Stielhandgranate

Hairbrush grenade

Early in the war, German soldiers made use of improvised stick grenades commonly known as the 'hairbrush grenade', which were thought as having a longer throwing range and improved accuracy over the Kugelhandgranate, which would lead to the development of the introduction of the first Stielhandgranate in 1915, though these stopgaps (also known as the 'paddle grenade') remained in use until 1916.

The German hairbrush grenade was a metal box filled with explosives and nailed to a 38 cm (15 in) wooden handle with a spring igniter, fuze, and detonator similar to the ones used on the Stielhandgranate. The early versions of these crude grenades had to be lit by hand (often with a smoking pipe, cigar or cigarette) before throwing. The British and the French also made their own copies, such as the Grenade No. 12 Hairbrush, and the Pétard Raquette.

German service

While the 'stick grenade' or 'potato masher' was possibly the most recognizable of the hand grenades employed by the Germans in World War I, they also employed a large variety of designs during the conflict, including the ball grenade (Kugelhandgranate), egg grenade (Eierhandgranate), and the discus grenade (Diskushandgranate), besides improvised (behelfs) designs using during the early years and closing months of the conflict, with the latter being made out a wide variety of materials such as wood or concrete. These emergency designs would reappear in the late stages of World War II, in Wehrmacht service.

Although grenades were introduced in 1915, not every German soldier acquired or used them in combat. In early 1916, during the Battle of Verdun, a detachment from the 5th Assault Battalion 'Rohr' led multiple infantry units in small-scale assaults, which lasted from the 10th of January up until March of 1916, when the battalion was sent to Beuville and held assault courses for infantry units, as well as training replacements for its own force. Crown Prince Wilhelm asked the battalion commander, Hauptmann Willy Rohr, as to why the Germans were not more successful during the assaults carried out. Rohr stated that the various branches of service lacked experience and did not cooperate well with each other. But, in particular, the Germans were not trained en masse with the use of hand grenades and simply threw them away in thousands, distrustful of the weapons. The Germans included the usage of hand grenades in training programs for new, and older recruits. By mid 1916, it was a common sight to see a soldier with at least one grenade on him. Stormtroopers carried dozens of stick grenades in empty sandbags slung across their chests when leading assaults.

The Germans often used the stielhandgranate for assaulting enemy fortifications, where it proved to be effective when detonated within the confines of a trench system, building or bunker. As instructed in field manuals, stormtroopers made use of bundle charges by tying together the heads of multiple stielhandgranates onto a single stielhandgranate using small pieces of barbed wire. These, as instructed by field manuals, were primarily used to quickly destroy patches of barbed wire. They also acted as regular grenades, being used during combat in order to achieve a larger blast radius. Additionally, they acted as anti-tank grenades when artillery and field cannons failed to knock a tank out, being used to knock off the tracks off of one.

By 1918, the Stielhandgranate almost completely replaced all other types of grenades used by the Imperial German Army. It was considered as an effective design, though they were heavy and cumbersome to carry.

Austro-Hungarian service

The Austro-Hungarian Army started the war with several types of domestically produced hand grenades, but their unreliability often resulted in injuries to the thrower. In 1915–16, the army was re-equipped with German-supplied Stielhandgranate and Eierhandgranate grenades, which were more effective and safer to operate than the Austrian designs. In March 1915, the Austro-Hungarians officially issued their own egg grenade and the Rohr stick grenade, a short cast iron cylinder enclosed in a cardboard tube that served as a throwing handle.

Austro-Hungarian stormtroopers made effective use of bundle charges to breach enemy barbed wire emplacements and blockhouses, often wiring several grenades together to a plank of wood in order to create stronger charges. Elite assault mountain units scaled mountain peaks to infiltrate enemy positions and overrun them by throwing grenades from above and from the flanks of an enemy mountain outpost.

Derivatives

• China – The Chinese made a wide variety of defensive stick grenades featuring scored, serrated, and smooth warheads while the explosive filling ranged from picric acid, TNT or nitroglycerin mixed with potassium nitrate, or sawdust and Amatol; according to Janes, these grenades produce more dust than fragments while the picric acid grenades are dangerously unstable.
• China: Type 67 hand grenade
• China: Type 77 hand grenade
• Finland: Varsikranaatti m/32 – Finnish stick grenade, it was slightly smaller and lighter than the M24, while it retained the metal clip used on World War I-era models
• Finland: Varsikranaatti m/41 − Virtually identical to the m/32, but with the belt clip omitted
• Japan: Type 98 stick hand grenade − A Japanese derivative based on the Chinese stick grenades, it was smaller than the Model 24, but it produced more fragments since it used a cast iron warhead 5 mm (0.20 in) thick
• Sweden: Spränghandgranat m/43 − Swedish all-metal stick grenade, featuring a more rounded warhead and other minor modifications

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