That's a nice photo. I have seen closeups on the armor, but never this photo of the firing tests.

The rifle grenade was always a flawed concept since it is one of those ideas that seems great at first but in reality maybe is not so great after all. Almost all armies used them during WW2, since there was nothing better and it seemed like a good idea to give the soldier a bit more firepower than his rifle and some hand grenades. Most armies nowadays have discarded the concept entirely (USA and Russia) since better add-on launchers are available (M-203 and its succesor the M-320). The French though are still highly enamored of the rifle grenade and their excellent FAMAS service rifle has provision for firing them. This is a bit odd since the drawbacks to the rifle grenade are well known, especially by anyone who's ever fired one.

In WW2 you can see why they were widely adopted since nothing comparable was available. It was thought that a weapon that could cover the effective range between a hand grenade and a mortar was needed and as such the rifle grenade was adopted and turned out to be an adequate stop gap or at least better than nothing. The problem is rifle grenades are heavy, bulky to carry, required special ammo to fire, hard to shoot with any accuracy without lots of practice, and a bit weak in explosive effect. There was no way around this since you couldn't issue a truly effective grenade with more explosive inside than they have, without breaking the gun and/or the soldier's shoulder upon firing.


about 15-20 years ago in Soldier of Fortune magazine they tried out an M-16 mounted grenade called the RAW that someone had invented and was trying to sell to the army. It was a round, black contraption and the whole thing looked like a large grapefruit mounted under the barrel. It was supposed to have had a powerful explosive effect when it hit something and was intended to blow holes in buildings and destroy and unarmored vehicles.

What was typical range compared to a thrown grenade?

Rifle grenades offer several areas of interest:
1. One should remember them for what they are....a method of achieving greater range than can be achieved by hand-throwing.
2. The tube-type (US) launcher is better than the cup-type (Ger) because the attachment does not interfere with normal sighting and operation of the weapon.
3. One type of US launcher literally held a standard hand grenade. The early antitank warhead was, indeed, put on a privately made rocket motor as a prototype of the Bazooka round.
4. My experience w the rifle grenade is rather limited, but, I think, rather interesting. Once when I was instructing platoon tactics at Ft Benning, an OCS type discovered a huge timber rattler. Now, orders were to avoid all contact and leave them alone, but the CG didn't have to run exercises in that area twice weekly. I instructed the kid w the signal grenade to shoot the sucker. He hit it dead center and created a magnificent sight w the warhead oozing red smoke out of one side of the snake and the fins sticking out the other side. Now it takes a snake's body a long time to realize it's dead....not this one! Nary a single twitch!
As an adviser to the RF in Vietnam, I got to see these little fellows use a rifle grenade launcher. The guy had taken an '03 Springfield, cut several inches off the stock, put a backpack full of grenades on his back. He would squat down, put the buttstock on the ground, eyeball his target and shoot, reloading by working the bolt and then reaching over his shoulder to get another grenade. Naturally, he had only grenade-launching rounds in the magazine of the '03. He was pretty good with it and added a lot of firepower to the RF company......especially since Vietnamese are too small to throw a grenade very far.
5. Rifle grenades were appreciably better than throwing by hand. Before you write them off, bear in mind that the bursting radius of a grenade is greater than your ability to throw one! If everyone in the squad carried only one grenade it added appreciably to the squads firepower and cost no one individual no serious additional weight to carry. They were a worthwhile weapon in an army's arsenal.
6. The development of reduced-power rifles caused the rifle grenade to go away.