Good morning, guys.
I will continue a thread begun several years ago, the hand grenades, this time, of WWII (some iconic WWII hand grenades were omited because they were depicted in the first post, of Spanish Civil War grenades).
![[ img ]](https://i.imgur.com/LywFoOF.png)
The first ones, are the Anti-Tank soviet hand grenades, of increasing penetration power, then the most usual fragmentation grenades used by the soviet infantry, first the powerful but complicated RGD-33, and then the almost universal RGD-42.
The American "pineapple grenade" Mk.2 is iconic, in several parts of the world is the image that came to mind when we thought in grenades. It had a cast iron body plus a time delay fuze. Less known was the Mk.3, the "demolition grenade", with a more powerful explosive charge, it works by concusion, not by fragmentation.
The most used Japanese hand grenade was Type 97, which unlike the rather similar Type 91 cannot be used from the Knee Mortar. During the war, to solve some relaibility issues with the fuze, and improved and cheaper grenade was made, Type 99. Both had cast bodies and were percussion fuzed.
Although the iconic WWI and WWII German hand grenade was the handle grenade "potato masher" type, the German egg type was made by the millions and was used in all the fronts. As its handle stablemate, it was time fused, the blue cap indicates a delay of 4.5 seconds.
During the Winter and Continuation Wars, Finland´s most used hand grenade was m/32. With a patognomonic tear or drop shape, it was intended to be fired from the Tampella 47 mm mortar (with an attached tail unit, and different contact nose fuze), but was much more used as hand grenade.
The first modern hand grenade was WWI British Mills bomb, incorporating all the modern items of a hand granade: Cast iron body, time delay fuze and a safety lever. The green band indicates that the filling was TNT. No. 36 can be used with a proper gas sealing metal disc attached to the base, from a rifle grenade-throwing cup.
The French most used granade from WWII was OF-37, together with DF-37 (both grenedas were also used in all the French Post-War wars, from Indochina to Algeria). OF-37 works by concusion or blast effect, and had a two part body of thin cast iron. It was painted depending on the filling, an all green grenade means a TNT charge (red/yellow were filled with Schneiderite, all yellow were filled with Tolite) and were equiped with time delay (5 seconds) fuze.
Finally, the British "Sticky Bomb" was created after Dunkirk as a last ditch Anti-Tank device. It had a glass flask which was filled with nitroglycerin with additives for stability, inside a fabric sock covered with birdlime, all inside a thin two part spheric metal cover with a bakelite handle and a time fuze. The idea was to run to the enemy tank, take-off the metal cover, struck strongly the sock to the tank, broke the glass flask and ignite the fuze. If everything works correctly this was able to defeat up to 25 mm of armour.
As the Anti-Tank role was an increasingly important task of the infantry, and tactics using hand held grenades were almost impossible (or suicidal) in the open field (but not in urban environments), two different approaches were though to use a proyected AT grenade. The Americans created a rocket launcher and the germans a recoiless grenade proyector: the Bazooka and the Panzerfaust. Of greater reach the former, but with more destructive power the later, they were forerunners of almost all modern AT weapons.
![[ img ]](https://i.imgur.com/M20FCcw.png)
![[ img ]](https://i.imgur.com/FJWi0Gg.png)
Cheers.
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