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What is this?

Fragman

Fragman

Ordnance Approved
Ordnance approved
Hi. What is this (ignore the paint, as it has probably been restored)? I got this several years ago from Europe. It was described as an M15, but appears to be made of thicker gauge steel than the standard M15. It is empty and has a hole punched in the side (under the lever in the photo). There were a few of these floating around a few years back and being sold on Ebay, so a batch of them must have been found somewhere. Cheers
 

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It's the body of a BLU-17/B WP submunition. They are a little taller than a WWII M15 grenade and have a sharper radius at the corners.
 
Look at the top of the grenade from the original poster and look at top of the grenade on the e-bay link. Notice the stepped lip around the top. Don't always trust Ord Data photos. The come from the 60 series and as JVollenberg can tell you, those drawings are not always correct. The grenade on Ebay is an M15.

http://www.warbirdheritagefoundation.org/G_A1_BLU17B.jpg
 
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This might help a bit. In the photo from the left: M34 WP body, BLU-17/ submunition with special long spoon with slots for retainer band, M15 grenade body, and two other WWII vintage M15 varients.

You can see the BLU-17 body is slightly longer and larger in diameter than the hand grenades. It is also more "square" looking with smaller corner radii, especially at the bottom. This example also has the demil punch hole like the one Fragman has. As far as I know, these came from a scrap yard in Indiana that purchased them as steel scrap from the Crane Naval Ammunition Depot. I picked out 20 or 25 of them and am aware of a couple of dealers who bought more than that.

All of the items in this particular pile of scrap were originally white phosphorus filled and all were demilled the same way with a punched hole to allow the WP to burn out in a furnace. As you would expect, no paint remained on anything, just rusty steel. I got the impression it was more a random clean up of odd items from storage rather than a large, organized demil program.

While there were fairly large quantities (perhaps a few dozen of each) of M34 grenade bodies and BLU-17s, there were also very small quantities of several other pieces, maybe 1 to 10 of each. These included M57 81mm mortar bodies, M123 napalm bomb bursters, 57mm recoilless rifle projectiles, and a few other odd bits.

PICT0503.jpgPICT0504.jpg
 
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