I think the answer is somewhere in the Book of Armaments.
I always wondered about this. From the movies you’d get the impression that a strong sneeze will pull the pin on any grenade you happen to be carrying, which seemed like a hugely dangerous situation.
As far as I can tell, as with many other things military in training you want to always use “good form”, which helps when hurling the live ones as you really want to be sure that little ball of death is travelling fast and far away from you ( “And specially from ME!”, quoth the Drill Sergeant) and it does get you used to using good form; while in actual battle, well, you go for whatever works. My own policy was get rid of this motherscooter STAT.
Good answers.
My own thought, which I initially withheld, is that in such a situation you need to expose yourself to enemy fire as little as possible. An overhand throw would accomplish this better than a Justin Verlander fastball.
I hadn’t considered the weight of the grenade.
How many grenades might a soldier carry with him? I assume you would use them very sparingly.
mmm
My vests usually had 4 grenade pouches. If you needed to, you could carry more. It depends on the mission and on how many grenades are available.
Not necessarily. They also issued a fragmentation sleeve. For offensive use one could use the plain grenade, resulting in blast with very fine shrapnel from the tin-can case. For defensive action one could slip on the pre-patterned steel sleeve for heavy fragmentation.
It was introduced in 1942, about the time they started going backwards on a more regular basis…
I believe a stick grenade is just too big and bulky for something not used that often. If one really needs an explosion past ‘normal’ grenade range, then a rifle, launcher or rocket-propelled grenade is generally used nowadays.
I’ve never even seen a live grenade but*, I think you’ve mostly got it.
A lobbing throw is, most often, going to go off very close to where it lands. A baseball throw is going to hit the ground and, most often, keep going until it goes off or it’s stopped by something or runs out of forward momentum.
The lobbing throw is the easiest way to get a grenade into a horizontal target like a trench or pillbox with little to no overhead protection but some protection from infantry attacks I.E. sandbags, logs, simple berms.
The baseball throw is the easiest way to get a grenade through a vertical target like a small opening I.E. a bunker with a gun slit being the only point you can attack or a building’s windows and doors.
It’s harder to lob a grenade through a window than throw it through it.
It’s harder to throw a grenade into a trench than lob it into it.
Sometimes you need an RPG and sometimes you need a mortar.
CMC fnord!
*There’s a SCA archery competition where the targets are three upright man sized targets and a ring of straw bales. The upright shots are standard shots where the angle of the shot only affects its range. The target in the bale ring is its center and the only way to hit it is with a very high angle shot that comes almost straight down.
As far as shrapnel goes, I understand that the typical procedure for tossing a grenade is to pull the pin, warn your buddies that you are about to throw something that goes boom, throw it as far away from yourself as you can manage, and immediately take cover behind something solid.
Variations depending on where you are fighting (i.e.: Using a grenade to clear a building in urban combat), but the general idea is that if you catch pieces of your own munition, you might be using it wrong.
I recall reading somewhere (I want to say it was the book “We Were Soldiers Once… And Young”), that one strategy for using grenades at close range was to place one just outside your foxhole and get as small as you could. This was only used when your position was being overrun. In theory, your buddies nearby would be similarly staying in their foxholes, thus being protected from the blast, while the bad guys, trying to get into your foxhole, would not. You’d also dig a deeper hole in the middle of your foxhole, in case a grenade found its way inside your foxhole. Kick it into the deeper hole, get very small and get very religious very quickly.
No personal experience with the things though. They rarely let me handle anything more dangerous than a Skillcraft pen in my career field.
Is this staged? In the second round of hot-potato, the final solder throws the package to the ground directly in front of him, and then the explosion appears to happen some 4-5 feet away, in the middle of the supposed blast pit.
What is the point of such an exercise anyway?
I agree that the biggest surprise was how resonating the explosion is - it’s hard to describe and although the movies seem to be able to get the volume right, it loses the reverberation that sort of cuts right through everything.
I know when I did my Range Safety Officer course, everyone dreaded getting the grenade range - all ranges are strict on safety (and so they should be) but grenade ranges are just that much stricter.
My experience was throwing tear gas grenades. Much less lethal and we were using them at shorter ranges. So you threw them underhand like a softball.
What do you do if a <stereotypical stupid person> throws a pin at you?
So, in real life (as opposed to the movies), how big an explosion does a grenade make?
To pick a random setting for reference: Suppose the Mad Bomber rolls a grenade onto the floor in front of the counter at Starbucks. If it explodes, does it kill everyone in the shop? Would the barista be protected by ducking behind the counter? Would the bathroom door be enough protection?
Would a standalone coffee shop be flattened? Structurally damaged?
What kind of mass is needed to muffle the grenade sufficiently for protection? Would it help to throw it in the trash can, or kick it under one of the big chairs? Suppose someone decides to be a hero and fall on the grenade; is one body enough to muffle it?
Apparently it is (or was). There are a number of Medal of Honor recipients who smothered grenades to save their fellow soldiers.
I’m a little perplexed at the method of hitting the deck that involves first flinging one’s self three feet in the air.
Grenades make a nice boom, but its not going to generate the kind of overpressure to blow apart a building. Blow out every bit of glass in the place, probably, kill a few people, yup, hurt a bunch of people, yup, but you only get so many scraps of metal flying around and they are not really “aimed” so alot of the fragments/effect hit open air or floor. If the place was crammed you would have a serious cluster of dead/critically wounded but those some folks would soak up those fragments minimizing casualties outside of those closest to the blast.
I seem to recall advice passed on on military forums, the gist of which was that despite it sounding intuitive it’s a very bad idea to try and cover the grenade with your helmet before you jump on it - the helmet just turns into more & bigger shrapnel.
The Mythbusters also tested a handful of grenade myths, notably a movie scene in which the hero grabs a grenade, quickly stuffs it into a nearby fridge and closes the door. Apparently doing this cause a lot more damage than just letting the grenade blow up on the floor because, yup, the fridge becomes so much shrapnel too (not to mention freon splashes).
They did more or less conclusively prove that jumping on a grenade in and of itself was efficient however - it did not stop the shrapnel completely but it drastically reduced the amount of metal other nearby puppets caught, as well as the range puppets got “injured”.
You must distinguish between the explosion and the effective radius. On the M67, the kill radius is about 5 meters, the injury radius is about 15 meters. These are approximations as are most weapon range figures ; do not stand 16 meters from an exploding grenade.
When I threw grenades, we had a viewport with (ostensibly, since I’m here to talk about it) blast proof glass. I was careful to look at the explosion and I saw a headsized yellow flame. My recollection isn’t terribly precise because it happened fast, as explosion are wont to do, and I was in the midst of going from fear to relief.
It would mess up everyone in the main room of your coffee shop but likely wouldn’t kill them all. Frag grenades tend to be made to injure, not kill since A) smaller pieces means more pieces to injure more people and increase the likelyhood of injury B) injuring a soldier can have greater effect than killing him.
Plenty of frags get used in urban fighting and I’ve never heard of any stability-endangering structural damage. Perhaps very vulnerable buildings could be damaged.
As for the ability to penetrate cover; I think that would mainly depend on how close it is to the cover. I would think that intensity (injury effect, penetration) would go down at the square or cube of distance. I wouldn’t like to have a counter between me and a grenade but I’d take that over nothing.
Just for those reading along, google says that a major league baseball weighs roughly 5 1/2 ounces. 
I didn’t know what the weight was by comparison.
This really wasn’t in need of testing. The Army’s Center for Military History page has (or at least used to have) to full text of every Medal of Honor citation. If you scroll through them, particularly the ones in the Vietnam war, many, in fact dozens, were awarded to soldiers who sacrificed their lives by jumping on a live grenade to save their comrades.
In fact on the alphabetical list just the second one is like that: