WW I was the war of the machine gun, with a single rapid-fire gun easily able to hold back a company of hundreds of men. WW II was the war of the tank, as Germany showed when their mounted, armored cannons rolled through French and Polish machine gun fire unscathed. For ordinary soldiers the sight of a lumbering hunk of metal bearing down on them must have been terrifying; and for a time they were virtually defenseless against it. That is, until the development of a handheld infantry weapon against them.

On this day, June 14, in 1942, the General Electric Company in Bridgeport produced the first “Launcher, Rocket AT, M-1,” better known as the bazooka. As the name implies, the weapon was a essentially a rocket launcher: a steel tube containing a shaped armor-piercing shell that launched at the press of a button.

Bazookas was simple to make and operate, and best of all, allowed soldiers to disable enemy tanks from as far as 300 yards away. U.S Army Major General L.H. Campbell Jr. in a press conference on the new weapon called it “so simple and yet so powerful that any foot soldier using it can stand his ground with the certain knowledge that he is the master of any tank which may attack him.”