24. A Defective Weapon Straight Out of Looney Tunes
One of WWII’s more infamous weapons was the Sticky Bomb, or Sticky Grenade, developed by the British in the aftermath of a humiliating defeat at the 1940 Battle of France. In that debacle, the British had been cornered at Dunkirk and forced into a hasty evacuation, in which most of the British Army’s anti-tank weapons were left behind.
That sudden shortage of conventional anti-tank arms led British developers to come up with a hastily improvised and easy-to-produce weapon, for use against enemy armor. The result was the Anti Tank Hand Grenade #74, AKA Sticky Bomb – a maraca-looking device with an outer metal shell covering a bomb coated with a powerful adhesive. It did not take long before the downside of using an explosive coated with strong glue that could stick to the user became apparent.