Skill: How do you use the weapon to maximum efficiency?

To use any grenade the lever, which lies snugly down the side of the body of the grenade, is held in place by hand and the retaining pin is removed. Nothing will happen until the lever is released and prior to this the pin can be reinserted safely should you wish. When you throw the grenade, and thereby release the lever, the lever flies off and a striker hits the fuse which, after an interval of 4.5 seconds, sets off the charge. By this time the grenade should be well away from you.

Fragmentation grenades work most effectively, like mortars and artillery shells, when they explode in the air. With practice it is possible to release the lever, let the timer start and wait for a certain interval before throwing – with the effect that the grenade explodes while still at head height amongst the enemy. There is a knack to this of course.

So if you want to clear a trench without getting too close, and maybe shot, then throw a grenade in first and follow it before they have time to come round. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Likewise with houses and bunkers – though with bunkers you might want just to keep throwing grenades in as following them is not always a good idea – you don’t know what you might find in terms of booby traps and other ‘nasties’.

There is one other excellent feature of grenades which I want to share with you here. Most fighting happens at night and not everyone has night sights. Hopefully at least the enemy don’t. What tends to happen without night sights is that two sides face each other in cover. When the first person fires on one side then they light themselves up with the muzzle flash from their rifle and everyone on the other side fires at them for a while. Then the firing dies down and after a while the process is repeated. Of course no one wants to fire first. This is where grenades come in. If you can work out where the opposition are you can lob grenades at them all night without giving your position away.

One time we were in the Zambezi valley, 18 of us dug in like rats in a little triangle, 10 yards on a side, with a machine gun at each corner. There was moderate bush all around. Each night at 18:30 it went dark and we were attacked by about 200 of the opposition. It felt a bit like Rorke’s Drift – if you remember the film Zulu. Each morning we did a clearing patrol and from the piles of empty cartridge cases we could count how many were shooting at us – they tended to lie still and shoot off all their ammunition leaving a neat pile of cases – and from the blood stains we could see how many we had actually hit.

Fortunately it is one of those strange quirks of human nature that a person lying on the floor shooting at night, and without night sights, tends to shoot high so we had no casualties. And we knew to shoot low to compensate. This went on for four nights with someone on one side firing first and everyone else shooting at them and so forth. Each night we hit about 20 of the opposition. It so happened there was a crazy American lieutenant amongst us. One night he suggested he and I crawl out towards the opposition so we could nail them properly instead of aiming at muzzle flashes. Even today what follows sounds crazy to me. Anyway that’s exactly what we did. We crawled up towards where the opposition were shooting at our position from – some 25 yards from our trenches – and got within about 5 yards of them. They were just on the other side of a raised dirt track and shooting over our heads. I tossed the first grenade over and judged a hit by the gurgling. A second grenade and the gurgling stopped. Then a whole bunch of enemy walked up the track in the dark and stumbled over us. We lay on our backs with me throwing grenades in all directions and the lieutenant shooting everyone who tripped over him and no one knowing what was happening. Remember it was pitch dark and every shot and grenade flash lit up the area like a freeze-frame film for a split second and then left everyone dazzled.

But there were bodies everywhere so in the confusion we were able to crawl back to our trenches. The point to remember here, the real moral of this story, is that grenades are anonymous at night and rifles are certainly not. No one knows where you are throwing grenades from at night even when you are lying at the feet of the enemy.

Types of Grenades

There are a thousand types of fragmentation grenade but they all either look like a pineapple or a lemon and they all work the same way. You pull out the pin while you hold the lever in place. When you release the lever you have around 4.5 seconds to part company. The pineapple is a cast-iron shell which fragments on detonation and the lemon is a tin casing which covers a segmented wire coil which does the same trick but more delicately.

LEFT TO RIGHT Modern US fragmentation grenade; modern German frag; older Russian frag; older US frag. (i-Stock)

Summary: What are the important things to remember about grenades?

Carry plenty of fragmentation grenades and perhaps a couple of phosphorous as they reduce your risk when clearing trenches or buildings and when fighting close up at night. Grenades provide the only safe way to enter a room no matter what you have seen on the TV. If in doubt, toss in a grenade first. If you think there may be civilians inside you may shout a warning first telling them to come out. They may elect to blow themselves, and you, up at this stage.

MACHINE GUNS

Machine guns come in many models and calibres but they only have two functions: the first is to put a lot of bullets into one area quickly and the other is to stop light armour or knock down walls. The definition of a machine gun is, I always think, something along the lines of a firearm, which can fire rifle or heavier ammunition and reload and fire again repeatedly on an automatic cycle for as long as the trigger is depressed. In practice they are all fed by a belt of ammunition rather than a magazine.

This term, though, is never used for automatic rifles as they have magazines and therefore limited duration or sub machine guns/machine pistols for the same reason plus they fire pistol bullets. A bit vague but you will know one when you see one. A machine gun is generally anything from a heavy barrelled automatic rifle of 7.62mm calibre to a light cannon of perhaps 27mm which fires explosive rounds, but above 12.7mm weapons are often called cannon or grenade launchers, particularly if they fire explosive rounds. To some extent the term is blurred and it depends who is talking. The thing which really defines a machine gun is that with one pull of the trigger it produces a high rate of fire and can keep firing for an extended period – usually some thousands of rounds. Machine guns of various light calibres are carried by infantry while heavier weapons are mounted on vehicles, aircraft and boats.

Goal: When is the right time to employ this weapon? What can it do?

The problem with a machine gun is that it is heavy. It has to be to fire the large numbers of heavy rounds, and dissipate the heat thus generated, and it has to be accompanied by a lot of heavy ammunition. For this reason it is best fitted to a vehicle or sited in a defensive position with a good view of the approach. The machine gun is ideal for shooting down a wave of charging infantry – which is why infantry don’t charge much anymore.

Since World War II a light or medium machine gun with a calibre in the range of 7.62mm has usually been a part of every infantry section of eight men or so. This added a great deal of fire power to a bunch of bolt-action rifles by raising the combined rate of fire from the rifles, perhaps 80 rounds per minute, to a thousand rounds a minute. It was ideal for stopping an enemy charge or keeping their heads down while you charged. In recent times, as infantry have been issued with automatic rifles having a higher rate of fire, the machine gun has become less of a clear advantage to a section of infantry when the fact of its weight has been taken into account.