Grenade

• 1. Introduction

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  The grenade is a weapon so old that its name comes from a fruit. The French word for pomegranate gave soldiers a name for the small, seed-packed explosive devices they hurled at one another, and the first recorded use of that word in English dates to 1591. But the story stretches back much further: to Byzantine clay jars full of Greek fire, to Song Dynasty soldiers stuffing gunpowder into ceramic pots, to Catalan sailors loading 200,000 copper "pomegranates" onto a fleet bound for Sicily.

  How did a device that looked like a piece of fruit become one of the defining weapons of modern infantry combat? Why did the British Army declare the hand grenade obsolete in 1902, only to scramble to produce them by the millions just years later? And what does a Swedish engineer working in the 2010s have to do with fixing a design problem that dated back to the 1930s? Those questions carry us through a story that spans from the Byzantine Empire to the drone-struck fields of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

• 2. Fire, Pots, and Pomegranates

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  Rudimentary incendiary grenades appeared in the Byzantine Empire not long after the reign of Leo III, who ruled from 717 to 741. Byzantine soldiers realized that Greek fire, a combustible mixture already in use that century, could be hurled in stone and ceramic jars as well as sprayed by flamethrowers. Glass containers were eventually adopted as a refinement.

  In Song China, which lasted from 960 to 1279, soldiers packed gunpowder into ceramic or metal containers fitted with fuses. The resulting weapons were called "thunder crash bombs." A military book from 1044, the Wujing Zongyao, described gunpowder recipes that the scholar Joseph Needham identified as prototypes of the modern hand grenade. The book records shells made of cast iron, shaped like a ball and as large as a bowl, each holding half a pound of gunpowder, fired from an eruptor toward the enemy and producing a sound the text likens to a thunderclap.

  A 12th-century Persian historiography, the Mojmal al-Tawarikh, records a terracotta elephant packed with explosives placed hidden in a van and detonated as an invading army approached. The innovation shifted from the incendiary approach of earlier devices toward the fragmentation concept that would eventually define the modern grenade.

  The Catalan use of grenades made that shift unmistakable. A fleet under Alfonso the Magnanimous sailed from Barcelona in 1433 carrying 200,000 copper pomegranates filled with gunpowder. A chronicle by Melcior Miralles, chaplain to Alfonso, describes them: they made a great noise when lit, and as the pieces shattered they did enough damage to knock anyone they touched to the ground. Earlier grenades had relied on fire; these were designed to explode and spray metal shrapnel. The quantity also signals something important: these were not experimental curiosities but standard-issue munitions.

• 3. Grenadiers and the Age of Infantry

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  By the mid-17th century, a new type of soldier had emerged across Europe. Infantry called grenadiers specialized in shock tactics and close-quarters combat, using grenades alongside fierce melee fighting. In 1643, there is a recorded possibility that grenados were thrown among Welsh troops at Holt Bridge during the English Civil War.

  The Glorious Revolution of 1688 produced a more precise entry in the record. Cricket-ball-sized iron spheres, measuring 8.81 to 9 inches in circumference and packed with gunpowder, were fitted with slow-burning wicks and thrown against the Jacobites at the battles of Killiecrankie and Glen Shiel. The weapons performed poorly. Fuses burned at inconsistent rates, detonations were unpredictable, and the grenades saw little use as a result.

  The 18th century brought a different kind of grenade user: pirates. During the Golden Age of Piracy, particularly in naval boarding actions, grenades were a favored weapon. Captain Thompson used what one account describes as vast numbers of powder flasks, grenade shells, and stinkpots to defeat two pirate-hunters sent by the Governor of Jamaica in 1721. By the end of that century, hand grenades were in general decline among formal militaries.

  The 19th century revived them. During the Crimean War of 1854-1856, Colonel Hugh Robert Hibbert wrote his sister a letter describing a British improvised grenade: empty soda water bottles packed with powder, twisted nails, and other sharp scraps, with a burning fuse, lobbed into enemy pits. He noted with dry humor that the neighbors in the pit were greatly annoyed. French and Russian forces used grenades in the Siege of Sebastopol during the same conflict.

  The American Civil War produced grenades at industrial scale. The Union Army procured approximately 93,200 Ketchum grenades over the course of the war, deploying them in the sieges of Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and Petersburg. The Augusta Arsenal, on the Confederate side, manufactured around 13,000 hand grenades between 1863 and 1865. In March 1868, Paraguayan troops used hand grenades while attempting to board Brazilian ironclad warships from canoes.

• 4. Obsolete, Then Indispensable

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  In 1902, the British War Office declared that hand grenades were obsolete and had no place in modern warfare. Within two years, that verdict was reversed. Reports from General Sir Aylmer Haldane, a British observer of the Russo-Japanese War, described improvised grenades being used with great effect by Russian defenders at Port Arthur, now known as Lüshun Port. Defenders there converted old iron cases and mountain gun shells at first, then shifted to cut-down casings from quick-firing artillery, packed with dynamite or gun-cotton and fitted with safety fuses. At peak production, the workshops at Port Arthur could produce 2,500 grenades in a single day; in August alone, 18,000 were prepared.

  Japanese forces at the same war made their own improvised grenades from tin cans or bamboo tubes, initially lit with matches, then later triggered with a percussion arrangement using a rifle cartridge as primer and steel wire. Japanese cavalry was also armed with grenades and used them against pursuing enemies by throwing them under the horses of their opponents.

  The Board of Ordnance was quickly instructed to develop a practical hand grenade. Various models using percussion fuzes were built, but they proved unreliable in practice and were not commissioned in large numbers. Marten Hale, who is known for patenting the Hales rifle grenade, developed a modern hand grenade in 1906 but could not persuade the British Army to adopt it until 1913. His chief competitor was Nils Waltersen Aasen, who independently invented a design in the same year of 1906 while serving as a sergeant at the Oscarsborg Fortress in Norway. Aasen received a patent for his design in England, formed a company called the Aasenske Granatkompani in Denmark, and began exporting hand grenades across Europe before the First World War. He successfully marketed the weapon to France and was appointed a Knight of the French Legion of Honour in 1916.

  The Royal Laboratory's No. 1 grenade, developed in 1908, contained explosive material with an iron fragmentation band and a long cane handle of approximately 16 inches, allowing the user to throw it beyond the blast radius. Its fatal flaw: the percussion fuse was armed before throwing, which meant a soldier drawing back his arm in a confined trench risked detonating the grenade before releasing it.

• 5. The Mills Bomb and a Standard Design

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  William Mills, a hand grenade designer from Sunderland, patented, developed, and manufactured what he called the Mills bomb at the Mills Munition Factory in Birmingham in 1915, designating it the No. 5. It was described at the time as the first safe grenade. The design consisted of an explosive-filled steel canister with a triggering pin and a deeply notched exterior surface that became iconic.

  The external segmentation is widely believed to aid fragmentation, scattering shards of metal on detonation. Mills' own notes tell a different story: the grooves were purely to help soldiers grip the weapon. Improved fragmentation designs were later built with the notches on the inside, but those were too expensive to produce at the time, so the external grooves remained. They happened to work well for grip, and the "pin-and-pineapple" form persisted.

  After the Second World War, the fundamental design of hand grenades remained largely unchanged. The pin-and-lever igniter system became standard among the major military powers. Incremental improvements continued, but no major departure from the Mills pattern emerged until 2012, when Spränghandgranat 07, known as shgr 07, was announced as the first major innovation in hand grenades since the First World War. Developed by Ian Kinley at Försvarets Materielverk in Sweden, shgr 07 is a self-righting, jumping grenade. It contains approximately 1,900 balls and covers a cone 10 metres in diameter, with the center of that cone about 2 metres in height. This geometry minimizes random scatter outside the lethal zone, a persistent problem with earlier designs.

  Kinley had identified two core problems with grenades dating back to mechanisms unchanged since the 1930s: time fuzes that burned faster in heat and slower in cold, and striker springs that came pre-tensioned from the factory. A new mechanism, adopted into service in 2019 and fully interchangeable with older designs, addressed both. Springs are now twist-tensioned by the thrower after the transport safety is removed, eliminating the possibility of accidental arming.

• 6. Types and Purposes

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  Fragmentation grenades are the most common type in military service. The United States M67 grenade has a wounding radius of 15 metres, half that of older-style grenades, and can be thrown roughly 40 metres. Fragments from the explosion may travel more than 200 metres, which is why throwers must take cover before detonation.

  High-explosive grenades work on a different principle. Their effective casualty radius is smaller than the distance they can be thrown, making them useful in confined spaces like fortifications and buildings. In the US Mk3A2, that casualty radius is published as 2 metres in open areas, though fragments and fuze pieces may travel as far as 200 metres from the point of detonation. The US Mk 40 concussion grenade is specifically designed for use against enemy divers and frogmen. In 2016, the US Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center announced development of a grenade, designated ET-MP, capable of switching between fragmentation and blast modes at any point before throwing.

  Incendiary grenades saw significant production in Britain during the Second World War. The No. 76 special incendiary grenade, issued mainly to the Home Guard as an anti-tank weapon, was manufactured in vast numbers; by August 1941, well over 6,000,000 had been produced.

  Stun grenades have a civilian law-enforcement variant called sting grenades, also known as stingball or sting ball grenades. Made of hard rubber and filled with around 100 rubber or plastic balls, they are intended to cause painful stings without serious injury. In practice, they do not reliably incapacitate targets, can ricochet unpredictably, and have caused people to lose eyes and hands. The brand name Stinger is trademarked by Defense Technology for its specific line, making "stinger grenade" a genericized trademark.

  Fuel-air explosive hand grenades such as the Ukrainian RTG-27 series have been reported as effective in clearing dugouts and buildings. Anti-tank grenades, which were developed seriously beginning in the Second World War as a stopgap for squads without rocket-propelled weapons, were still used with limited success against lightly armored MRAP vehicles during the Iraqi insurgency in the early 2000s. More recently, modified anti-tank grenades have been dropped from drones in the Russo-Ukrainian war.