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The Old World’s Medieval Untouchables and Other Random Historical Facts

Khalid Elhassan March 17, 2020 33 min

Pancho Villa - Mexican Revolution — General Pancho Villa before a firing squad in 1912. Wikimedia

24. A Defective Weapon Straight Out of Looney Tunes

Sticky bomb being assembled, showing the outer casing and the inner glue-coated bomb. Wikimedia

One of WWII’s more infamous weapons was the Sticky Bomb, or Sticky Grenade, developed by the British in the aftermath of a humiliating defeat at the 1940 Battle of France. In that debacle, the British had been cornered at Dunkirk and forced into a hasty evacuation, in which most of the British Army’s anti-tank weapons were left behind.

That sudden shortage of conventional anti-tank arms led British developers to come up with a hastily improvised and easy-to-produce weapon, for use against enemy armor. The result was the Anti Tank Hand Grenade #74, AKA Sticky Bomb – a maraca-looking device with an outer metal shell covering a bomb coated with a powerful adhesive. It did not take long before the downside of using an explosive coated with strong glue that could stick to the user became apparent.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.