military@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker) (07/05/89)
From: att!ihlpf!zonker >A question was put to me today concerning the history of grenades; >in particular, their presence in the US during the Revolutionary war >and following decade or so. I have been a member of a revolutionary war re-enactment group of Grenadiers for several years now, so I feel somewhat qualified to answer your question. Basically your guesses are right. Grenadier units were first organized during the Marlborough era during the early 1700s. The main feature of these wars was a series of sieges in the low countries. These are the same wars that brought Vauban to the forefront as the greatest military engineer of the era. The grenadier companies were organized pretty much simultaneously by every army involved. The grenades were heavy and so the strongest men were chosen to use them. It was also found that having units of big strong guys has other advantages in terms of assaults, etc. and the select Grenadier companies became part of the permanent establishment quite rapidly. By the Revolutionary War the grenadiers were primarily elite infantry and no longer carried grenades routinely. However if the situation called for someone to go out and throw grenades, you know who they would have called. The function served by the grenadiers in the early 1700's was quickly delegated to the artillery and a variety of small howitzers and mortars (cohorns) which could do the same job from a safer distance. About the only remnant of the grenadiers function on the revolutionary uniform was the match case for lighting the bombs and the bomb badges. > At that time, a hand grenade resembled the standard "cartoon bomb"; a > cast iron sphere, filled with gunpowder, fitted with a piece of fuse. Actually the standard cartoon bomb is based on the 18th and 19th century grenade. It came into cartoons because it was the weapon of choice of the anarchists of the same era. > it may be that Britain, for example, never used the term in its original > implementation, but only to refer to elite infantry. The term was in common use by the British by the turn of the century (1700) in its original implementation. By the 1740's Grenadiers were primarily elite infantry and probably no longer routinely carried grenades. Bomb, Shell or Grenade? Basically the confusion occurs because all three things are the same item in different contexts. The Grenadiers threw the same item that might be shot out of a mortar or howitzer. In the strictest sense a grenade was what was thrown by a grenadier, a shell was fired by a howitzer and a bomb was shot by a mortar. However, since these were all firing the same item, much confusion of the terms occurs in historic literature itself. This is compounded by what I mentioned earlier about the small mortars and howitzers taking over the grenadiers duties since these were often called grenade throwers. The only limitation between the three terms that I would call definite is that a grenade has to be small enough to be thrown a fair distance by a man (i.e. 4" shell or smaller; typically a 2"-3" shell). A extremely good book on the British army during this entire period is J. A. Houlding's "Fit for Service", Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981. Non Cuniculus Est, Tom H.