I watched The Rocketeer again a few days ago, and I got me wondering if a jetpack would actually be a useful item in WW2, or even in today’s military?
A fictional jetpack that could run tens of minutes with no real world fuel/ejection mass limitations? It would be absolutely revolutionary, like air mobile cavalry without the limitations of needing helicopters. A significant portion of the fight is maneuvering fast to where the enemy doesn’t want you to be. You see this at the operational level through all of warfare as horse-mounted troops could always dominate ground-mounted troops, but this would bring it even to the tactical level where individual troop movements and squads would have practically unlimited mobility on the battlefield. It would probably be an advantage on par with one side having tanks and the other not.
For niche purposes, probably. The people in the movie likely would have originally imagined huge numbers of flying infantry, as part of the standard “everyone fights the last war” phenomenon; that’s how they’d have been used in WWI, for mass assault. But with the proliferation of machine guns and anti-air weapons, that’d have been suicide.
In WWII and the modern era they’d be more a superior version of paratroopers, who can go up as well as down. Less well armed/equipped than a standard soldier by necessity - the rocket pack has to displace something, after all. But somebody who can do things like zip onto or over buildings in urban combat or be dropped from aircraft basically anywhere.
This is just my gut instinct, but in the era of WWIi, which was pre-helicopter, I can’t see how it wouldn’t be an advantage over an enemy who did not have jet packs. Assuming they worked reliably and as promised.
For one thing, tanks traditionally have less armor at the top. Today, this is exploited by top-down guided missiles like the FGM-148 Javelin - Wikipedia or drones dropping IEDs in Ukraine. In WW2, without modern guidance systems, the ability to fly above a tank and shoot down onto it would’ve been quite helpful, even if that meant exposing a soldier to AA fire, especially if that tank wasn’t guarded by infantry. Some of the bigger anti-air systems might’ve had a harder time tracking a tiny, fast-moving person-sized target flying so low (but not always; some could be aimed down too).
And for the Japanese, it probably would’ve made kamikaze attacks even more deadly. A swarm of exploding people launched from a plane would’ve been an early take on Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle - Wikipedia…
PS There are also modern versions being tested: https://youtube.com/shorts/jCynApD4so8?si=OCew5j_sNDC4aunz
Maybe it’ll be an Olympic sport someday… Dubai had a jetpack race just a couple years ago: https://youtu.be/oRol5tiXNdY?si=MFuHd0egiGlVKyqf
I remember a old Sci-Fi story about the Soviets developing an Anti-Gravity backpack and how it didn’t work out quite the way they thought it would…(can’t for the life of me remember it’s name). Also, this cartoon from my favorite Web-comic comes to mind…
Press On.
Glad to see I’m not the only one for whom that was the first thought.
The biggest problem with jetpacks is that there is no cover in the air. It would be like skeet shooting for the enemy.
That’s why I suggested it would be good for urban combat; the buildings provide cover. I would expect it to be used more as a “jump pack” than for continuous flight in order to stay low and avoid being “skeet”, as the comic above calls it.