US Combat Shotguns by Leroy Thompson

Author:Leroy Thompson [Thompson, Leroy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: US Combat Shotguns
ISBN: 9781780960159
Publisher: Osprey Publishing Ltd
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Their first warnings were German “potato masher” hand grenades lobbing through the air. Few landed as most of them were exploded in the air by the experts in the outposts. Upon the failure of the grenade attack, the enemy launched a mortar attack. Again the trapshooters proved their worth, deflecting the slowly arching bombs. Finally, a vast grey [sic] wave of the Kaiser’s best surged forward. (Perry 1956: 33)

Although the author has seen mentions of US troops using shotguns to deflect grenades, this is the first reference he has seen to an organized effort to deploy shotguns to stop grenades and even mortar rounds. Certainly, it would make some sense to deploy skilled trapshooters for this purpose, but if the account is true it appears unlikely that this became a common tactical use of the shotgun! It should be borne in mind, too, that many grenades would have been thrown at night by German trench raiders when it would have been virtually impossible to use the grenades as targets.

In an attempt to test this tactic, Jenkins mentions that he had examined dummy Mills bombs used for “counter grenade” training and obtained some of them which were taken to a skeet range and shot at with an M97 Trench Gun with bayonet mounted and using 00 buckshot:

We found the bombs could not only be hit, but we shattered one of those cast-iron dummies in the air, with buckshot? Yet let me rise to remark that, while it is alright to stand and shoot at the incomers at skeet stations 1 and 7 – IF the said incomer were an iron bomb weighing 27 ounces and timed to explode in 5 seconds from its start, and you had 20-inch cylinder-bore shotgun with 9 pellets of shot with which to hit it and knock it away – what would you do? I cannot escape a strong conviction that all world’s sprint records would be broken in the next instant of time by somebody moving, so to speak, away from there! (Jenkins 1935: 22)

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