The Screaming Six-Barrel German Rocket That Broke Soviet Assaults, 1943

Near Kursk in July of 1943, a company of Soviet riflemen climbed out of a shallow trench and started across open ground toward the German line. They had maybe 200 yd to cross. They crossed 40 of it. Then six streaks of fire climbed off a low ridge behind the German positions and the air over the field began to howl.

The howl reached the men on the ground a second or two before the rockets did. The rockets came down together six at once and the ground where the riflemen had gone flat heaved up in smoke and dirt. The attack ended there. It did not fall back in good order and it did not push on. It came apart on the grass 100 yard short of a line it never reached.

The weapon that did it was the Neville and its crews lived with a fact they tried not to dwell on. The same trick that let six rockets break an assault in 10 seconds also told the Red Army almost to the yard where the men who fired them were standing. That debt comes due at the end. First, the weapon itself.

The full name was the 15 cm Nettlewor 41. And the name was a lie told on purpose. Nebelver means fogthrower. Smokethrower. It is the name you would give a device that lays a smokec screen. And that is exactly why the German army chose it. After the first war, the treaty terms capped German artillery hard and rockets sat in a gap the treaty writers had not thought to close.

So the program hid inside a cover story. The men who would fire high explosive across a battlefield were enrolled as smoke troops. A chemical unit stood up in 1929 to handle screening smoke and gas. A rocket that threw a warhead full of high explosive went to war wearing the name of a smoke pot. The smoke troop cover was not entirely a fiction.

The launchers really could fire smoke rounds to screen an advance. And the same units were the German army’s chemical arm trained and equipped to deliver poison gas if the order ever came. That order never came in Europe. The gas stayed in its bunkers and the launchers spent the war throwing high explosive instead.

But the name on the paperwork held and a device meant to hide an attack ended up known across two fronts for breaking them. The machine underneath the name was blunt and cheap. Six steel tubes arranged in a hexagon bolted to a two- wheeled carriage lifted straight off the 3.7 cm anti-tank gun. Nothing about it was precious.

It was light enough that a handful of men could swing it around by the trail and simple enough that it could be built fast and lost without much grief. Germany turned out nearly 6,000 of these launchers before the war ended, which tells you how the army thought of them, not as prizes to be protected, as tools to be spent.

The German army had a specific reason to want rockets alongside its guns. A field gun needs a heavy barrel and a recoil system to survive its own shot. And all that steel is slow to forge and heavy to drag. A rocket carries its own push and needs no barrel to hold it in. So the launcher can be light and the whole rig can be cheap.

The catch is that each rocket costs far more than a shell and lands far less precisely. The Germans took that trade for one thing. It bought them. A small crew in a few seconds could drop more high explosive on a patch of ground than a full battery of towed guns could put there in the same short window. Concentration in time was the entire idea.

Everything arriving at once is far worse to be under than the same weight spread across a minute. The rocket the launcher threw was a stranger thing than the launcher itself. It was spinstabilized, turned in flight like a rifle bullet rather than steadied by tail fins alone. To do that, the designers built it back to front.

The rocket motor sat up in the nose. The high explosive charge rode behind it and the exhaust vented out through a ring of angled ports set around the middle of the body. Those caned ports spun the rocket as it climbed. Each round weighed about 76 lb and carried roughly 5 12 lb of high explosive. On a good day, it reached out 4.3 mi.

A little past 7,500 yd. The venting exhaust is where the scream came from. Gas tearing out through those angled ports, the body turning, six of them crossing the sky together, made a noise that soldiers who heard it reached for the same words to describe. American troops who met it later in Italy and in the hedge of Normandy called it the screaming mimi.

British troops called it moaning mini. The German army had built a smokethrower that announced every shot it fired with a howl. A man could hear coming for seconds before it arrived. That warning time was part of the effect, not a fault in it. A shell from a gun arise with almost no notice. A nebble for salvo gave a man just long enough to understand what was overhead and nowhere near long enough to escape it.

Soviet infantry in the path of it reported a strange new weapon whose shells shrieked as they passed over and reported long stretches spent pressed into whatever cover they had while the ground heaved. A soldier flattened in a shell hole, waiting out that noise was a soldier not moving forward. For a weapon built to stop an attack before it landed, the fear did as much of the work as the explosive.

What a saturation Salvo did to men in the open was a matter of blast and fragment. Each warhead threw a shock wave and a spray of steel across a wide radius and a dozen of them coming down together across one field left few safe spaces inside it. Troops caught upright were knocked flat and stunned by the over pressure alone.

An attack does not have to lose every man to fail. It has to lose its shape, its officers and its forward motion. and a rocket salvo could take all of that in the space of a breath. Firing the launcher was its own drill worked to a stopwatch. A crew of five served each one. Loading six rockets down the tubes took about 90 seconds.

Then the crew backed away 10 to 15 yards and touched the salvo off by electric current from behind cover because the back blast off six rockets leaving together could injure a man standing too close. The trained crew could put three volleys down range in 5 minutes. 18 rockets from a single launcher onto one patch of ground inside the time it takes to boil an egg.

One launcher was never the point. They came in numbers. Six to a battery. Three batteries to a battalion. Three battalions to a regiment. Run the arithmetic and a full WER regiment stood at 54 launchers. Fire every tube. And that regiment threw 324 rockets into the sky in about 10 seconds.

All of them falling across the same stretch of field at once. That is the weapon. Not a rocket. A wall of them arriving together over ground. A man was trying to cross. You could not aim it at a bunker. And the Germans knew it. A single Neville rocket was inaccurate and against a dug in strong point or a concrete imp placement it was close to useless.

What it did was saturate. You picked a square of ground where troops were massing or crossing in the open and you buried that square under high explosive faster than any towed gun battery could manage against men caught in the open forming up or moving. Saturation was enough and precision did not matter. That is what the German army reached for at Kursk in July of 1943 in the offensive it called Citadel.

The launchers were massed there as they had not been before. More than 300 of them stood along the front and ahead of the Panza thrusts, they threw thousands of rockets into the Soviet defensive belts and assembly areas, trying to stun the defenders in the minutes before the armor rolled forward. The SS Panza had a whole rocket brigade of its own in support.

The offensive opened on the 5th of July, and when it opened, the full weight of it came down at once. A German soldier named Alfred Noney went through those opening hours and carried them the rest of his life. Writing about it more than 50 years later, he said the first hours of the Kursk offensive still caused him flashbacks.

He could still hear the incredible noise of the German weapons. The flack, the artillery, the mortars, the stookers, and the nettleworfers all firing together. Note who is speaking. That is a man on the side that fired the rockets, and the sound of his own barrage is the thing that stayed with him for half a century.

The Red Army had already met the weapon by then and had already taken its secret apart. It did not happen at Kursk. It happened in January of 1943 at Velier Lui, a town far to the north where a German garrison had been surrounded since late November and slowly ground down through the winter. Soviet troops overran the German positions there and captured intact launchers.

Until then, the design had been kept closely held. The men who hauled those captured tubes back through the snow changed that. Soviet engineers pulled the launchers apart, learned how the rockets turned and how the crews served them, and the weapons stopped being a mystery to the men on the receiving end. The Red Army had also already answered the problem.

The German crews were still fighting. Its own rocket weapon, the Katushia, was rails bolted to the bed of a truck. Carried 16 rockets. It fired them fast, and when the tubes were empty, the driver simply drove the whole launcher away. The mobility the German crews had to struggle for, wrestling a towed carriage back onto its tractor while Soviet fire searched for them.

The Katusha crews had built in from the first day. Two armies had reached for the same idea, a cheap weapon that throws a wall of rockets, and the side the Germans were firing at had already solved the deadly part of it. The debt from the opening was the smoke. When a Nettleworth battery fired, it did more than make noise. It made a sign in the air that could be read for miles.

Six rockets off each launcher, a battery or a regiment firing at once, threw up a bank of smoke and dust that hung over the launch site like a marker flag. The Howl told the men downrange that a strike was inbound. The smoke told the Red Army exactly where that strike had come from. A Soviet artillery observer did not have to hunt for a hidden battery.

He watched for the cloud, marked the spot on his map, and passed the coordinates back to his own guns. So the crews lived by the clock, fire the salvo, hook the launcher back to its tractor and move. All before the Soviet answer came down on the empty firing point. A Wer crew that stayed where it fired was a crew waiting to be found.

The smoke that gave the weapon its screaming name was the same smoke that hunted the men who worked it. And they knew it. And they ran from every position the moment the tubes were dry. That was the floor the terror hid. The weapon that could break an assault in 10 seconds could not stay to watch it break. It could not decide the battle either.

The launchers broke local attacks and tore up assembly areas along the front exactly as they were built to do. But breaking an attack in one field does not win a campaign and Citadel failed. The Soviet defense at Kursk was built to a depth no barrage could reach through. For months, the Red Army had known the blow was coming, and it had dug in to meet it.

Eight belts of defenses stood stacked, one behind the next, running back as far as nearly 200 m. Soldiers and civilians had cut some 2,600 m of trenches into the salient and seeded close to a million mines across it. Area rocket fire could stun the front belt of that. It could not clear it and there were seven more waiting behind.

The panzas wore themselves down, grinding through the lines. The Soviet counterattack came on schedule and within about 2 weeks the German command called the whole offensive off. The German army in the east never launched another summer offensive after it. The screaming weapon sat in the middle of the largest defeat the German army had suffered to that point, and its howl did nothing to turn the result.

The Germans did try to mend the one flaw they could. Later in 1943, a new version reached the front with the launch tubes mounted on an armored halftrack so a crew could fire and drive off in one motion instead of musling a towed carriage back onto its tractor under fire. It was an answer to the smoke and the counter battery guns, and it arrived too late to change anything at Kursk.

The toad launchers went on doing the same work on the same terms for the rest of the war, screaming when they fired and running the moment they were empty. Go back to that field near Kursk and the company of riflemen that came apart on the grass 100 yard short of the German line. An hour later, another company crossed the same open ground.

This time the ridge that had screamed at them was quiet. Soviet guns had watched the smoke rise off it, marked it, and the launchers had already hooked up and gone. The weapon that had broken the first assault was not there to break the second. It had heard its own answer coming, [music] and it had

The Screaming Six-Barrel German Rocket That Broke Soviet Assaults, 1943

Near Kursk in July of 1943, a company of Soviet riflemen climbed out of a shallow trench and started across open ground toward the German line. They had maybe 200 yd to cross. They crossed 40 of it. Then six streaks of fire climbed off a low ridge behind the German positions and the air over the field began to howl.

The howl reached the men on the ground a second or two before the rockets did. The rockets came down together six at once and the ground where the riflemen had gone flat heaved up in smoke and dirt. The attack ended there. It did not fall back in good order and it did not push on. It came apart on the grass 100 yard short of a line it never reached.

The weapon that did it was the Neville and its crews lived with a fact they tried not to dwell on. The same trick that let six rockets break an assault in 10 seconds also told the Red Army almost to the yard where the men who fired them were standing. That debt comes due at the end. First, the weapon itself.

The full name was the 15 cm Nettlewor 41. And the name was a lie told on purpose. Nebelver means fogthrower. Smokethrower. It is the name you would give a device that lays a smokec screen. And that is exactly why the German army chose it. After the first war, the treaty terms capped German artillery hard and rockets sat in a gap the treaty writers had not thought to close.

So the program hid inside a cover story. The men who would fire high explosive across a battlefield were enrolled as smoke troops. A chemical unit stood up in 1929 to handle screening smoke and gas. A rocket that threw a warhead full of high explosive went to war wearing the name of a smoke pot. The smoke troop cover was not entirely a fiction.

The launchers really could fire smoke rounds to screen an advance. And the same units were the German army’s chemical arm trained and equipped to deliver poison gas if the order ever came. That order never came in Europe. The gas stayed in its bunkers and the launchers spent the war throwing high explosive instead.

But the name on the paperwork held and a device meant to hide an attack ended up known across two fronts for breaking them. The machine underneath the name was blunt and cheap. Six steel tubes arranged in a hexagon bolted to a two- wheeled carriage lifted straight off the 3.7 cm anti-tank gun. Nothing about it was precious.

It was light enough that a handful of men could swing it around by the trail and simple enough that it could be built fast and lost without much grief. Germany turned out nearly 6,000 of these launchers before the war ended, which tells you how the army thought of them, not as prizes to be protected, as tools to be spent.

The German army had a specific reason to want rockets alongside its guns. A field gun needs a heavy barrel and a recoil system to survive its own shot. And all that steel is slow to forge and heavy to drag. A rocket carries its own push and needs no barrel to hold it in. So the launcher can be light and the whole rig can be cheap.

The catch is that each rocket costs far more than a shell and lands far less precisely. The Germans took that trade for one thing. It bought them. A small crew in a few seconds could drop more high explosive on a patch of ground than a full battery of towed guns could put there in the same short window. Concentration in time was the entire idea.

Everything arriving at once is far worse to be under than the same weight spread across a minute. The rocket the launcher threw was a stranger thing than the launcher itself. It was spinstabilized, turned in flight like a rifle bullet rather than steadied by tail fins alone. To do that, the designers built it back to front.

The rocket motor sat up in the nose. The high explosive charge rode behind it and the exhaust vented out through a ring of angled ports set around the middle of the body. Those caned ports spun the rocket as it climbed. Each round weighed about 76 lb and carried roughly 5 12 lb of high explosive. On a good day, it reached out 4.3 mi.

A little past 7,500 yd. The venting exhaust is where the scream came from. Gas tearing out through those angled ports, the body turning, six of them crossing the sky together, made a noise that soldiers who heard it reached for the same words to describe. American troops who met it later in Italy and in the hedge of Normandy called it the screaming mimi.

British troops called it moaning mini. The German army had built a smokethrower that announced every shot it fired with a howl. A man could hear coming for seconds before it arrived. That warning time was part of the effect, not a fault in it. A shell from a gun arise with almost no notice. A nebble for salvo gave a man just long enough to understand what was overhead and nowhere near long enough to escape it.

Soviet infantry in the path of it reported a strange new weapon whose shells shrieked as they passed over and reported long stretches spent pressed into whatever cover they had while the ground heaved. A soldier flattened in a shell hole, waiting out that noise was a soldier not moving forward. For a weapon built to stop an attack before it landed, the fear did as much of the work as the explosive.

What a saturation Salvo did to men in the open was a matter of blast and fragment. Each warhead threw a shock wave and a spray of steel across a wide radius and a dozen of them coming down together across one field left few safe spaces inside it. Troops caught upright were knocked flat and stunned by the over pressure alone.

An attack does not have to lose every man to fail. It has to lose its shape, its officers and its forward motion. and a rocket salvo could take all of that in the space of a breath. Firing the launcher was its own drill worked to a stopwatch. A crew of five served each one. Loading six rockets down the tubes took about 90 seconds.

Then the crew backed away 10 to 15 yards and touched the salvo off by electric current from behind cover because the back blast off six rockets leaving together could injure a man standing too close. The trained crew could put three volleys down range in 5 minutes. 18 rockets from a single launcher onto one patch of ground inside the time it takes to boil an egg.

One launcher was never the point. They came in numbers. Six to a battery. Three batteries to a battalion. Three battalions to a regiment. Run the arithmetic and a full WER regiment stood at 54 launchers. Fire every tube. And that regiment threw 324 rockets into the sky in about 10 seconds.

All of them falling across the same stretch of field at once. That is the weapon. Not a rocket. A wall of them arriving together over ground. A man was trying to cross. You could not aim it at a bunker. And the Germans knew it. A single Neville rocket was inaccurate and against a dug in strong point or a concrete imp placement it was close to useless.

What it did was saturate. You picked a square of ground where troops were massing or crossing in the open and you buried that square under high explosive faster than any towed gun battery could manage against men caught in the open forming up or moving. Saturation was enough and precision did not matter. That is what the German army reached for at Kursk in July of 1943 in the offensive it called Citadel.

The launchers were massed there as they had not been before. More than 300 of them stood along the front and ahead of the Panza thrusts, they threw thousands of rockets into the Soviet defensive belts and assembly areas, trying to stun the defenders in the minutes before the armor rolled forward. The SS Panza had a whole rocket brigade of its own in support.

The offensive opened on the 5th of July, and when it opened, the full weight of it came down at once. A German soldier named Alfred Noney went through those opening hours and carried them the rest of his life. Writing about it more than 50 years later, he said the first hours of the Kursk offensive still caused him flashbacks.

He could still hear the incredible noise of the German weapons. The flack, the artillery, the mortars, the stookers, and the nettleworfers all firing together. Note who is speaking. That is a man on the side that fired the rockets, and the sound of his own barrage is the thing that stayed with him for half a century.

The Red Army had already met the weapon by then and had already taken its secret apart. It did not happen at Kursk. It happened in January of 1943 at Velier Lui, a town far to the north where a German garrison had been surrounded since late November and slowly ground down through the winter. Soviet troops overran the German positions there and captured intact launchers.

Until then, the design had been kept closely held. The men who hauled those captured tubes back through the snow changed that. Soviet engineers pulled the launchers apart, learned how the rockets turned and how the crews served them, and the weapons stopped being a mystery to the men on the receiving end. The Red Army had also already answered the problem.

The German crews were still fighting. Its own rocket weapon, the Katushia, was rails bolted to the bed of a truck. Carried 16 rockets. It fired them fast, and when the tubes were empty, the driver simply drove the whole launcher away. The mobility the German crews had to struggle for, wrestling a towed carriage back onto its tractor while Soviet fire searched for them.

The Katusha crews had built in from the first day. Two armies had reached for the same idea, a cheap weapon that throws a wall of rockets, and the side the Germans were firing at had already solved the deadly part of it. The debt from the opening was the smoke. When a Nettleworth battery fired, it did more than make noise. It made a sign in the air that could be read for miles.

Six rockets off each launcher, a battery or a regiment firing at once, threw up a bank of smoke and dust that hung over the launch site like a marker flag. The Howl told the men downrange that a strike was inbound. The smoke told the Red Army exactly where that strike had come from. A Soviet artillery observer did not have to hunt for a hidden battery.

He watched for the cloud, marked the spot on his map, and passed the coordinates back to his own guns. So the crews lived by the clock, fire the salvo, hook the launcher back to its tractor and move. All before the Soviet answer came down on the empty firing point. A Wer crew that stayed where it fired was a crew waiting to be found.

The smoke that gave the weapon its screaming name was the same smoke that hunted the men who worked it. And they knew it. And they ran from every position the moment the tubes were dry. That was the floor the terror hid. The weapon that could break an assault in 10 seconds could not stay to watch it break. It could not decide the battle either.

The launchers broke local attacks and tore up assembly areas along the front exactly as they were built to do. But breaking an attack in one field does not win a campaign and Citadel failed. The Soviet defense at Kursk was built to a depth no barrage could reach through. For months, the Red Army had known the blow was coming, and it had dug in to meet it.

Eight belts of defenses stood stacked, one behind the next, running back as far as nearly 200 m. Soldiers and civilians had cut some 2,600 m of trenches into the salient and seeded close to a million mines across it. Area rocket fire could stun the front belt of that. It could not clear it and there were seven more waiting behind.

The panzas wore themselves down, grinding through the lines. The Soviet counterattack came on schedule and within about 2 weeks the German command called the whole offensive off. The German army in the east never launched another summer offensive after it. The screaming weapon sat in the middle of the largest defeat the German army had suffered to that point, and its howl did nothing to turn the result.

The Germans did try to mend the one flaw they could. Later in 1943, a new version reached the front with the launch tubes mounted on an armored halftrack so a crew could fire and drive off in one motion instead of musling a towed carriage back onto its tractor under fire. It was an answer to the smoke and the counter battery guns, and it arrived too late to change anything at Kursk.

The toad launchers went on doing the same work on the same terms for the rest of the war, screaming when they fired and running the moment they were empty. Go back to that field near Kursk and the company of riflemen that came apart on the grass 100 yard short of the German line. An hour later, another company crossed the same open ground.

This time the ridge that had screamed at them was quiet. Soviet guns had watched the smoke rise off it, marked it, and the launchers had already hooked up and gone. The weapon that had broken the first assault was not there to break the second. It had heard its own answer coming, [music] and it had