Jazz, the Marines, radio, and the weapon that helped win World War II.
Sergeant Bob Burns was a championship rifleman in the Marine Corps during World War I. But as good a marksman as he was, he was a better musician. Burns organized a Marine Corps Jazz Band that was a favorite of General John Pershing and played to troops across Europe.
Burns was especially well known for playing an instrument that he invented himself. It was made out of two pieces of gas pipe and a whiskey funnel. It was sort of a combination of a trombone and a slide whistle, and it became Burns’s trademark. He even coined a funny name for it.
After World War I, Burns became a radio entertainer and a movie star. He was known around the country as the “Arkansas Traveler,” casting himself as a homespun rube telling tales of the Ozarks. But the cornerstone of his success was that wacky instrument of his. In the late 1930s and early ’40s, at the height of his popularity, thousands of toy versions were manufactured and sold to kids across America.
Burns’s instrument is forgotten today, but the name he dreamed up for it lives on—with a very different meaning.
In the early days of World War II the army was testing a new shoulder-mounted antitank gun called the M1A1 at the Aberdeen Proving Ground. The soldiers trying it out thought that it bore a remarkable resemblance to the odd contraption Burns had made famous. And so it got the nickname by which it is still remembered.
The bazooka.
Burns’s bazooka sounded like a low-toned saxophone with a range of about six notes. Burns was equally adept at playing the instrument for laughs or turning in virtuoso jazz performances with it.
The United States manufactured nearly half a million bazookas during World War II, along with 15 million of the antitank rockets it fired. The bazooka proved so successful at stopping enemy tanks that the Germans copied it outright. They did, however, give it another name, calling it the Panzerschreck, or “tank terror.”
Where did Burns get the name? He said once that he took it from the now-obsolete slang word “bazoo,” meaning mouth, as in “he blows his bazoo” (he talks too much). He told other people that the name mimicked the sound the strange instrument made.