The British Army's percussion hand grenades, 1914–16

Abstract

There are deep disagreements among historians of the Great War concerning the British Army's willingness and ability to adapt itself to the conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front. One possible way of shedding new light on this old controversy is by closely studying one small case of successful adaptation: the case of the hand grenade. Unlike their French allies and German enemies, the British went to war in the summer of 1914 with only very small numbers of hand grenades; to make matters worse, the British Army's hand grenade had a percussion fuse designed to detonate on impact when thrown. This weapon was not suited to the static trench fighting that prevailed on the Western Front after the autumn of 1914, and as a consequence British troops were forced to rely for the most part on improvised, experimental, and emergency hand grenades during the campaigns of 1915. By the summer of 1916, however, these early designs had been replaced by a safe and effective time-fuse grenade, the Mills bomb, which the British Army continued to use for the rest of the war. At first glance, the story of the hand grenade seems to support the arguments of optimistic historians who argue that the British Army's mistakes and failures have been exaggerated. But closer examination will reveal that the story is not as simple as it might first appear. In particular, British senior officers persisted in demanding large numbers of percussion hand grenades long after it should have been clear that these weapons were neither as safe nor as reliable as their time-fuse counterparts. The percussion hand grenade was not abandoned after a period of trial and error, as optimistic narratives would suggest. Instead, it was abandoned only when senior officers concluded that it would never be made available in the quantities they demanded. And ironically, the Army's decision to drop its requirement for percussion hand grenades came at a point when British manufacturers were finally capable of meeting the military's demands. As a consequence, the British arms industry spent the summer of 1916 producing large numbers of grenades that nobody wanted. Thus, the case of the percussion hand grenade suggests that a process more complex than a ‘learning curve’ was at work within the British Army between 1914 and 1916.