What are people buying?

[Norman D. Landings]

I know the Germans produced wooden bullets for use with the 1942-model schiessbecher.
That would explain why a production and supply chain for the (otherwise inexplicable) things existed.

[Buff Orpington]

We had wooden bullets for the Bren, apparently the mechanism didn't like regular blank ammo. An adaptor with a spike went on to degrade the ballistic properties but even so the SOP was to aim it into the ground in front. The 7.62mm version worked fine with a blank firing attachment.

[Norman D. Landings]

The phrases ‘ballistic properties’ and ‘wooden bullet’ do not go together at all.
One of the reasons I’ve never bought the notion that wooden bullets were intended as ‘training rounds’.
There’s a decent chance the round will fragment under the power of the propellant going off, and if it does make it out of the barrel, the slightest breath of wind will send the thing yards sideways.

[Buff Orpington]

Yes, my experience of them was purely restricted to army cadets making a noise without having to re-cock it between rounds.

[Paul]

I think the Germans used wooden 'blanks' for firing rifle grenades and isn't there an account of a US soldier in Normandy getting hit in face by a wooden bullet which splintered and caused a nasty but non fatal wound?

[Norman D. Landings]

Yep, that’s the scheissbecher - “shooting beaker” - the 1942-model rifle-grenade adaptor.

It was supposed to become general issue, but the Germans already had two or three other systems lashed-up from cut-down ATR’s or adapted flare pistols so in true Wehrmacht fashion, they ended up with all the systems in simultaneous circulation.

There were all sorts of Lamp & Sandbag stories about the supposed purpose of wooden bullets, mostly involving dastardly Nazis trying to inflict wounds full of wood splinters that were supposed to be virtually impossible for allied surgeons to treat.

[Peeler]

Wooden bullets, useful for anti-vampire jobs.

[levied troop]

A few of these later this morning:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/go ... m=Jacobite

Got their Jacobites on the earlier one, very nice and this KS means I might finish the 1745 project.

[RMD]

The Bren had a 'splitter' attachment on the barrel to break up the wooden bullet. Saw them in action once or twice when I was a nipper and wouldn't want to be anywhere near the front arc. But blank wasn't much safer - a mate on IOT got a poorly-secured SLR Blank-Firing Attachment (BFA) in the face and another got an ejected blank case embedded in the side of his eyeball (the crimped end of the round became nastily serrated after firing)...

[Buff Orpington]

BFA's could be tricky, we were attacked by para's on exercise in 83, they interrogated one captive by slackening off the BFA and putting it against the side of his head. They threatened to pull the trigger if he didn't give them the entry code. This was 1983, they were still high after the Falklands and felt that the Crabs offered no challenge. So much so that they decided to leopard crawl across the airfield at night to assault the only brightly lit sector on the station. This was the QRA, a live loaded Buccaneer guarded by double fences and live armed guards with 7.62 brens. They took a bit of persuading to go away and play somewhere else.