoy by himself and or with the help of artillery, decides, you know what? I'm gonna go land my plane in a field next to this burning convoy and inspect it and see what happened. I wanna see how good these Pazookas are performing. So that's what he does, lands his plane in the field, grabs a gun, goes out there to inspect it,

finds six surviving Germans and takes all six of them as prisoner and then proceeds to put bullets in the engine blocks of all the remaining vehicles that weren't burning yet. Okay, do you understand how ridiculous and gangster this is from the German perspective? Okay, because at this point in time, the German ideology was if you see an American spotter plane, if you see a grasshopper up in the sky, they don't have guns. They can't really hurt us. They can just call in artillery.

Best case scenario, you shoot down a $2,000 plane and take out one guy, and he dumps artillery on your entire unit. It's a bad trade, so usually they just ignore him. So these Germans are sitting there in this convoy, and they're like, it's just a close. Oh shit It's diving on us and then it starts shooting bazookas at you and calling in artillery destroys your entire convoy then the pilot proceeds to land in the field next to you and get out of the plane like dad coming home from work and Capture you as prisoner from here word spreads like wildfire There's some crazy-ass major out there somewhere on the Western Front flying a crop duster around shooting bazookas at Germans. From here, people start calling him the mad major bazooka Charlie, and he pretty

much gets told, I mean, do whatever you want. You can call in artillery. You can shoot bazookas at people. Remember he's good buddies with the top general. He's the only guy doing this. It seems to be effective.

Why get in his way? Let him keep blowing up Germans. Everything works out. So that's what he's doing. He's just going up in the air, calling on artillery when he sees fit, shooting bazookas when he sees fit. Everything's going great. And during this time, he really refines the method, okay? He kind of figures out as close as you can

how to accurately aim these bazookas. I mean, at the end of the day, it's basically a giant bottle rocket. But he kind of gets a feel for where they usually go on average. He's got markings on his windshield inside the cockpit for where the bazooka should land. On top of that, he refines how he does his attack runs. He comes in at like 800 feet, does this corkscrew maneuver, goes down, drops to 300 feet, levels out, fires his bazookas, and then dives straight up, literally pulling G's in a fabric plane. And again, at this point in time, we have no idea how many other missions he ran,

how many trucks or armored vehicles or tanks that he took out. On top of that, even if he did take out tanks, not many people would believe him. And that's because at this point in time, bazookas weren't very successful against German tanks. German armor was incredibly thick, and a bazooka, more often than not, even if you scored a direct hit, was not going to penetrate the front or side armor of a German Panther or a German Tiger Tank. But what most people didn't realize at the time, he's not shooting at a German Tiger Tank from the front or the side, he's shooting at it from the top, like an early version of a Javelin missile, literally hitting the tank at its weakest possible point,

because no engineer could have ever foreseen, what if somebody was flying above you with a fucking bazooka. At no point in the German engineering process did any of the engineers say yeah, but what if a crazy history teacher from Illinois and a crop duster covered in bazookas develops the pro-gamer move? Okay, if you're not picking up what I'm putting down I'm trying to tell you it's not only possible for Bazooka Charlie to take out a German tank with his crop duster, it's probable. The only problem is it's one of those things

you're gonna have to see to believe and he's a one-man show so nobody's seen it but him.

Yet.

All right, September 19th, 1944, the Battle of Airacorps right outside of Nancy, France. It is the largest armored battle on the Western Front in all of World War II. The Germans have approximately 262 tanks and armored vehicles, and the Americans have approximately 140 Sherman tanks. The Germans have the upper hand, but per usual, the Americans have air superiority. Problem, it's foggy as shit and the planes can't fly. Regardless, Charles Carpenter goes up anyways.

Under the cover of the fog, the Germans start advancing, and after about an hour of loitering over the battlefield, Charles Carpenter finds a break in the fog, and what he sees is a German column advancing, and there's six soldiers pinned down at this watering point. It's the only place to get fresh water, and they were filling up water tanks for the rest of the unit. Bazooka Charlie sees what's unfolding, immediately takes action, goes into his corkscrew, dives down on the first tank, fires his first two bazookas. Both of them are a miss.

Pulls up, circles back around, does his corkscrew maneuver again, dives again, fires two bazookas, hits the lead tank. The crew has to bail out. And the six guys that were getting water are watching this entire thing unfold and they are the first people to ever see Bazooka Charlie take out an enemy tank

With a bazooka strapped to a crop duster something that nobody would have thought was possible

Holy

Fucking shit

And Bazooka Charlie still got two more bazookas fresh in the tank pulls up again circles back around does hiskscrew again, dives on another tank, scores a direct hit. The Germans have no fucking idea what's going on. There's just a tiny little plane spawning out of the fog, taking out all their tanks. They think it's some type of new weapon or an ambush or something crazy is going on, so they panic and retreat. The water crew escapes unscathed, they later confirm that he did in fact take out two enemy tanks, giving him his first two confirmed tank kills. He then flies back to base, has his ground crew reload the bazookas, and goes back up, fires all six bazookas again, goes back, reloads the bazookas again, goes back up, fires them all again.

He fired no less than 16 bazooka rounds that day. Bear in mind, again, we have no idea how successful he was overall because he's a one-man show and he had to have witnesses to confirm stuff, but by the end of the day, he had ground confirmation from multiple other people that he had for sure destroyed two German Panther tanks, two armored vehicles, and at least 12 ground troops. But his impact on the overall battle was so much bigger than that because again the fog cover was preventing America from having air

superiority, meaning that the Germans had a humongous upper hand. But Charles Carpenter going out in the fog, preventing them from advancing, throwing the Germans off their game, kept them on their heels long enough for the fog to lift and by the time they realized what the fuck was going on and it was one crazy guy in a crop duster, America had regained air superiority and flipped the entire battle on its head. By the end of the Battle of Aracor,

America had lost 30 tanks. The Germans had lost over 200 tanks and armored vehicles. After the Battle of Aracor, the legend of Bazooka Charlie goes from being a legend within the ranks of Patton's Third Army from being a legend within the ranks of Patton's Third Army to being a legend back home.

He is in newspaper articles absolutely all over the place. Personally, he doesn't really care for the attention, he doesn't really like the notoriety, he even writes back home to his wife Bunny and says, Hey, don't talk to the press, I don't want the attention. In an interview, he even told a reporter, and I quote, some people around here think I'm nuts, but I just believe that if we're gonna fight this war, we have to get on with it 60 minutes an hour,

24 hours in a day. In addition to his newfound notoriety, he also has to deal with the fact that the Germans have caught on to his battle strategy and they have changed their tactics to ignoring spotter planes,

to shooting absolutely everything they have at them all the time. Regarding that, he told a reporter, and I quote, "'Word must be getting around among those c***s to watch out for cubs with bazookas on them. Every time I show up now, they shoot everything they have. They never used to bother cubs. Bazookas must be bothering them a bit.'" Despite that, Bazooka Charlie goes out and continues to do Bazooka Charlie things, keeps going out on missions, keeps shooting his bazookas, keeps calling in artillery. And again, I reiterate for like the 15th time,

we don't know how many enemy tanks and armored vehicles he took out during this time period because again, he's a one-man show and everything has to have multiple eyewitnesses to be confirmed. Despite that, over the next month in October of 1944, he manages to bag four German tank kills confirmed, two of which were the German Tiger heavy tank, the baddest tank of World War II. The other two were allegedly Panther tanks, one of which was leading an entire column of tanks down a narrow road with ditches on either side, and Charles Carpenter dived on the lead tank, took it out, and then called in artillery and destroyed the entire column. Bazooka Charlie continues with his antics all through October, November, December, January. Again,

documentation's not that great, but some accounts claim as many as 14 confirmed tank kills, as well as over 20 armored vehicles and countless enemy machine gun positions and ground troops. And somewhere along the line, he is also awarded a Silver Star and an Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster. But by February of 1945, he's hurting. He's got this massive lump on his neck. He has no idea what it is.

He's extremely fatigued and tired and he ends up getting hospitalized with battle fatigue initially. Army doctors don't know what to make of this lump on his neck. They send him off to Paris. He gets surgery, gets this massive lump removed and he gets told that he has Hodgkin's lymphoma. They try to give him radiation treatment, but the Hodgkin's lymphoma is so advanced that they basically tell him, you've got a year, maybe two years to live. He is released from the army and sent back home.

From here, he's reunited with the love of his life, Bunny, and his daughter, Carol, and he figures he's got two years left. He might as well make the most of it. an Airstream trailer and they tour the entire American West and he gets to see all of the country that he fought for. Fast forward early 2000s, his daughter Carol is now in her 60s and it's the early days of the internet and she gets on the internet one day and she's reading on war forums and she finds a thread about her dad and it's people talking about this crazy guy

named Bazooka Charlie that supposedly mounted bazookas onto a crop duster and eliminated a bunch of German tanks. But because there's such a lack of documentation and everything else, all the comments are doubting the validity of this story and nobody believes it. So she gets in this forum and she starts posting pictures that she has of her dad in theater and she starts reading all of the letters that he had written back home to her mom, Bunny, and she helps validate this story

and it becomes a known fact. She then, with some help of some other people in the aviation community, goes on to write a book about it. And in one of the pictures that she has of her dad posing next to his plane, Rosie the Rocketer,

you can actually read the serial number on the plane and aviation people track down Rosie the Rocketer and find her in a museum in Austria. They buy the plane, bring it back home, and restore Rosie the Rocketer to her wartime paint job. And Carol's daughter, a graphic designer, gets to actually paint the old paint job of her grandfather on the plane. But that's not even the best part. The best part is that after Charles and Bunny and Carol got to tour the American West in their Airstream trailer,

Charles felt great. So they went back home and he still felt fine. So Charles went back to work being a history teacher, changing the world one classroom at a time, and a year went by and he was still doing fine, and another year, and another year, and another year, and Charles lived an additional 22 years after he was given a one-year death sentence. He would finally succumb to Hodgkin's disease in 1966 at the age of 53, which is still a premature, tragic death, but the silver lining is he got to live an additional 22 years like he was dying.

And I like to think Bazooka Charlie of all people was able to cram a lot of life into that 22 years under those conditions And that's the best ending I could possibly give you Thank you for watching best way to support the channels go buy some merch over the fat electrician comm quack bang out Carol if you're watching this, I really hope you enjoyed it. I tried to do your dad justice. He's a humongous badass. So are you for all the work you did telling his story? And I tried to get ahold of you, but couldn't. But if you do see this, I would love nothing more than to buy you a first class plane ticket out to San

I would love nothing more than to buy you a first class plane ticket out to San Antonio and have you on my podcast. And we can talk more about your dad. Thanks.