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The 82mm BM-8 and 132mm BM-13 Katyusha rocket launchers were built and fielded by the Soviet Union in World War II. The launcher got this unofficial, but immediately recognized in the Red Army, name from the title of a Russian wartime song, Katyusha about a girl longing for her beloved, who is away on military service. Katyusha is a tender diminutive of a female name: Ekatherina (Katherine) -> Katya -> Katyusha.
The weapon was better known as " Stalin's Organ", so named by German troops due to its resemblance to a pipe organ. Stalin's Organ was seen in many forms during World War II mounted on various trucks (often the Lend Lease US Studebaker-US6), tanks, and occasionally even on tractors; modified versions were also being mounted on airplanes. It was a relatively simple design consisting of a rack of parallel rails on which rockets were mounted, with a folding frame to raise the rails to launch position. Each truck had 48 launchers. The rocket was 1.8 m long and had a 22 kg explosive warhead with a range of about 5 km. It was often used in huge masses to create a shock effect.
The idea for the Katyusha rocket launcher was sparked by Nazi Germany's development of the six-barreled Nebelwerfer rocket mortar in 1936. The Red Army began work on the design of rocket artillery in 1938, and deployment was approved on June 21 1941. On July 14 1941 the experimental artillery battery (7 launchers) was used in battle against the German army under the command of the captain I. Flerov at station Orsha. On August 8 1941 first eight regiments of missile artillery (36 launchers in each unit) were created. The improved BM-13N ("normalized") design was developed in 1943, and more than 1800 were made by the end of WWII. The simple design of Stalin's Organ lacked accuracy, therefore its primary usage was to heavily bombard enemy forces firing in salvos for area coverage, psychological effects being an important factor.
The term is now often used to describe small artillery rockets in general, whether they are Soviet-derived or originally built. Such rockets are often used in guerilla warfare, as by the Viet Conginterrogation following capture in the attacks on Saigon during the festive Tet holiday period of 1968. Tng tin cong Tt Mu Than) Viet Cong (Vit Cng) was a name used by American and allied soldiers in Vietnam, as well as by much of the English language med, HezbollahHezbollah militant Guerrilla carrying Hezbollah Flag Hezbollah ( Arabic , meaning Party of God is regarded by the Arab and Muslim world, and by some European Union countries, as a legitimate, militant, Shia political party in Lebanon, and by the Israeli g, the Iraqi resistanceThe Iraqi resistance comprises the groups and political parties advocating violent and non-violent actions against the multinational force in Iraq, which these parties regard as an " occupation force". For these parties, the foreign forces that dethroned, and TalibanThe Taliban ( Pashtun: "students of Islam"), also transliterated as Taleban is an Islamist movement which ruled most of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, despite having diplomatic recognition from only three countries (the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan,.
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Rocket artillery
Soviet phraseology
