14 Nov 2022 Garand Picture of the Day

[fjruple]

Mark--

The M37 demo kit brought a lot of memories of my instruction of demo classes while I was assigned to the Engineers. The M37 came a bit later in the war as the M2 kits were made of Tetrytol demo blocks which were temperature sensitive (67 degrees F). About that temperature the tetrytol demo blocks becomes unstable. In the hot climates of Tarawa, it would not take much to set off the explosives. The M37 was developed due to this problem and use plastic explosives. Personally, I would pre-make several of these demolition charges by breaking down a the M37 kit into 2 demo blocks, they are already daisy chain together with det cord, attach the two blocks to the end of six foot piece of pole or lumber with thousand mile tape. Add a M26 frag grenade with the safety pull facing to the rear of long end of the pole. Run a piece of commo wire from the safety ring to long end of the pole. You can put a loop in the end to make it easier to pull out the ring. You can also tape a burst type WP grenade to the demo charge to make thing interesting if they are available.

This post reminds me of the war movie, "Hell is for Heroes" where Steve McQueen uses a demo kit to blow up a German bunker.