Forget what you saw in the movies. [music] There is a version of the sticky bomb that lives in popular culture. Something improvised, almost folksy, the kind of thing a determined farmer might cobble together from stuff in his shed. And that version is a comfortable lie. Because the real sticky bomb, the actual weapon that Britain issued to over a million homeg guard volunteers and sent into combat in North Africa, New Guinea, and the beaches of Anzio, was something considerably more disturbing.

 It was a hand-blown glass sphere filled with semi-liquid nitroglycerin, coated in an adhesive so powerful it could grip steel plate against gravity and enclosed in a thin metal casing that could fail you at the single worst moment possible. Its official designation was the grenade hand [music] anti-tank number 74.

 If you pulled the arming pin on one of these things and it made contact with your uniform before you threw it, you had exactly 5 seconds to rip your own clothes off your body before it killed you. 2 and 12 million of them were produced. The body responsible for approving British Army weapons never officially signed off on it.

 And the man who forced it into existence told the civilians expected to use it. that dying while destroying a German tank was an acceptable outcome. This is the full story of the number 74. [music] And to understand how Britain ended up handing a glass ball of liquid explosive to shopkeepers and farmers and telling them to run at a panzer with it, you have to go back to the summer of 1940 and one of the most catastrophic military retreats in modern history.

Between late May and early June of 1940, the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk. Over 300,000 men made it home, but the equipment did not. Left behind in France were 840 anti-tank guns, nearly the entire British stock. What remained on home soil was 167. Those 167 were so precious that regulations at the time explicitly forbade firing a single round of ammunition through them for training purposes.

 Britain was, in practical terms, defenseless against armor. A German invasion was not a remote possibility. It was considered likely. Into this panic stepped a small, unconventional weapon shop operating under the designation, Military Intelligence Research. It was not a large organization. It was by most accounts a collection of brilliant, somewhat unorthodox engineers and scientists who had been handed a mandate to develop weapons fast outside the usual bureaucratic channels.

 Two of its key figures were Major Milis Jeffris, a career army officer with a gift for lateral thinking, and Stuart McCrae, a former editor of a science magazine called Armchair Science, who had been pulled into the War Department and by his own account found himself designing anti-tank weapons without any particular background in doing so.

 Jeffris had been working on the core concept since 1938, drawing on research from two scientists at Cambridge University, Drs. Bower and Schulman. The idea was a squash head charge. Rather than trying to punch through tank armor with brute kinetic force, you pressed a quantity of plastic explosive flat against the surface, maximize the contact area, and let the detonation wave travel directly into the steel.

 At close range and with sufficient explosive, it could rupture the inner face of the armor and send lethal fragments called spall spraying through the crew compartment. It was in theory an elegant solution. What it needed was a delivery mechanism. And that delivery mechanism needed to stick. Getting explosive to adhere reliably to a steel tank under battlefield conditions turned out to be significantly harder than it sounds.

Early experiments involved bicycle inner tubes filled with plasticine. They did not work. The problem wasn’t the explosive. It was the glue. And finding a glue strong enough to hold a live explosive device against vertical steel plating and rain and mud reliably was not a problem that had a straightforward industrial solution.

 In 1940, McCrae solved it in a characteristically roundabout way. He had a tin of a substance called bird lime, an ancient viscous adhesive that had been used for centuries to trap wild birds by coating tree branches. The tin was labeled with a large letter K and indicated it had come from somewhere in Stockport.

 McCrae got on a train to Stockport, found a taxi driver willing to help, and eventually tracked down the manufacturer, K Brothers Limited. Their chief chemist worked on the formulation, and within weeks, they had an adhesive capable of doing the job. What McCrae and Jeffris built around it became the grenade hand anti-tank number 74 Mark 1.

 The specifications are worth going through because they tell you everything you need to know about how this weapon worked and why it was so dangerous to the person using it. The device was 9 1/2 in long and 4 1/2 in in diameter, roughly the size of a large grapefruit on a handle. Total weight was about 2 and a/4 lb. At its core was a handblown glass flask containing 560 g of Nobel’s number 81023, a semi-liquid nitroglycerin compound developed by ICY with stabilizing additives to reduce its sensitivity to shock. It had, according to contemporary

accounts, the consistency of Vaseline. The flask was wrapped in a knitted woolen stockinet sock, which was then coated liberally in the bird lime adhesive. Over that went a two-part sheet metal casing, two spring-loaded hemispheres that clamped around the sphere to protect the adhesive surface during transport and handling.

 The whole assembly screwed onto a belite handle containing the firing mechanism, two pins, and a lever. The first pin released the metal casing. The second arm the fuse. Releasing the lever started a 5-second delay. On detonation, the glass sphere was designed to shatter on contact with the target, spreading the nitroglycerin compound across the hull in a thick paste.

 The squash head effect would then focus the blast inward, cracking the armor plate and sending steel fragments through the interior at lethal velocity. against the thinner rear and top armor of German tanks of the period, the Panzer 3 and Panzer 4 that made up the bulk of German armored strength in the early war years. It was theoretically capable of disabling or destroying the vehicle.

There was also one other thing worth mentioning about the detonation. When the number 74 fired, the belite handle was ejected from the explosion with considerable force, described by people who witnessed it as being thrown clear like a bullet. This was not to put it diplomatically prominently featured in the training materials, but the handle wasn’t the part that was going to kill you.

 The deployment sequence for the number 74 was on paper straightforward. You screwed the handle onto the base of the flask. You pulled the first pin, which allowed the spring-loaded metal casing to fall away, exposing the adhesive surface. You pulled the second pin, which armed the fuse. You gripped the lever and held it firmly because releasing it started the countdown.

 You approached the tank, smashed the sphere against the hall hard enough to shatter it, released the lever, and ran. 5 seconds, simple, clean, logical. Now, let’s talk about what actually happened. The moment that metal casing hit the ground, you were no longer holding a weapon in the conventional sense. You were holding a live glassbodied explosive device with an exposed adhesive surface standing in an active combat environment surrounded by the exact materials the adhesive was designed to grip without mercy. The

birdl coating on that sphere was not engineered to be selective. It did not know the difference between a panzer hull and a wool uniform. It had been specifically formulated to hold a 2 and 1/4b device against vertical steel plate, which means the force required to pull it free of fabric, of leather webbing, of a canvas ammunition pouch, was more than your fingers could generate, far more.

 Think about the throwing motion itself. You are swinging a handled device through roughly 180° of arc, the adhesive surface completely exposed, your arm passing close to your own body at the apex of the swing. If the sphere brushed your sleeve, not struck it, brushed it, the contact was potentially enough.

 The bird line would take hold in a fraction of a second. And as your arm came forward, the resistance would pull the device backward out of your grip, the lever releasing as it left your hand. The fuse is now running. The device is on the ground or tumbling or stuck to your sleeve. You have 5 seconds.

 If it is on the ground near you, you run. If it is stuck to your sleeve, you do not run because running does nothing. You have to stop in the middle of whatever is happening around you and deal with the fact that you are wearing a live grenade. The adhesive will not release from the wool. Pulling at it with your fingers is useless.

 The same force that would hold it to tank armor will hold it to you. Your only option is to get the fabric off your body before the fuse reaches zero. The Homeguard records lay out with the particular matter-of-act horror of British military documentation. Exactly what that required. You had to release the lever first carefully without triggering the fuse, which meant maintaining pressure on the liver mechanism while simultaneously trying to undress.

 You then had to unbuckle your equipment belt, which carried your ammunition pouches, your bayonet, your field kit, remove your battle dress blouse, the heavywool jacket over the equipment, and then remove your trousers, which in the uniform of the period were held up by braces and came off over the boots, not under them. All of that in under 5 seconds.

 And if the lever had already been released, if the fuse was already running when the sphere contacted your uniform, then you had 5 seconds to strip from the waist down in an active combat zone while knowing with complete certainty that the clock was running, that you could not feel it counting, and that there was no indication other than the original hiss of the fuse that told you how much time remained.

 One Homeguard training account preserved in military records describes a soldier who got the bomb stuck to his trouser leg during a practice throw. A comrade reacted instantly, grabbed the trousers, and ripped them free in time. The subsequent explosion, the account notes, with characteristic British composure, left the trousers in something of a mess, though it was observed they may have been in some state before the explosion as well.

 That account gets remembered and repeated because it ended without a death. The accounts that ended differently are simply listed in the records as accidents. There were tragic accidents during training. That is the official language. Not incidents, not injuries. Accidents. And there is something uniquely awful about the word accident in this context because the number 74 did not malfunction to kill those men.

 It worked exactly as designed. The adhesive held, the fuse ran, the nitroglycerin compound detonated, the weapon performed its function perfectly. The problem was that its function was being performed on the wrong person. Now consider what semi-liquid nitroglycerin actually does at close range. The 560 g of Nobel’s number 823 inside that flask.

 About 1 and a4 lb was not a large charge by the standards of purpose-built anti-tank munitions. But it was not a small one either. At the distances involved in a training accident, the over pressure wave from the detonation was sufficient to rupture eardrums, collapse lungs, and cause hemorrhaging in soft tissue without any shrapnel involvement at all.

The glass flask on detonation became fragmentation. The belyte handle was thrown clear at velocity. The nitroglycerin itself, if not fully vaporized, scattered burning liquid across whatever was in the immediate vicinity. The recommended safe distance from the detonation for a user who had successfully placed the device and was running was described as a few yards, provided you were not in line with the handle.

 A few yards in this context meant roughly the distance from one end of a midsize living room to the other. The men who were issued this weapon and told to use it against tanks were not safe at a few yards. They were expected to be within arms reach at the moment of placement, pressed against the hall in some cases, and then running across open ground, under fire for 5 seconds.

 5 seconds at a full sprint, even for a young fit soldier, covers perhaps 30 yard that left them inside the lethal radius of their own weapon when it went off, depending on conditions, terrain, and whether the German infantry attached to the tank column had already shot them in the back.

 The psychological weight of carrying the number 74 into combat, really carrying it, knowing everything described above, has not been extensively documented because the men who used it were largely homeg guard volunteers who did not leave detailed personal accounts and because the professional military treated the weapons dangers as a known and acceptable cost.

 But it is not difficult to reconstruct. You were carrying an object that could kill you if you dropped it on a hard surface after sufficient storage time because the nitroglycerin degraded and became impacts sensitive. You were carrying an object that could kill you during the act of trying to use it. If your hands were not exactly right, if your aim was not exactly right, if the casing snagged on anything during the throw, and you were being asked to carry this object across open ground toward a vehicle whose entire purpose was to kill you

before you got close enough for the weapon to be relevant, Tom Miller, a Kent Homeguard auxiliar who trained with the number 74 and left one of the more candid accounts of the experience, described throwing them at vehicles during practice and concluding they were simply of no use. That was training against stationary targets without anyone shooting back.

 The professional assessment of the weapon was, if anything, less charitable. The ordinance board had refused to approve it before a single one was issued. The war diary of military intelligence research noted that by June 1940, the sticky bomb had been made a practical proposition, not perfected, the phrasing is careful to note, but a practical proposition.

 That is the language of people who have accepted a compromise they are not comfortable with. What it meant on the ground was this. If a panzer came over the hill and you were a homeg guard volunteer with a number 74, holding number 74 in your hand, you were being asked to wait in a trench while 60 tons of German engineering rolled toward you.

Let it pass close enough to touch. Emerge from cover behind it. run to within arms reach of the rear hull under whatever fire the accompanying infantry could bring to bear. Press a fragile glass ball of degrading liquid explosive against the steel. Hope the surface was clean enough for the adhesive to grip, release the lever, and then run 30 yards in 5 seconds.

 Winston Churchill called this a practical proposition. He also had a slogan for the men he expected to do it. You can always take one with you. He wrote it down and he was proud of it. The number 74 was in the end less a weapon than a transaction. It was a decision made at the highest levels of the British government that some number of its own people would die attempting to use it and that this was an acceptable exchange rate for the possibility of stopping a German tank.

It is hard to argue with the logic given the situation Britain was in during the summer of 1940. It is also hard to look at it without understanding that the men on the other end of that calculation, the farmers, shopkeepers, and retired veterans who were issued this device in its cardboard packaging with its warning label reading danger.

 Do not remove this pin until ready to throw grenade were not consulted about the terms. The number 74 saw combat across several theaters and the pattern was consistent enough to constitute a verdict. In North Africa during 1942, British and Commonwealth infantry used the weapon against German armor during the grinding attritional fighting around Alamne.

 The conditions were from the number 74’s perspective about as bad as they could be. Desert warfare meant tanks coated in fine sand and dust that formed a crust over every external surface. It meant heat that accelerated the degradation of the nitroglycerin inside the flask. It meant fast-moving armored engagements where the trench and weight doctrine the weapon had been designed around was frequently irrelevant because the battle had moved on before anyone could execute it.

 The weapon was used. It occasionally worked, but the accounts that survive are notable more for the conditions under which it failed than the conditions under which it succeeded. The Pacific Theater provided the number 74 with its most thoroughly documented failure. In August 1942, Australian forces were engaged at the Battle of Mil Bay in New Guinea, one of the first land engagements of the Pacific War in which Allied forces stopped a Japanese amphibious assault outright.

 The second 10th Australian Infantry Battalion encountered Japanese light tanks during the fighting and attempted to deploy the number 74 against them. New Guinea in August is one of the most hostile environments on Earth for a weapon that depends on adhesion. The humidity is extreme. The mud is constant and deep. The jungle means that any approach to a vehicle involves pushing through saturated undergrowth that coats everything you are carrying in organic matter.

 The bird lime adhesion failed repeatedly. [music] Men who had run through fire to get close enough found the device simply would not hold. The tanks that were ultimately stopped abd were stopped by other means. At Anzio in January 1944, Allied units including the first special service force used number 74 grenades in the defensive fighting around the beach head against German counterattacks.

 The performance was inconsistent, which by this point in the weapon service life was about the most generous assessment available. Some worked, some did not. In several documented instances, the glass sphere failed to shatter cleanly on impact, leaving the nitroglycerin compound smeared incompletely across the hull, reducing or eliminating the squash head effect entirely.

 A weapon that required physical contact with the target, a running approach under fire, and a 5-second fuse could not afford to then also fail to detonate properly. But it failed. The one context in which number 74 found something approaching reliable utility was the one it had never been designed for. The French resistance supplied with stocks through the special operations executive used them as compact demolition charges placed carefully against stationary vehicles, infrastructure, and fixed equipment at their own pace without

anyone shooting at them while they did it. When you remove the tank, the running approach, the degraded adhesion, and the time pressure, the number 74 was a reasonably effective explosive device. The bitter irony was that a reasonably effective explosive device was the lowest possible bar and the number 74 had been designed to clear a considerably higher one.

 Production ended in 1943 at approximately 2 1/2 million units. The ordinance board had never officially approved it. It had entered production on Churchill’s direct instruction over their explicit objections and it left production having never received their formal endorsement. The professional military establishment responsible for evaluating British weapons had looked at the number 74, concluded it was unacceptable and been overruled.

 They were not wrong in their assessment. They were simply overruled by a man with the authority to do so and a country too desperate to wait for something better. What replaced it was the PIAT, the projector, infantry, anti-tank, a spring-loaded spigot mortar that fired a shaped charge round. Effective range around 100 yards.

 Heavy, awkward, punishing to fire, genuinely difficult to [ __ ] in cold weather, and demanding of its user in ways that made it far from an easy weapon to master. But 100 yd is not arms reach. 100 yd means cover. 100 yards means the man firing it is not pressing a glass ball of liquid explosive against steel with his bare hands and then attempting to outrun the explosion. The PAT had serious problems.

It was still a revolution compared to what it replaced. The number 74 did not disappear cleanly. Homeg guard units continued to hold stocks well after the PIAT entered service. Partly because supply chains to part-time volunteer formations were never a military priority and partly because two and a half million of anything takes a very long time to fully account for.

 Crates of them sat in depots in barns in storage facilities across Britain and the Commonwealth. The nitroglycerin inside each flask continuing its slow, patient degradation, becoming less stable, more sensitive, more dangerous to anyone who eventually had to deal with them, [music] which is how we arrive at 1964. 19 years after the end of the Second World War, a cache of number 74 grenades was discovered.

 Warrant Officer Class 1 Sydney Braier and Major William Musen of the Royal Army Ordinance Corps were called in. What followed was 9 hours of careful, deliberate, genuinely dangerous work. Using probes and rubber gloves, moving with the particular concentrated patients that comes from understanding exactly what will happen if you make one wrong movement.

 They extracted 20 intact devices and relocated them before destroying the remaining 30 through controlled detonation. The nitroglycerin inside those flasks had been sitting for over two decades. It had been degrading since 1943 or possibly earlier. Every movement of every device was a negotiation with physics that had been running against them for 20 years.

Both men received the George Medal. The George Medal, to be clear, is awarded for acts of great bravery in circumstances of extreme danger. It is not a routine commendation. It is not given for doing a difficult job competently. It is given when the danger involved is severe enough and the bravery required is real enough that the institution feels obligated to formally acknowledge what was asked of a person.

The last George medal generated by the number 74 grenade [music] hand anti-tank was awarded in 1964. The weapon had been out of production for 21 years. The war it was built for had been over for 19 years, [music] and it was still in a storage facility somewhere in Britain, doing what it had always done, presenting the people near it with a choice between extraordinary courage and the consequences of its existence. 2 1/2 million were made.

 They were never once officially approved by the body that existed to approve such things. They were designed in a basement built at Churchill’s insistence, handed to men who were told the mathematics of dying for one’s country were straightforward, and then left in crates for two decades, still capable of making that argument.

 The danger, do not remove this pin label was printed on every single one of them. [music] It was, in retrospect, the most honest thing about the entire weapon.