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Why Mortars Killed More Men Than Tanks in WWII
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00:00Every war film you have ever seen got it wrong.
00:02The camera always finds the tank, the machine gun, the sniper.
00:07But the weapon that actually killed the most infantrymen in World War II
00:11looked like a piece of plumbing, a metal tube, a base plate, and a set of folding legs.
00:17According to U.S. Army casualty data,
00:19mortar and artillery fire caused between 64% and 69% of all American combat deaths in the European theater.
00:27Rifles, pistols, machine guns, everything that fires a bullet, 14 to 23%.
00:32The most primitive weapon on the battlefield killed more men than everything else combined.
00:37And against it, nothing a soldier had been trained to do actually worked.
00:41To understand how that is possible,
00:43you need to know what it felt like to be on the other end of a mortar.
00:46A veteran of the fighting in France remembered the day he and several other men
00:50spotted chickens on a small farm near the front.
00:52They were hungry.
00:53They went down the open hillside to catch one.
00:56The Germans across the river saw them immediately and started dropping mortar rounds.
01:00The men were running faster than the chickens.
01:03Not one bird was caught.
01:04The veteran put it simply,
01:06give a good mortar man three rounds,
01:08and if you stand still, he can put it down your throat.
01:11Three rounds.
01:12That was all it took.
01:13Not a battery of heavy guns.
01:15Not an airstrike.
01:17One man, one tube,
01:18and three shells the size of a thermos flask.
01:21And here is what made it worse.
01:23Against artillery, a soldier had a chance.
01:25He could hear it coming.
01:26He could throw himself flat.
01:28Against a rifle, he knew the direction.
01:30Against a mortar, he had nothing.
01:32No warning, no direction, no time.
01:35Just an explosion where a moment ago, there was silence.
01:38That weapon has been on every battlefield since 1915.
01:42But where did it come from?
01:43A civilian engineer in England designed it in a matter of weeks.
01:47The military rejected it twice, and then the entire world copied it.
01:53In 1914, the Western Front froze.
01:56Millions of men dug into the earth and faced each other across a few hundred yards of open ground.
02:02Artillery could flatten a trench from miles away,
02:04but only if the shells came in at a low enough angle to hit inside it.
02:08Most did not.
02:09A howitzer round screaming in from a distance struck at a shallow trajectory.
02:13It hit the parapet, the sandbags, the ground in front.
02:17But the men crouching at the bottom of a five-foot ditch were untouched.
02:21The problem was geometry.
02:23To kill a man in a trench, you needed something that fell straight down.
02:27The Germans figured this out first.
02:29They had been watching.
02:30During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904,
02:34observers saw mortars used at the siege of Port Arthur and came home with ideas.
02:38By 1908, they had developed the Minenwerfer, literally, mine thrower.
02:44Three sizes.
02:45Heavy, medium, light.
02:47When war broke out, they had roughly 160 ready.
02:50The British had none.
02:52Here is how badly the British scrambled.
02:54In the first three months, they managed to produce 75 mortars.
02:58Most were dangerous improvisations.
03:00Workshop devices almost as likely to kill the crew as the enemy.
03:04Some units resorted to building catapults.
03:06Then, in January 1915, a civilian engineer named Wilfred Stokes
03:11designed something that changed infantry warfare permanently.
03:15His mortar was so simple, it was almost insulting.
03:18A smooth metal tube.
03:19A base plate to absorb recoil.
03:21A bipod to hold it at an angle.
03:23A fixed firing pin at the bottom of the tube.
03:25Drop a finned shell into the muzzle.
03:28It slides down, hits the pin, and launches.
03:31No complicated breach.
03:33No rifling.
03:34No recoil mechanism.
03:35One man could carry the tube.
03:37Another carried the plate.
03:39A third carried the legs.
03:40The whole thing was ready to fire in under a minute.
03:43The army rejected it.
03:44The shells did not fit existing ammunition stocks.
03:47It took the personal intervention of David Lloyd George,
03:51then Minister of Munitions, to force it into production.
03:53Stokes received a knighthood for his trouble.
03:56And his design became the ancestor of virtually every infantry mortar in the world.
04:01Between the wars, a French weapons designer named Edgar Brandt refined the concept.
04:06He replaced the crude cylindrical bomb with a streamlined, fin-stabilized teardrop shell.
04:11Range and accuracy jumped.
04:13The Brandt mortar became the international standard.
04:15The Soviets copied it.
04:17The Americans bought it.
04:18The Japanese adapted it.
04:19By 1939, every major army on earth was equipped with direct descendants of that same English tube on a French
04:26shell.
04:27Not one of them fully understood what they had built.
04:31The mortar killed so effectively because of three things no other infantry weapon could combine.
04:37Trajectory, speed, and silence.
04:40A rifle fires flat.
04:42A machine gun fires flat.
04:43Even most artillery fires at a relatively shallow angle.
04:47A mortar does not.
04:49It launches its shell nearly straight up.
04:52The round climbs high into the air,
04:54arcs over,
04:55and comes down almost vertically.
04:57That changes everything.
04:59Any cover a soldier can hide behind only works against something coming from the side.
05:04A mortar round does not come from the side.
05:07It comes from directly above.
05:09And against something falling out of the sky,
05:12the oldest rule of infantry,
05:13get behind cover,
05:15stops working.
05:16A trench becomes an open-topped box waiting to be filled with shrapnel.
05:20Now consider the speed.
05:22An 81-millimeter mortar crew could fire 25 to 30 rounds per minute.
05:27A standard field howitzer managed 3 to 4.
05:30One mortar tube put out more rounds in 60 seconds than a heavy gun did in 10 minutes.
05:36And mortars never operated alone.
05:38A battery of four could saturate a position so fast
05:42that by the time the first round landed,
05:44a dozen more were already in the air.
05:47Allied operational researchers ran the numbers
05:50and concluded that a single medium mortar
05:52delivered the equivalent firepower of three machine guns.
05:55Except a machine gun needed a line of sight.
05:58A mortar did not.
06:00And then there was the sound.
06:03Or rather, the absence of it.
06:05An artillery shell travels faster than the speed of sound.
06:08You hear the shriek and you have a second to react.
06:11A rifle bullet cracks past
06:13and you instinctively know the direction.
06:15But a mortar round moves slowly.
06:18It climbs and falls in near silence.
06:21There is no whistle, no warning.
06:23The first indication that a mortar round is about to land is the explosion itself.
06:29For the men on the receiving end,
06:31it was not a weapon they could fight
06:32because they could not hear it,
06:34could not see it,
06:35and could not predict where the next one would fall.
06:38Here is what that meant in practice.
06:40A mortar crew sets up behind a hill.
06:42A forward observer watches the target.
06:44The first round lands 50 yards short.
06:47The observer corrects.
06:48The second round lands 20 yards left.
06:51One more adjustment.
06:52The third round lands among the men.
06:55And by the time it does,
06:56the crew is already dropping shells into the tube as fast as they can feed them.
07:00The target has no muzzle flash to locate,
07:03no sound to track,
07:04and nowhere to hide.
07:05What happens next,
07:07what soldiers actually tried to do to survive this,
07:10is where the story gets worse.
07:12Because every defense they had was useless.
07:14And in one forest on the German border,
07:17that fact killed more Americans than almost any other single battle of the war.
07:21If you want to see how that played out,
07:23hit like and subscribe so you do not miss what comes next.
07:27Because what happened in that forest still haunts the men who survived it.
07:32A foxhole was the infantryman's first instinct under fire.
07:36Dig in.
07:37Get below ground level.
07:38It worked against bullets.
07:40It worked against artillery.
07:41Most of the time.
07:43Because shells came in at an angle,
07:45and the blast went sideways.
07:46But a mortar round came down from directly above.
07:49It dropped into the foxhole like a stone into a bucket.
07:53The one place a soldier was trained to go for safety
07:55became the one place that offered none.
07:57A wall worked against flat trajectory fire.
08:00A building offered cover from machine guns.
08:03Neither stopped a mortar round.
08:05The shell simply cleared the obstacle and detonated on the far side.
08:09Retreating did nothing either.
08:11Without a sound to indicate where the fire was coming from,
08:13a man running blindly was just as likely to run toward the next impact as away from it.
08:19Counter battery fire,
08:20shooting back at the mortar,
08:22was nearly impossible.
08:23A mortar crew operated behind a ridge,
08:26behind a wall,
08:27behind anything solid enough to block line of sight.
08:30The tube weighed under 100 pounds.
08:32Fire 20 rounds,
08:34pick it up,
08:34move 50 yards,
08:36set it down again.
08:37By the time the enemy zeroed in on the position,
08:40the crew was already gone.
08:42But the worst place to be under mortar fire was a forest.
08:45And in the autumn of 1944,
08:47the United States Army walked into one.
08:49The Hurtgen forest sat on the German-Belgian border.
08:5250 square miles of dense fir trees,
08:55some 100 feet tall,
08:57packed so tightly that a man could barely walk between them.
09:00The Germans had been there for months.
09:02Every section of the forest was pre-registered,
09:05numbered,
09:06measured,
09:06and mapped for their mortar and artillery crews.
09:09The moment American soldiers entered,
09:11the coordinates were called in.
09:13Shells began falling into the treetops.
09:16Here is what a tree burst does.
09:17The round strikes a branch or a trunk 60 feet above the ground
09:21and detonates in the canopy.
09:23The blast sends fragments and splintered timber straight down.
09:28A foxhole,
09:29which is open on top,
09:30becomes a collection point for falling shrapnel.
09:33Men who dug in died.
09:35Men who stayed above ground died.
09:37There was no correct response.
09:39The 22nd Infantry Regiment
09:41attacked through the Hurtgen for 18 continuous days.
09:45They advanced 6,000 yards.
09:47They lost 2,678 men.
09:51One soldier for every two yards gained.
09:5486% of the regiment's strength.
09:57Company Baker went into one attack with 79 men.
10:0054 did not come back.
10:02Ernest Hemingway,
10:04who was there,
10:04called it Passchendaele with tree bursts.
10:07The physical damage was only half of what the mortar did to infantry.
10:11The other half was invisible,
10:13and it destroyed more soldiers than shrapnel ever could.
10:18On September 15, 1944,
10:21Private Eugene Sledge landed on Peleliu with the 1st Marine Division.
10:25He was 21 years old.
10:26As the Marines moved off the beach and started inland,
10:29the Japanese opened up with heavy mortar fire.
10:32The men hit the ground.
10:34There was no cover.
10:35The shells fell faster and faster until they sounded like one continuous roar.
10:41Sledge lay in a shallow depression and waited to die.
10:4435 years later, he still remembered every second.
10:47I thought it would never stop.
10:49One was bound to fall directly into my hole.
10:52I was out there on the battlefield all by myself, utterly forlorn and helpless.
10:57He was not wounded that day, not physically.
11:00But something in him changed in those minutes,
11:02and it never fully changed back.
11:04That was the mortar's second weapon.
11:06Not shrapnel.
11:08Fear.
11:08Fear.
11:09The kind of fear that accumulates,
11:10that does not go away between barrages,
11:13that builds over days and weeks until a man simply stops functioning.
11:17The military called it combat fatigue.
11:20The numbers behind it were staggering.
11:22More than 504,000 American soldiers were lost to psychiatric collapse during the war.
11:28That was the equivalent of 50 infantry divisions,
11:31removed from the fight not by wounds, but by the breaking of the mind.
11:3640% of all medical discharges were psychiatric.
11:40One out of every four American casualties was attributed not to enemy fire,
11:44but to the stress of enduring it.
11:45And the mortar was the single greatest driver of that stress.
11:49Not because it was the loudest weapon.
11:51Not because it caused the worst wounds,
11:53but because it was the one weapon a soldier could not prepare for.
11:57A machine gun had a sound.
11:59A rifle had a direction.
12:01Artillery had a whistle.
12:03The mortar had nothing.
12:04It simply arrived.
12:06And the impossibility of bracing yourself,
12:08of doing anything at all to improve your odds,
12:11is what broke men faster than any other weapon in the war.
12:16Psychiatrist John Appel studied combat exhaustion cases
12:19at Monte Cassino and Anzio.
12:22His conclusion was as blunt as it was hopeless.
12:25Practically all men in rifle battalions,
12:27who are not otherwise disabled,
12:29ultimately become psychiatric casualties.
12:32It was not a question of courage.
12:33It was arithmetic.
12:35Enough days under mortar fire,
12:37and every man reached a limit.
12:40In the Hurtgen Forest,
12:41soldiers began shooting themselves.
12:44Lieutenant Paul Fussell,
12:45an infantry officer,
12:47reported that hundreds chose the left hand or the left foot.
12:51The brighter ones used a sandbag to muffle the shot
12:54and avoid powder burns near the bullet hole.
12:57The army set up special hospital wards
12:59designated S.I.W.,
13:02Self-Inflicted Wound.
13:03When those men recovered,
13:05most were court-martialed.
13:07Six months in the stockade,
13:09then back to the line.
13:11The mortar destroyed bodies and mines in equal measure,
13:14and yet no army on earth reduced its use.
13:17They did the opposite.
13:19They built more,
13:20in quantities that dwarfed
13:21every other infantry weapon ever made.
13:25A tank required a factory with precision machine tools,
13:29hardened steel plate,
13:30a trained assembly line,
13:32and months of production time.
13:34A field gun needed a rifled barrel
13:36machined to tight tolerances.
13:38A mortar required no precision machining,
13:40and no specialized steel.
13:42Any metalworking shop in the world could produce one.
13:44And every army in the war understood this.
13:47The Soviet Union built 230,000 mortars in 1942 alone.
13:51That was more than every other major power combined in the same year.
13:55A Soviet artillery division carried over 100 heavy,
13:59120-millimeter mortars organized into dedicated mortar brigades,
14:03a concentration of indirect firepower
14:06that no other army matched at that scale.
14:08By the final months of the war,
14:10Soviet infantry units had so many mortars available
14:13that they used them as a substitute for artillery
14:15rather than waiting for gun batteries to arrive.
14:18The Japanese solved a different problem the same way.
14:21Their tanks were obsolete,
14:22their artillery was limited.
14:24The Imperial Navy consumed most of the industrial budget,
14:27so the army compensated with light infantry and mortars.
14:30The Type 89 50-millimeter mortar weighed 10 pounds.
14:33It fired a round out to 700 yards, and it was everywhere.
14:38A single Japanese rifle company fielded as many as 12 of them,
14:41four times the number in an equivalent American unit.
14:44After the fighting on Guadalcanal,
14:46Marine Colonel Merritt Edson,
14:48the man who led the famous raiders,
14:49insisted the Americans desperately needed something equivalent.
14:53Allied soldiers who met the Type 89 in combat universally hated it.
14:57Not because it was powerful,
14:59because there were so many of them,
15:01and they never stopped firing.
15:02But the most remarkable story of mortar production
15:05happened on the Eastern Front.
15:06In the opening months of Barbarossa,
15:09the Germans captured enormous quantities of Soviet equipment,
15:13including thousands of 120-millimeter PM-38 mortars
15:16and the ammunition to go with them.
15:18They turned the weapons around
15:20and used them against their former owners
15:22without a single modification.
15:24Soviet mortar,
15:25Soviet shells,
15:27German crews,
15:28and the weapon worked so well
15:30that Berlin ordered an exact copy into production.
15:33The Grenadwerfer 42
15:35rolled off German assembly lines,
15:37around 8,500 built,
15:39and in many units,
15:41it replaced the infantry gun entirely.
15:43Germany even manufactured 5.4 million rounds
15:46of its own ammunition
15:48for a weapon it had copied from its enemy.
15:51Britain,
15:51which had never used a 120-millimeter mortar,
15:54began producing them specifically to ship to the Soviets
15:57under lend-lease.
15:58On every front,
15:59in every theater,
16:01the mortar had become the centerpiece of infantry combat.
16:04And when everything else ran out,
16:06some men found ways to use the mortar shell itself
16:09that should not have been possible.
16:15Okinawa,
16:16April 13, 1945,
16:193 in the morning.
16:20Technical Sergeant Buford Anderson
16:22was a mortarman
16:23with the 381st Infantry,
16:2696th Division.
16:27His unit held a saddle
16:28between two ridge lines
16:30on Kakazu Ridge.
16:31They had been attacking the Japanese positions
16:33for days without progress.
16:35Now the Japanese were attacking back.
16:37A column of 75 soldiers
16:39came up the south slope in the dark.
16:41Grenades,
16:42knee mortars,
16:43satchel charges.
16:44They hit Anderson's flank.
16:45His squad was wounded,
16:47every one of them.
16:48He ordered them into an old Okinawan tomb for cover.
16:51Then he stepped out alone.
16:53He was 5'7",
16:54130 pounds.
16:56He had an M1 carbine with one magazine.
16:59Anderson emptied the magazine into the column
17:01at point-blank range.
17:03When it was empty,
17:04he grabbed an unexploded Japanese mortar round
17:06off the ground
17:07and threw it back at them.
17:09It detonated in their midst.
17:11Then he found a crate of American mortar shells.
17:13He pulled the safety pins.
17:14He slammed the tail fins against a rock to arm them.
17:17And he threw them,
17:19one after another,
17:20into the advancing Japanese,
17:22reloading and firing his carbine between throws.
17:25The man was using mortar rounds as hand grenades.
17:28By dawn,
17:29the Japanese had pulled back.
17:3025 of them were dead.
17:32Several machine guns and knee mortars were destroyed.
17:35Anderson was bleeding badly from a shrapnel wound.
17:37He refused evacuation.
17:39Instead,
17:40he walked to his company commander
17:41and reported what had happened.
17:43His information allowed American artillery
17:45to wipe out the remaining attackers.
17:47On Memorial Day,
17:491946,
17:50President Harry Truman presented Buford Anderson
17:52with the Medal of Honor on the White House lawn.
17:55He was one of five men from the 96th Division
17:58to receive it during the war.
18:00He never talked about it much.
18:01Most people in the California town
18:03where he later served as mayor
18:04had no idea he had earned it.
18:06The mortar was the simplest weapon of World War II.
18:09A tube,
18:10a plate,
18:11and a set of legs.
18:12It cost a fraction of a tank.
18:14Any factory could build one.
18:16Any three men could carry it.
18:18It made no sound that could save you.
18:20It cleared every wall,
18:22every ridge,
18:23every trench.
18:24It broke bodies in the open
18:26and mines in the dark.
18:28And it killed more infantrymen
18:30than tanks,
18:31machine guns,
18:32and snipers combined.
18:33Not because it was sophisticated.
18:35Because against it,
18:37nothing worked.
18:38If this video changed
18:39the way you think about
18:40what actually killed men
18:42in World War II,
18:43hit like and subscribe.
18:44And turn on the bell.
18:46It is the only way
18:47to make sure you see the next one.
18:49Here is a question for the comments.
18:51What weapon from the Second World War
18:52do you think is the most underestimated?
18:55Not the most famous.
18:56The most overlooked.
18:58The one nobody talks about.
19:00Drop your answer below.
19:01And tell us where you are watching from.
19:03We are always curious
19:04how far this channel reaches.
19:06These stories deserve to be remembered.
19:08Not the way Hollywood remembers them.
19:10The way the men who lived them do.
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