Two volumes of the Office of Scientific Research and Development’s official series Science in World War II were devoted to rocket ordnance: New Weapons for Air Warfare (1947) and Rockets, Guns and Targets (1948), both cataloged in this collection. Together they documented the wartime development of recoilless guns, hypervelocity projectiles, and rocket-propelled munitions across every branch of service.

Ground-based rocket artillery, mounted on tank chassis and fired in massed batteries, supplemented conventional field guns on the Western Front. At sea, ripple-fired rocket barrages like the one shown here gave destroyers and landing craft a saturation bombardment capability against shore targets, a tactic developed and refined over the course of the war and documented extensively across these two volumes.