Aasen bombs (grenades) 1kg, 3kg & 10kg

[Dreamk]

There is a lot of confusion on the Aasen bombs used by the French Aeronautique militaire in 1914-1916. Even the Article by Henry Belot on the Aasen grenades falls into some traps such as mixing the 1.7kg A2 Aasen grenade with the 3kg Aasen bomb.

In 1913 in Morocco they had used the same infantry Aasen grenade type A2 as the Italian had done in Lybia in 1911-12.
With an overall weight of 1.6 to 1.7 kg (depending of the content of explosive: either 260g of ECHO or 380g of Trytol) and including 140 metal balls of 3.3g each, Its metal sheet body had a diameter of 80mm and height of 150mm. The overall length including the wooden handle was 330mm. To the handle was attached an inverted fabric umbrella for stabilizing the fall (and originally for helping the infantry soldiers to throw it)
The Type C and its French clone the excelsior-Thevenot P2 do not seem to have been used by airmen due to their smaller weight and explosive power.


Now the 3kg Aasen bomb - officially designed as "type D", also known as "Aircraft type" - apparently introduced end 1914, its dimensions seem (according to the only photograph I could find of it, on the lexpev site, sadly of low quality) to have been roughly the double of the A2 ones. It included 400 metal balls inside of the original 140 of the A2.


Above, from left to right: Type A , Type A deployed , Type A2 , Type A4 , Type B , Type C , aircraft design ("Type D") , rifle grenade

Then we have then mysterious 10kg "high capacity" or "enlarged" Aasen bomb that appears recurrently in the Operational Reports of ww1 French Squadrons in 1915.
I have found in these records more an more elements that lead me to strongly suppose this bomb is no other than the second, smaller and almost cubic, type of "square bomb" I posted in another recent thread.
This includes the repeated mentions of "bombe carree de 10kg" in reports from the period (such as:
"Les vols emouvants de la guerre" dated 1917, and "La guerre illustree" from 1919)
The evolution between the fabric umbrella and the "Italian-type" stabilizing stub is quite straightforward (though the original development may in fact have been Austro-Hungarian, before the Italian picked the idea - I'll post an interesting pic I found lately on this at some later time).


In short...who can help to put some more flesh on this skeleton - more details, pics etc...

 

[Dreamk]

Why making things easy when they can be complicated....
Less than 24 hours after writing the above lines and I find this document, dated May 12th, 1915 - Operational Report from French Dirigible "Fleurus":
The charges taken for the mission are listed at the bottom of this document:
- 2 artillery shells of 95mm
- 6 rounded Aasen bombs of 10kg
- 6 squared Aasen bombs of 11,7kg

On one hand this strengthen the identification of the square bombs on the above photographs as Aasen bombs but of 11.7kg

On the other hand we are now in front of a previously unknown rounded Aasen bomb of 10kg - no photograph, no details upon this one...

Curiouser and Curiouser, eh.....?

(Aasen is spelled on the document "Azen" in accordance with French pronunciation, "s" between two vowels being pronounced "z")

 

[sgdbdr]

The full picture from "Norsk Militaert Tidsskrift" 1910 from Nasjonalbiblioteket https://www.nb.no/



Cheers,

S.

 

[Dreamk]

Thanks a lot!
Interestingly on this picture the "Type Aircraft" bomb is called "type A3" and not "Type D" as in the French documentation - What is also of interest is the date of the photography - 1910. this tends to confirm that the "heavier" 10 and 11.7 kg were wartime developments.
Niels Aasen "took sides" as soon as 1914 and established in the following couple of years no less than 14 factories all other France, with up to 13.000 workers. The French military establishment gave him the honorary rank of Colonel - something, by the way, quite exceptional under the French Republic, quite reminiscent of the "Old Regime" when honorary titles of Colonels were given to senior foreign personalities.
I went to the reference you gave :Norsk Militaert Tidsskrift" 1910 and in the article there is included teh following table with the details of these bombs, and confirmation that this "type Aircraft" (A3 / D) is indeed a 3kg bomb with 400 metal balls of 3.3g each:

 

[MINENAZ16]

Hello,
I'm quite sure you know all details on use of Aasen bomb series by French, maybe this could help :

https://gallica.bnf.fr/services/eng... "cb34415554b_date"&rk=236052;4#resultat-id-1

You can download these 3 magazines.

 

[Dreamk]

Yes I have been passing quite a number of evenings with Gallica - A great seat with a great potential but sadly hampered by it search engine.
The main problem of the search engine is of course that it is based on an OCR version of the texts displayed as images, and they used a very bad, early, software for it, and due to the size of the site they cannot go backwards and try a new engine.
There are solutions for that but this needs to be defined as a "problem" by Gallica team and they may have other priorities, such as the lousy bandpass connection quite in discrepancy with the current number of users - which is constantly growing.
Another problem is that the "filtration" component of their search engine is quite inefficient. The advanced search is only marginally better (mainly helps in the time frame, the boolean search has the same problems as above described).
Well at least it is still online, while the hysterical response of French authorities to a hacking episode of one of the Defense Historical archives server has been to....shut down quite a lot of French sites that were online and gave access to archivial historical documents - and if you try to go and these these archives "in person", well.....good luck (what a mess of bureaucracy - this was not like that some years ago and some services are closed already for some years and their archives unavailable du to lack of adequate manpower)

 

[Speedy]

With an overall weight of 1.6 to 1.7 kg (depending of the content of explosive: either 260g of ECHO or 380g of Trytol)

I think Trytol means TNT? And what is ECHO?

 

[Dreamk]

Tritol / Trytol = TNT
ECHO = ammonium nitrate (appellation used in some European countries till ww1 and still used in Italy till the late 30s)

 

[sgdbdr]

From "FSTC 381-5042 - Handbook of foreign explosives", 1965 : ECHOS or ESCHO



Cheers

S.

 

[Dreamk]

......"Ipposino" dried pulverized horse dung :tinysmile_kiss_t: Woooh! who would had think of using this as an ingredient for making an explosive:tinysmile_twink_t2:
What is the idea behind this ? to add pinches of phosphorus and potassium?

 

[Dreamk]

I found these 2 photographs from German sources:
The first is a postcard of a bomb dropped by a French airplane in December 1914


This could be an Aasen Grenade type A2 but the fact that stabilizing umbrella seems not to be directly attached to the bomb but linked by a cord to its handle, leads me to think that its another view of the bomb photographied in the following document:
This comes from the Kriegsbilder Nr. 17 1915 under the title "Nicht explodierte französische Fliegerbombe mit Fallschirm" and shows a larger projectile with a quite large stabilizing umbrella - by comparison with the had width of the official holding it, its diameter is about 110-120 mm - apparently an Aasen A3 bomb for Aircraft