Little Bombs With Big Results: Hand Grenades

^{Two grenades. At top is a German”potato masher” hand grenade used in both World Wars. Below it is a rifle grenade fitted to a U.S. M 1 carbine.}

The crowd lining the streets of Sarajevo was in a festive mood. Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the throne), was visiting, and the weather was perfect on July 28, 1914. The mayor of Sarajevo, proud as a peacock, rode by in the first car. The next car was the archduke’s. He sat in the back seat, next to his beloved Sophie, the woman he married against the wishes of the emperor himself. As the royal car approached, a young man named Nedjelko Cabrinovic took what looked like a whiskey flask from a pocket, unscrewed the top, and struck it against a lamp post. Spectators heard a pop, then they saw Cabrinovic hurl the flask at the Archduke. Franz Ferdinand saw out of the corner of his eye what looked like a rock flying toward Sophie. He threw up his arm and blocked the missile. It fell on the street and exploded with a loud bang. People screamed. Several bystanders were wounded. Franz Ferdinand ordered the car to stop. He got out to make sure the injured spectators would get medical treat‑ment, then got back in the car and proceeded to the city hall.

In a sense, the first shot of World War I had been fired. It was fired with a hand grenade.

Later, after a reception at the city hall, the archduke insisted on going to the hospital to visit people wounded in the attack. On the way to the hospital the chauffeur suddenly learned that he was going the wrong way. He stopped so he could turn around. He stopped right in front of another young man named Gavrilo Princip, who was, as Cabrinovic was, a member of the assassination conspiracy. Princip pulled out a pistol and shot and killed the archduke and his wife.

Princip used a Browning automatic pistol, a weapon so popular that “brown‑ing” became a synonym for automatic pistol in several European languages. But Cabrinovic’s weapon was a Serbian army hand grenade. A description of the Serbian grenade shows how these little bombs had declined from being a major weapon of war from the 15th through 18th centuries to being mainly an assassination weapon in 1914. The Serbian grenade was flat, not as convenient a shape for throwing as later grenades, but a shape that let it fit in a pocket without causing suspicious bulges. Under the screw top of the “flask” was a percussion cap. Striking that on a hard surface ignited a short fuse. In short, the Serbian grenade was a weapon for clandestine use, not the battlefield.

The hand grenade had seen some battlefield use in the Russo‑Japanese War and somewhat less by defenders of forts in the America Civil War and the American Revolution, but most military authorities saw little use for it before World War I. That’s somewhat surprising, because the hand grenade was probably the earliest of all gunpowder weapons. The Chinese were using bamboo joints filled with gunpowder before anybody had guns. European records mention the use of grenades in the 15th century, when the principal missile weapons were the longbow and the crossbow. The grenade at that time was an iron sphere filled with gunpowder with a fuse projecting from a hole. A picture in La Pyrotechnie, a book published in 1620, shows a grenade filled with gunpowder and pistol balls. The bullets were packed like seeds in a pomegranate, and is why it was called a “grenade,” which is Middle French for pomegranate.

Those early grenades weighed about 3 pounds. Both garrisons of fortresses and besiegers tossed grenades over walls at their enemies. Because few men could throw a 3‑pound ball far enough to be out of range of those lead “seeds,” grenade throwers liked to have a wall between themselves and their target. In the 17th century, when all European war revolved around capturing enemy strong points and supply depots, the grenade became a most important weapon. To use it, European armies picked tall, strong men. They had to have strong throwing arms, and they had to be able to lug sacks of grenades, which weighed between a 1 1/2‑3 punds each. These “grenadiers” were most impressive‑looking on parade, which some rulers such as Frederick William of Prussia seemed to think was an army’s most important function. Grenadiers wore high, brimless hats so the brims wouldn’t interfere with their throwing arms and to make them look even taller. The big, strong grenadiers were essential to the rapid storm tactics the Duke of Marlborough devised. They threw grenades to demoralize the enemy, then finished him off with musket and bayonet. Occasionally, though, they couldn’t use their grenades. In 1710, Marlborough sent his grenadiers through neck‑deep water to attack a position outside Bouchain. After that immersion, the grenade in the grenadiers’ bags were as useful as so many sacks of stone. The water not only soaked the powder in the grenades, it extinguished the slow match every grenadier carried in a perforated metal case.

That slow match was one of the reasons the grenade was almost abandoned shortly before the Revolution. It made the grenadiers’ job as dangerous as that of the matchlock musketeer. If a spark fell on a grenade fuse, the grenadier would become a human bomb, wiping out himself and anybody near him. Sometimes a sharp jar would set off a grenade. In addition to that, the weight of a sack of grenades detracted from mobility. So the grenade was largely abandoned. But the grenadiers were not. They looked too good. They became an elite corps, just as paratroopers have in modern times (even though the parachute is obsolescent and mass parachute jumps like those on D‑Day in World War II will probably never happen again). Even countries with hardly any airplanes have parachute troops.

What brought the hand grenade back was trench warfare. The Western Front in World War I was a massive siege – the longest siege line in the history of the world with the most besiegers and defenders (each side had both). In the kind of close‑quarters fighting that characterized struggles in the zigzag trenches and dugouts of the Western Front, the hand grenade was sometimes the only weapon that would work. The front‑line infantrymen adopted the grenade before the military authorities. They filled old cans with TNT or gun cotton, sometimes with nails taped to them, sometimes with scraps of metal in the can with the explosive. To get more range when throwing the explosive, some soldiers taped their home‑made bombs to wooden handles. Later, the German government issued its famous “potato masher” grenade with a wooden handle. Through World War I and later World War II, all nations continued to develop types of grenades.

There were incendiary grenades and gas grenades, smoke grenades and antitank grenades, offensive grenades and defensive grenades. Defensive grenades were designed to be used from cover: They sprayed the area with metal fragments, covering distance farther than most men could throw. Offensive grenades relied on concussion: they would kill only at a short distance, although at a somewhat longer distance they might temporarily disable an enemy. An attacker in the open could safely throw them. Antitank grenades had some sort of tail – fabric fins, bundles of hemp, or cloth streamers to make them fly point‑first.

They had to strike point‑first because they had armor‑piercing shaped charges in the nose. One Soviet antitank hand grenade was the RPG 43. “RPG,” obviously, did not stand for “rocket propelled grenade” on this arm‑propelled bomb any more than it does on the well‑known RPG 7, a Soviet antitank weapon, which uses a recoilless gun to launch a rocket‑assisted shell and has become every guerrilla’s favorite hardware. Some incendiary grenades used thermite to create an intensely hot fire. Thermite could burn anything and could not be extinguished by water. Pushed down the barrel of a cannon, the thermite fire would weld the breechblock to the barrel and render the gun useless. Another type of incendiary grenade used white phosphorous, known to World War II and Korean War veterans as Willy Peter. White phosphorous ignites when exposed to air. When the grenade bursts, fragments of burning phosphorous filled the air. Willy Peter could inflict horrible burns on anyone it touched, but its primary purpose was to create a smoke screen.

The hand grenade was a favorite weapon of Orde Wingate, the maverick British general who invented new tactics in Palestine, Ethiopia, and Burma.

Wingate favored the grenade for night fighting, when a rifle could not be aimed, because there was no way an enemy could tell from where the weapon had come. In World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, grenades were widely used as the basis for booby traps, as well as for attacking pill boxes and bunkers.

Some “military experts” have expressed doubt that hand grenades are worth their weight in modern warfare (such as Ray Bonds, author of Advanced Technology Warfare). One wonders if such experts have ever studied war from the vantage point of a front‑line infantryman.

In World War I and later wars, there were frequently situations in which soldiers wished they could throw the grenade a little farther. That led to the rifle grenade. There were several ways of throwing a grenade with a rifle. One way was to place the grenade in a cup on the muzzle of the rifle and fire a blank cartridge. The gas blast armed the grenade and threw it toward the enemy.

Another way used a long rod attached to the grenade. This was pushed down the barrel of the rifle, then propelled with a blank cartridge. Grenades especially designed to be fire from rifles were then issued. These usually had a hollow tail with fins that fitted over a device called a “grenade launcher,” which was attached to the muzzle of the rifle. Again, a blank cartridge was the propelling force. After World War II, some grenades were made that could be launched with a regular cartridge. These had a steel block in the base of the grenade that stopped the bullet.

Presently, the United States and other forces use “grenade launchers” that are really separate guns. These use a 40 mm cartridge that has a small grenade instead of a bullet. The earliest models of this type of gun looked like a short, fat single‑barrel shotgun, but now the U.S. grenade launchers are minimal guns that fit below the barrel of the standard rifle. NATO and Warsaw Pact countries also had automatic grenade launchers that looked like machine guns on steroids and fired a more powerful 40 mm grenade cartridge.