The 'Dumbest' American Grenade That Became Germany's Worst Nightmare
It looked like a joke. Twenty-one ounces of crude cast iron, shaped like a piece of fruit, covered in 40 raised segments that served no apparent purpose. The body felt rough in your hand, almost unfinished. The fuse mechanism consisted of exactly two components: a pin and a lever. Pull one, release the other, throw. A design so primitive that German ordnance officers examining captured examples assumed it was emergency production, something the Americans manufactured when they ran out of real grenades. They were wrong. The official designation was Mk 2 fragmentation grenade. American soldiers called it the pineapple. German soldiers called it something else, usually in the half-second before it detonated. By 1945, that segmented sphere had become one of the most feared weapons on the battlefield, responsible for approximately seven percent of German combat deaths in close quarters engagements. More than 70 million were manufactured between 1918 and 1945. Seventy million identical copies of what appeared to be a metallurgical mistake.
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