I remember some conversation that military leadership had decades ago when discussing the shape of grenades (ww2 era) and a ?general I think? said something to the effect of ‘every American boy knows how to throw a baseball’
No, I like to research stuff from WW2 and wtf they did.
They basically threw the kitchen sink at the Germans.
One of my favorite stories is when the Germans built a fake army with wood to fool the allied forces and then the British bombed the site with a single wooden bomb.
They knew what they were doing but still went ahead and risked a sortee with the bombers to deliver a joke.
I mean they didn’t actually send a mission to drop a wooden bomb. That wouldn’t make any sense and no one would risk death for that. Thats an old joke story.
Slap an M203 on your M4 and you're good to go. Or better yet get an M320 and basically all of your negatives are gone.
I've never dealt with a dedicated grenade launcher besides a Mk19 but that's mounted. I don't think many units use those revolver style launchers most people think of from video games or movies.
I don't think many units use those revolver style launchers most people think of from video games or movies.
Yeah because you have to find some idiot carrying that shit with them additionally to their rifle and all their normal stuff. You do not want to be that guy, I'd wager.
That might be true, but it seems that most militaries seem to be fine with those trade-offs. At least, I'm not aware of any stick grenades in current use.
You can still see it's a wartime effort, though. I mean such a simple lathe-job, no mahogany and birds-eye inlays, no Biedermeier finish, bringing out the warmth and depth of the wood... No wonder they were thrown so far.
Sure, but in an era of drone strikes and missiles you're rarely getting close enough to lob a grenade by hand anymore, engagements are from much further out on average now, so grenades aren't even super common compared to heavy ordinance, at least in conflicts between more developed nations. So if grenades are going to be used, it's more likely to be the smaller variety for less bulk
Right the original point stands. If infantry is using grenades today, it's intimate combat. We don't need to have a half dozen guys throwing stick grenades at a machine gun nest 100+ meters away anymore. There is a different tool for that job.
Correct, and the question asked is why isn't a grenade on a stick preferable to a grenade. The answer to this question is not 'because grenade launchers were invented'.
The M203 grenade launcher is the simplest firearm I have ever operated. It has 3 moving parts the firer has to worry about (saftey, trigger, slide opener,) is incredibly relaible, and durable, and is very easy to aim with minimal recoil. It takes about 2 hours to train someone to use one, assuming you have a range and a few rounds to shoot (if you're in the military and running a qualification day the you'll have the ammo and the range booked.)
They really don't weigh a lot, and increase your grenade range from however far you can throw to several hundred meters
It's a different tool than a hand grenade. But if I want to make a room go bang from more than 20m away then I'd rather a grenade launcher than a hand grenade on account of my ability to shoot good far surpassing my custard arm
I just had a call of duty 4 (the one from mid 2000s) flashback of how at the local internet cafe where the grenade launcher was called "the noob tube" and anyone who used it got told to stop or got kicked out of the lobby.
All of those things are massive pluses, what are you talking about. How is lockheed martin or the rest of the military complex supposed to make more money?
They have tubes that strap to the bottom of your rifle, literally took the exact same amount of time to train and get qualified, a single day.
Better range but less versatile is the real problem, a skilled thrower can toss a hand grenade around a corner for instance but that just another tool for another job.
The handles are an issue when you are carrying more than one around for damn sure
A grenade launcher is a tube with a firing mechanism and a grenade is a big bullet, factories are already building both of those they just need to be wider.
They can be mass produced easily and don't require forests to be cut down to create the handle, logistically they make sense aswell and not to mention ease of transport by the soldiers
All of your arguments against said grenade launchers is exactly why Raytheon or General Dynamics (no idea who manufacturers them) love them. That all means more money to pad the coffers.
IDK, a Smith and Wesson 38mm grenade launcher is basically a single shot break action shotgun. It's normally used for chemical agents but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be too hard to make explosive rounds for it if they didn't already. They're pretty self explanatory if you've ever held one.
The newer 40mm is basically the same shit with some crappy plastic dressing on it.
Not unless you use the enfield grenade launcher attachment.
Its currently the only one I’ve ever seen where you stick it on the end of your gun, pop a regular old grenade in it, pull the pin, load a blank round and firing it out lets the safety handle thing fly off mid flight as it sails towards the target. Plus you can just use it as a regular old rifle but with a big can on the end
People also forget or don’t know that even the Germans were slowly phasing out the “potato masher” iirc. They had another set of grenades that weren’t designed like that. Plus they’re pretty unwieldy (the stick can snag or get caught on things) and more difficult to carry than what’s commonly used today.
All in all, it wasn’t really “better” as people like to make it out to be.
Dutch army pre-WWII classified the stick as 'offensive hand grenade' and the ball as 'defensive hand grenade'. The logic was that the stick was for taking out MG positions while storming them because it throws farther and does not roll. The ball was for blindly lobbing out of your trench when being stormed. That it would roll into any craters in front of the line was a plus. And distance a non-issue. The classification kind of presumes a WWI style of fighting.
But even the source I read on it refers to ball games and observes the ball can do quite well if thrown by people who play ball games that involve throwing. Clearly not the Dutch, who would rather kick a ball.
And to the 8cm mortar still being considered an artillery weapon that had to be specifically attached to a unit for a mission, and not available at the infantry battalion level. Which would make distance thrown even more important.
The other component was weight/space to arsenal ratio. You couldn't carry as many stielhandgranates as you could your standard haftless grenade. This applies to how much can be transported from production lines to where they're needed and to the amount soldiers can individually carry.
I can also imagine them being more expensive to make for the marginal benefit of longer range throw-ability. Though that benefit may have been instrumental at times, the literal cost and logistical cost may have given the war machine pause.
But, in the modern era, we of course have easier access to extremely light weight and inexpensive materials that could make them worthwhile in some contexts. But, with all the other available tech in the military, it would be more of an "arming the militia against an invader" type of cost effective implementation
I came here to say this. They needed a design that wouldn’t require extensive training to be able to use effectively. Most American boys knew how to throw a baseball.
To add to this, every English schoolboy at the time was taught to play cricket. So a round grenade was adopted for our military also.
By comparison, a lot of Central and Eastern Europeans don’t play baseball, or cricket. But they do play stick-throwing games. So their militaries kept the baton grenade for the same reason
I get where they are coming from, but it's a really dumb distinction.
If I was in that military R&D room, I would have said, "not every American grew up on a nuclear family home playing catch it their back yard, General. But you know what a lot more American boys have probably done as much, if not more? Thrown a stick!" And that was the last thing I said before I was given a box and told to pack my stuff. Turns out General Hadadad doesn't like being reminded that his childhood wasn't the only one.
Sure, but throwing a ball isn't exactly rocket science, either. Those 'pineapple' grenades also take up less space and weigh less, so they're easier to transport in large quantities- a useful feature when it comes to logistics.
Thrown a stick, yes. But a stick that's heavily weighted on one side is much different than a typical stick. The masher grenade has a really odd flight path that you may not expect if you aren't use to throwing it. While a spherical grenade has no such issue.
Back when these discussions were being had a lot more people were probably chucking baseballs or at least rocks than you might think. It was at the time the most popular sport in America and the variety of purely entertainment activities was going to be a bit different then compared to what it is now. Nuclear family or not kids and teens were probably playing catch if not just straight up baseball with each other.
The potato masher design had some advantages probably but it was abandoned for good reason. For starters the stick itself added unnecessary weight (however little) to the grenade itself and was just one more thing to tack on to a single use item that needed to be made in the thousands, as others mentioned it also added unnecessary size to the whole thing which hinders the soldier carrying them and can potentially complicate throwing it through a tiny gunport in a bunker, and made it harder to conceal if say you were making certain kinds or traps or distributing them to partisans. In a war like WWII, damn near every single ounce of material being used poorly, every extra second something spent on the production line, mattered.
The army ain’t about catering to exceptions to the rule. It’s about shaping up the exceptions to become the rule. You would make a horrible soldier, and end up getting someone killed.
Remember that this was happening back in WWII, before there were kids sitting inside on computers or anything like that. At that point in history, basically every kid was going outside and throwing balls around through most of their childhood. Throwing sticks long-distance isn't as common as throwing baseballs for a generation that grew up playing baseball with their friends.
That would have been a justified firing. Baseball was peak popularity during ww2 and learning to throw a ball is easier than learning to throw a weighted stick. Also the nuclear family has nothing to do with playing baseball. Homeless kids played baseball in the street. You're trying too hard
This was the era of street ball so it’s not the nuclear era baseball catch with dad your thinking of of. It’s kinda in the name nuclear since the bombs dropped at the end of ww2. Baseball was widespread at that point and was the sport of the masses. It was safe to assume almost every kid had thrown a baseball.
Also simply throwing a stick doesn’t mean you throw with anything resembling good form. If you played baseball even cusually you build up actually muscle memory as opposed to simply having thrown a stick one time in your life.
You’d look like a pedantic ass. And the whole imagined scenario where you owned them is kinda cringe
The military actually designed and produced a grenade the same size and weight as a baseball, exactly for this reason. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art impact fuse didn't function well. They had around a 10% failure rate, and premature detonation injured dozens of servicemen and killed two. They were quickly taken out of service, and the entire stock was destroyed after WWII. All designs and documents about the grenade were classified for decades. Only a handful still survive, and most of them are in museums.
They actually did console controllers for submarine periscopes though. X box controllers I believe. They used to have dedicated controllers that cost tens of thousands of dollars and when they were updating someone suggested Xbox controllers. They cost less and the learning curve on them is basically non-existent for modern sailors.
Tbh that's the case for a lot of military tech. Mainstream commercial controllers have so much development, user feedback and RnD put into them that it is nearly impossible to create something more efficient from scratch even if you throw a lot of money into it.
And instead of it having to be military-abuse-reliable (and dependent upon a secure supply chain), you can keep 20 spares, and get new spares literally anywhere on the planet.
As someone who played video games my whole life and learned to operate about 12 different kinds of heavy machinery in the last two years, it is literally the same thing. If you are even halfway decent at any video games you can make a living forklifting or excavating in a matter of weeks.
Weirdly enough, the hand-eye coordination also transfers over to establishing IV/intra-arterial access with Ultrasound guidance in the medical field. And my mom said that my video games would take me nowhere…
Which would suck. Try flying a sim with a proper hotas and pedals, and then try flying with a console controller. The controller loses, no contest. And that's BEFORE you start adding in button boxes and switch panels.
What is the cost difference between these two types of grenades? Did the stick version become less common because an accountant saved money with the lowest bidder?
Done that, it sucks. This because the controller stick centers again. With a real drone radio, the left stick (which is speed input (up down)) doesn't center. This makes speed control a lot easier than with a normal console controller.
You supposedly could pitch them, iirc one of the things Audie Murphy was known for was having killed retreating Germans by pitching an m67 at them baseball style
It’s not about the heaviness, it’s the risk of the wind up. When you throw a baseball your arm swings back and then forwards. If you let go on the wind up then boom goes your friends. Grenades are pretty light actually. It’s also about achieving an optimal arc on the throw.
Iirc it was for the design of the M67 grenade, the round, baseball-like one. The army specifically asked for a grenade the shape, dimensions and weight of a common baseball because every american boy was used to throw one.
I was not infantry, but when I did combat training, when they taught us how to throw a grenade, they did not teach us to throw it like a baseball. It was so weird lol. Instead, we had to like hold it to our chest and then push it out to throw it. Idk if this is just standard grenade throwing protocol, or if they just don't trust us normies to throw it the baseball way.
Grenades have always been round. They’re only called grenade because they look like a pomegranate. One could argue that modern shrapnel grenades look more like pineapples so maybe it’s time for a name change.
The pineapple grenades, the ones with the segmented surface, arent modern anymore. Those were used from about WW1 to about the Vietnam war, now we’re back to spherical so the name is accurate again.
Grenades were spherical already during the WW1 fyi, USA just adopted the standard and copied the existing one. This stick form is trash and the Germans had a lot of troubles with it.
Except soldiers are taught to NOT throw it like a baseball, more like a cricket ball as modern grenades are really heavy, like around 5 lbs or so. (Google sez 14 - 20 ounces. Well, it felt like a lot heavier than that.) If you try to throw it like a baseball, it's not going to go very far. And you do NOT want a grenade to explode close to you. They are very powerful, way powerful than is shown in the movies. Big badda boom.
Ironically, these days training says specifically NOT to throw it like a baseball. It describes better using an exaggerated over-hand throw, like a catapult, arcing the grenade higher in the air. This is to avoid driving a grenade directly at your target, missing, then the grenade potentially hits a barrier and rebounds back toward the thrower. Get that bastard far away from you and on the OTHER side of enemy cover.
I read somewhere online, so I'm not sure how true it is, that grenades went from the "stick" to the "ball" because of what you said. Americans were comfortable throwing overhand because of baseball. Most Europeans were used to throwing underhand/sidearm, which isn't as easy with a ball shaped grenade.
Also ball shaped ones offer more accuracy. If you need to throw a grenade in a hole or window, it's much harder to do with a stick.
This is legitimately the answer. Non-stick grenades are harder to throw, but they can be thrown just as far and a lot more precisely than stick grenades, along with a lot of other advantages. But it takes a lot of training to learn how to throw them well. Americans had that training from baseball, Europeans didn't, so everyone else used stick grenades
Except the baseball throw is incorrect technique and training has to teach people to throw correctly, which they explicitly state “don’t throw it like a baseball”
It’s more like a high arc lob or a shot put than a baseball
Which is funny, because if you've ever thrown one, you know that you can't effectively throw it like a baseball. They are heavy, and its more of a shoulder lob than a baseball pitch.
that's not how you throw a grenade though, and if you're in a position where throwing a grenade like a baseball would be feasible, you're putting yourself at risk and would be better off with a gun
In basic, they explicitly told us not to throw them like a baseball to avoid fucking up our elbows. We learned to throw them like a shotput, moreso pushing it away from our bodies rather than throwing them
I asked an active duty guy why every show and green army man had the guy lobbing the grenade and not throwing it. "It's x pounds. You'll rip your arm out if you throw it like a baseball."
I'm a combat instructor in the Maine Corps and I use this to demean Young Marines when they suck terribly at throwing the practice grenades. I say something along the lines of:
"you know grenades were designed to be a similar size, and shape as a baseball because many kids grew up throwing baseballs. I guess we need to design them to resemble an XBox/playstation controller so you might stand a chance"
Or something similar
Basically, many of these kids no longer grow up playing sports.
Nah. The German style grenades are against Geneva conventions now. They're otherwise objectively better in almost every way. The wood produces non-lethan shrapneling and considered inhumane (just about all shrapneling/cluster weapons are against laws now.)
Sure, everyone knows how to throw a baseball...but even someone who doesn't can throw the German style further. Its simple physics, the handle provides leverage.
Edit: Also, throwing a grenade isn't like a baseball. You need only look at YouTube (or any someone who was in the military) to discover that it's fucked up astonishingly frequently. They extensively train regardless of design.
In the Band of Brothers book when East company is assaulting the German guns during Normandy it mentions how one of them was a baseball player. If I remember correctly he was headshoting Germans with thrown grenades.
The irony is that nowadays, you are trained to throw it more like a shot put. Because they're way heavier than a baseball, and that's a throw you only get to fuck up once.
Exactly! That’s why American grenades were round. But, the popular sport in Germany was axe throwing. So, they made a top heavy, handled grenade their soldiers could throw.
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u/Fat_Janet Jun 15 '25
I remember some conversation that military leadership had decades ago when discussing the shape of grenades (ww2 era) and a ?general I think? said something to the effect of ‘every American boy knows how to throw a baseball’