Tore’s Tuesday again, and with an obscure item this time too, a French one. The Raquette handgrenade.
There were a myriad of handgrenades used during WWI (A A Gustaf Bryngelson has covered them in an earlier blog), but this is the one I find the weirdest and most fascinating. It looks like something a bored teenager with too much time and steel wire would make in the shed, but is actually a functional handgrenade. (This one is of course inert)
It consists of a stick… on it, fastened with steel wire is an iron tube that is ribbed on the inside for fragmentation. The tube was filled with explosive. Above the tube is a piece of hardwood with holes in it, and in a hole there was an igniter connected to a fuse that goes from the hardwood block into the tube. The fuse is still present. The hardwood is also tied on with steel wire. There will have been, now gone, a piece of string with a nail tied to it, fastened to the stick…
To ignite it one would insert the nail into the hole with the igniter, then strike the nail to fire the igniter and light the fuse, then throw it…
I showed this grenade to a collector friend of mine, and he said: “Had I received a crate of these, and been told that this was the best my country could give me to defend myself with, – I would have started looking through my pack for some white underpants to wave in the air…”