T13 "Beano" Impact grenade

During WWII, all sides tried to come up with new military products for use in the war. Some were real breakthroughs and others, well not so much. And that brings us to the T13 "Beano" Impact grenade. Standard fragmentation grenades are used by pulling out the pin which holds the "spoon" or "paddle" on. When the pin is pulled, spring pressure throws the paddle off the grenade and ignites a fuse that burns for approximately 3 to 5 seconds and then detonates the primary explosive. The Beano worked differently. Instead of a timed burning fuse, it used a pressure trigger and an in-flight arming mechanism. To throw the grenade, the user would grip it like a baseball, that is with the first and middle finger together over the top of the grenade and its knurled "butterfly cap". Then the pin was pulled and the grenade thrown. The butterfly cap would come off when the grenade was thrown and then a nylon cord attached to it would play out until it pulled a second arming pin from the interior of the grenade. This armed the grenade to explode when it impacted a hard surface. 

Obviously, this raises some important questions. What if you threw the grenade and it landed in soft dirt or mud or water? You have a highly dangerous piece of UXO is what. How much pressure is needed to pull the secondary arming pin? Would it fail to work or be pulled accidentally? How sensitive is the impact fuse?  Could you tangle the cord and butterfly cap in gear or barbed wire and cause the grenade (now armed) to come back at you like a tetherball? 

The T13 grenade was developed by the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA and manufactured by the Eastman Kodak company. The idea behind its shape was that American soldiers were almost all familiar with throwing baseballs and that they would be able to throw a baseball-shaped grenade further, more accurately and with greater ease than the oblong shape of earlier grenades like the Mk2 "pineapple" grenade or the Mills bomb. Despite accidents and deaths during the testing process, the T13 was approved for field use and some 10,000 were sent to the field for use during the Normandy invasion. It was apparently withdrawn due to a high incidence of accidents and injuries from misuse or poor design. Most existing examples were destroyed and the plans classified. There was a similar design from Italy called the SRCM 35/38 or the "Little Red Devil". It was used  during the same time period and there are many documented cases of the grenades being found in an armed, but undetonated state, sometimes killing those who further disturbed them.

Today the T13 grenade (de-milled, of course) is one of the rarest grenades from the WWII era and are very highly sought after by collectors. The baseball shape of the T13 was resurrected years later in the highly successful M61 and M67 Fragmentation grenades.

Hanes Excelsior Percussion Cap Grenade

Here is one from the bad idea bin. The Hanes Excelsior Percussion Cap Grenade. It was patented in 1862 by an W. W. Hanes for use in the American Civil War. It is a cast iron orb filled with gunpowder like the classic "Rocky and Bulwinkle" bomb. However instead of the classic open burning fuze, it is instead liberally covered with 10 nipples for percussion caps, which are small pressure sensitive explosives used to ignite a larger charge. It only took the detonation of one cap to set off the grenade, so if it were dropped or handled roughly it would certainly blow up inadvertently. And percussion caps are not always easy to use in the best of situations. To imagine Civil War soldiers in a trench, scared, hungry and being shot at using this thing without blowing themselves up is a stretch of the imagination. There is no record of their use in battle, so we can hope that no one was killed with this thing, either or purpose or on accident. Very few exist today.

Less Known Weapons of the Civil War

The "Late Unpleasantness", as it is known around here, was fought at the intersection of modern and incredibly effective weapons technology and the inflexible and Napoleonic tactics. This resulted in the wholesale slaughter of thousands of soldiers in both sides trying to fight an old war with new weapons or fight a new war with old weapons. I recently visited the Museum of History in Augusta, Georgia and got to see some of the less well known weapons of the War of Northern Aggression.

Sorry about the quality of the pictures, the light was low and flash not allowed, so we will have to make do with what we have.

First off we have the Rains Grenade, designed by Confederate Colonel George Washington Rains. It is certainly not the first hand grenade, and most are familiar with the old style, iron orb black powder grenade with a fuse, although we mainly see it in cartoons.
(Damn moose and squirrel!)

There were two problems with the orb grenades. Firstly, an exposed burning fuse was not really appropriate for the task. It was unlikely to go out, but could burn too slow, allowing the enemy to get away, or worse, throw it back, or it could burn too fast, and that probably wouldn't bother you more than once. Secondly, the orb grenades were pretty close to the size and heft of a shot put, and consequently, were difficult to throw very far. This meant you had to get well within the range of other weapons to use it in an attack and you were pretty close to the blast radius of the grenade itself. Something better was needed.

The Rains Grenade was equipped with a pressure fuse, which caused the grenade to explode on contact when primed and thrown. Also, the stick that the explosive was attached to allowed a soldier to really get a good throw, increasing the chance of hitting the enemy and surviving to tell the tale. This idea was also used in the famous "potato masher" grenades of Germany in WWI and WWII. While the smaller grenade did not have as large a blast radius, their light weight allowed more to be carried and them to be thrown a longer distance.
These weapons were more useful in a defense situation, as the user would likely be behind cover and/or higher up than the attacker, giving the defender a big advantage.

There were large shortages of appropriate weapons on both sides in the first months of the war. Confederate authorities ordered a large number of polearms, pikes and halberds and such produced as a stop gap measure. They were as cheap and easy to produce as they were next to useless. A generation or two before, many soldiers could probably only fire 2 rounds a minute and would have difficulty hitting a man sized target from 100 yards away. But the technology of war is never idle, and by the beginning of the war, range and rate of fire were much improved, making pikemen and bayonet charges into suicidal jobs.

Here we have on the left a Clover Leaf pike, (which to me is a Partisan or Ranseur, but hey) and on the right, a rather neat, if pointless, retractable pike. Why a pike would need to retract, I'm not really sure. But the mechanism was pretty interesting. Other than guarding prisoners, there would be no use whatsoever for these weapons and after the Summer of 1861, they were quickly discarded. Today they are pretty rare.

The middle gun is a Burnside Carbine, designed in 1856 by Union General Ambrose Burnside. I've always liked ol' Ambrose, even though he is a Yankee, because I used to wear big sideburns and it is said we get the term from him. Google him if you want, he had some pretty impressive facial hair.

Anyway, the Burnside Carbine was a breech loading .54 caliber rifle. Breech loading is infinitely easier and faster than muzzle loading a weapon. The main innovation of the Burnside is that the cartridge and breech block eliminated the problem of hot gasses escaping the chamber during firing. This is an uncomfortable and distracting problem at best, and anyone who has gotten gas in the eye knows it is no fun.

Less well known than the Spencer (the rifle on the bottom) and Sharps Carbines, about 55,000 of the Burnside Carbine were produced, and many were captured and used by Confederate Cavalry units. The Burnside Carbine suffered from complaints that the specially designed and strange, cone-shaped brass cartridge would get stuck in the chamber after firing. The Burnside propelled the bullet at about 950 feet per second and had a range of at least 200 yards. Like its better known cousins, its short length and light weight made it a popular weapon for the cavalry of the day.

Historical Oddities-Grenade Catapult

To prove that everything that is old becomes new again, here we see French Army, early in WWI, using a small catapult to attempt to lob grenades into the German trenches. How well this worked is unknown, but if the catapult was well-built, it could probably add 10-15 meters on a grenade throw, which is significant. Those grenades look like they are of a pretty good size as well. To me, the biggest advantage would be that you could send a grenade towards the enemy without exposing yourself to fire. I find it fascinating that a weapon that goes back 2500+ years was still being made use of in what was one of the first "modern" wars. Things like this show that whenever someone says something like "this weapon is obsolete, get rid of it" or "infantry battles will never take place again" or "dogfighting is a thing of the past" or any other nonsense, they should probably be put out to pasture, or into the bar, or someplace else out of the way, because inventiveness and initiative win wars as much as anything else.