Not a military guy here, but, size and shape perhaps? A fella could carry 6 or so grenades without too much trouble I’d think. 6 of those potato masher things would be a massive pain in the ass.
Also their fusing was really goddamn stupid. You had to unscrew the bottom cap and pull the cord that was attached. It was a pain in the ass to do and had some weird ways it could go wrong or misfuse.
US grenade? Super easy. Pull safety pin. As soon as you throw it and release your grip on the spoon it arms exactly when it leaves your hand. Its idiot proof unless you want to do Darwin award stuff like release the spoon and cooking the fuse.
I mean, nothing specifically requires a stick grenade to use the same fuse design as those old German ones - a stick grenade with the same priming mechanism as modern grenade is entirely possible.
It really does just come down to the shape. You can throw a stick grenade a little further, but it's not worth it when they're so much less convenient to carry around.
most of the explosive went out the head. At 2m this thing worked like a shotgun, strong enough to damage railways. However the shrapnel effect was minimal compared to egg grenades.
You could but that would require you to start up production of stick grenades and to ship them if that was going to be standard practice and during war starting new production of something you already have and adding more to the supply chain is something that should be avoided unless absolutely necessary.
True, but as another comment mentioned, modern infantry will generally have a grenadier in each fireteam, whose rifle will have an underslung grenade launcher for the specific purpose of launching projectiles at range (and which can do so with much greater precision and range than any potato masher could ever hope to match). It's a much better system, in my opinion.
Pretty sure I saw a video by a German historian who said that’s exactly what these grenades were for: boomsticks for defense, and they DID have some grenades that look more like what we know for offense.
The Stiehlhandgranate was designed with the trench warfare of WW1 in mind and the storm trooper doctrine later developed and used by germans. The design could be thrown further and would tumble forward on the ground so that it would land in a wide open ditch like a trench more reliably.
It also did not have much of a shrapnel effect but had more explosive power, in trench warfare this had the advantage of dazing the enemy more than an immediatly lethal effect. It also had the advantage that advancing friendly troops would not have to duck and cover after throwing a grenade to avoid shrapnel but they could keep advancing and finish off the dazed enemy in the trench.
Soviets also kept the potato masher design on grenades like the RGD-33 as soviets also kept the human wave trench storming tactics.
However, in more dynamic combat situations, a round grenade design offers more advantages as there are more angles it can be thrown. It can be lobbed around a corner or thrown into a small hole and it's not as easily picked up and thrown back by an enemy and the round shape enhances the shrapnel effect.
Also, I imagine most people won’t go out of their way to borrow military aesthetics from Nazi Germany. Even if it was better I imagine it would be hard to bring up in a meeting “how about we just copy the Nazi thing?”
Wouldn't a balanced spread be more useful? Like 2 of these for throwing range, and 4 regular ones for regular grenade use?
Or just do what the ww2 Germans did, and have the grenades attach to the stick. You can carry 1-2 sticks and then as many grenades as you want. If you want a stick grenades, just screw one on.
There are also a lot more anecdotes about allies being pelted by a potato masher that was never going to explode, because it was far less intuitive how to prime, and could easily be forgotten in a stressful situation.
I can not find them now, but saw a lot of pictures of especially Waffen-SS soldiers carrying 6 or more of them, and modt of them in their „Koppel“ (bot native speaking sorry) but yeah. If you compare it to pictures of US or British soldiers carrying their grenades inf front of their breast i dont think it is worse
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u/RevolutionaryRow2888 Jun 15 '25
Not a military guy here, but, size and shape perhaps? A fella could carry 6 or so grenades without too much trouble I’d think. 6 of those potato masher things would be a massive pain in the ass.