I remember seeing this in a war comic from the 1960s. After a grenade has been tossed, a soldier immediately dives on it with his helmet grasped in his hands, with the purpose of covering the explosion of the grenade with the helmet and his body! A second later, the grenade detonates! The helmet and his body take the brunt of the blast/shrapnel, and he saves his buddies, sacrificing himself in the process!
A question – was this ever done? How significant would the helmet be in the process? Would you get the same effect if you just jumped on the offending grenade with just your body, or would the shrapnel tear through your body and get to your fellow soldiers?
I suppose one could just throw or kick the explosive projectile far away! Did people do that?
IANAS but I’d surmise that the problem with attempting to kick or throw a live grenade is that it likely has already expended much of it’s limited fuse time already and the time it would take to rear back and throw it to a safe distance simply doesn’t exist.
As to whether or not someone’s ever tried to successfully cover one with their helmet, here’s one of, if not the most recent, Cpl. Jason L. Dunham, Medal Of Honor recipient.
At that range, the shrapnel from the grenade (or “Mills Bomb”–what a quaint term) is less of a concern than the blast. The thin steel helmets of the WWII/Korea/Vietnam era would probably just shatter into fragments, and the escaping blast under the rim would certainly shear away anything in its path like a blowtorch on butter. Clearly even the much stronger Kevlar helmets can’t contain such a burst. Using the helmet certainly attentuates the blast wave insofar as the energy required to burst the helmet, although I’d suspect a body would also absorb much of the blast. Either way, if I saw a grenade rolling toward me, I think my instinct would be to fling myself away, and preferably behind a sandbag wall or a transaxle rather than atop it. I never was much of a team player.
There are all too many cases in Israeli military history of men who did fall on a grenade – generally sans helmet – and saved their buddies, at cost of their own lives.
Using my brother, who’s an infantry officer with his share of combat: You don’t want to cook off the grenade. Trying to count off fuse time in the heat of combat can have disastrous consequences (“one one-thousand, two one-thousand . . . uh . . .where was I?”). If you’re throwing it in an enclosed space such as a room, you’re supposed to throw it hard, so it’ll go bouncing and skittering off walls and other objects. Much harder for someone to pick up and throw back at you.
recently a reporter picked up an explosive device and threw it out of the vehicle he and a group of soldiers were in. his hand was amputated, thankfully his life and those in the vehicle were saved. his article was in time mag… he said the device was very hot when he picked it up.
The original Mills bomb used a Baratol filler, an early plastique explosive of TNT, barium nitrate (for density and increased brisance), and a parafin binder. I don’t imagine any military devices have used deflagrant-type explosives like blackpowder since the invention of stabilized dynamite, although ANFO-type low grade high explosives have been used by sappers.
This one’s for you, Kaiser Bill. Special delivery from Uncle Sam and all the boys in D Company. Yeah… Johnny, Harris, Brooklyn Bob. And Reggie. Yeah, even Reggie. He ain’t so stuck up once you get to know hi…
Corporal Jason Dunham of the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines was recently awarded the Medal of Honor for exactly this action. The Medal of Honor citation reads, in part,
My father told a story once about when he saw a guy dive on a gernade in Korea just like in the movies. The gernade failed to explode, and the guy turned batshit crazy. No idea what happened to the guy after that.
That Army website has a full text citation for all ~3,400 Medals of Honor that have been awarded throughout history. If you peruse through the citations under the Vietnam heading you will notice a high proportion of them are for soldiers who dove on live grenades.
