Explosives

Origins

People threw fire at their enemies long before they had explosives. The Byzantines filled clay pots with Greek Fire, and incendiary pots and arrows were used across the ancient and medieval world. True explosives began in China, where gunpowder was first used in war in the tenth century. Song and Jin armies threw and catapulted gunpowder bombs in paper, bamboo, pottery and later iron cases, and the same powder drove the Fire Lance. During the Mongol Invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 the invaders used ceramic bombs, and some have been found in the wreck of their fleet off Takashima. Gunpowder reached Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and there it went mostly into guns such as the Hand Cannon.

Hand Grenades

Hollow iron or glass balls filled with powder and lit by a fuse were used in European sieges and sea fights from the sixteenth century. The name grenade comes from the French word for pomegranate, which a small, seed-filled bomb resembles. In the later seventeenth century armies formed companies of grenadiers, tall, strong soldiers picked to throw them. By the time of the Battle of Waterloo grenadiers rarely threw grenades, but the title survived as a mark of an elite unit.

The grenade came back in the trench war of the Russo-Japanese War and above all World War I. Soldiers first made bombs from jam tins, and then factories produced reliable designs such as the British Mills Bomb and the German stick grenade that led to the Model 24 Stielhandgranate. Their pattern, a delay fuse set off by a lever or pull cord, lasted through World War II, with the American Mk 2 Fragmentation Grenade and the Japanese Type 97 Hand Grenade. Grenades were also fired from rifles and from light launchers like the Type 89 Grenade Discharger and, later, the M79 Grenade Launcher. The cheapest grenade of all was the bottle of gasoline known as the Molotov Cocktail.

Demolition & Mines

Engineers have always blown up walls and bridges, and the mining of fortifications with powder charges goes back to the fifteenth century. The twentieth century added portable charges for the infantry. The Bangalore Torpedo, a string of explosive tubes invented in India in 1912, blasted lanes through barbed wire from Flanders to Omaha Beach. The Satchel Charge, a bag of explosive blocks thrown or placed by hand, was the tool for pillboxes and caves in the Pacific war and was used by Viet Cong sappers against American bases. Land mines, buried and set off by their victims, were used in huge numbers from the Second World War on, while the American M18 Claymore Mine turned the mine into a directional weapon usually fired on command.

Legacy

Explosives changed the shape of infantry fighting. The grenade gave a single soldier the power to clear a trench, a room or a bunker without being seen, and armies still issue it to every rifleman. Mines and charges made obstacles deadlier and gave engineers a central role in assaults. They also left a lasting cost. Mines and unexploded bombs keep killing civilians long after wars end, and the 1997 Ottawa Treaty banned anti-personnel mines set off by their victims for the states that signed it. Most of the basic designs on this page, from the lever-fused grenade to the Bangalore torpedo, are still in service in updated forms.

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