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Concept
No. 69 grenade
Summary
The British No. 69 was a hand grenade developed and used during the Second World War. It was adopted into service due to the need for a grenade with smaller destructive radius than the No. 36M "Mills bomb". This allowed the thrower to use a grenade even when there was little in the way of defensive cover. In contrast, the much greater destructive radius of the Mills bomb than its throwing range forced users to choose their throwing point carefully, in order to ensure that they would not be wounded by the shrapnel explosion of their own grenade.
The shell of the No. 69 grenade was composed entirely of the hard plastic, Bakelite, which shattered without producing fragments like a metal bodied grenade. Metal fragmenting sleeves were available to increase the grenade's lethality.
Using the No. 69 bomb was very simple: the screw-off cap was removed and discarded, and the grenade was then thrown. When the grenade was thrown, a linen tape with a curved lead weight on the end automatically unwrapped in flight, freeing a ball-bearing inside the fuze. In this manner the "all ways" action impact fuze was armed in flight and the grenade exploded on impact; and like the Gammon grenade, which used the same fuze design, it was withdrawn from service soon after the Second World War ended.
The No. 69 was the first British device to make use of the "all-ways fuze" later seen in the No. 82 Gammon bomb, the No. 73 Thermos bomb and the No. 77 smoke grenade. The "all-ways" fuze is an impact-only fuze. The term "all-ways" refers to the fact that all of the possible ways in which the grenade could hit a target were guaranteed to trigger detonation. Normally, impact-detonated munitions must hit the target with a particular point of impact (i.e. perpendicular to the fuze mechanism) in order to detonate. In contrast, no matter which way the No. 69 grenade hit the target (e.g. landing on its base, or sideways or upside down) it would still explode.
The all-ways fuze was composed of a free-floating striker and detonator combination held apart by a weak spring.
Official source
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