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.
Chapter 19
“Bombs Bursting in Air”: Explosive Shells
When Francis Scott Key located the flag by “the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air,” he was watching the effects of two weapons which had been developing for centuries and would turn into devices no one in the early 19th century could have imagined. Of the two — the rocket and the artillery shell — the rocket was far older. The Chinese had been using rockets in war before anybody had guns. And as we know, rockets would not only put men on the moon, they would develop into intercontinental engines of destruction.
The artillery shell, in contrast, was not quite three centuries old. The first recorded use was by the Turks at the siege of Rhodes in 1522. The Turkish bombards hurled huge shells over the walls of the fortress. The shells made a tremendous flash and noise when they exploded, but they weren’t much good for knocking down walls. They could knock down flimsy houses and they could kill by concussion anyone unlucky enough to be near them when they went off. But mostly, they were useful only to terrify the defenders. In the case of Rhodes, though, the defenders were the Order of the Knights of the Hospital of St. John the Baptist of Jerusalem (the Crusading Knight Hospitalers), a military unit that was among the least susceptible to terror in all history. The Turks eventually took Rhodes after expending rivers of blood, but the explosive shells weren’t much help. There was no indication in those days that the explosive shell would some-day be the most deadly device in land warfare and the supreme weapon at sea.
The explosive shell developed from the hand grenade. The first shells were hollow metal spheres filled with gunpowder. There was a hole in the ball, and it was covered with a fireproof sack filled with a flammable compound. A hole in the sack, on the other side of the sphere, faced the gun’s powder charge. When the gun went off, it ignited the compound in the sack, which burned around to the hole in the shell, and the shell exploded. Later, artillerymen used wooden or metal tubes filled with a priming compound. They hammered these into the hole in the shell. At first, they loaded the shell with the tube facing the gun’s powder charge. Too often, though, the propelling charge did not merely ignite the shell’s fuse. It drove the fuse into the shell, which then went off inside the gun, destroying the gun and gunners.
That led to double-firing — the gunner placed the shell in the gun with fuse facing the muzzle. He then lit the fuse and, immediately after, applied fire to the gun’s touch-hole. This could only be done with short-barreled guns.
