Type 98 grenade
The Type 98 stick hand grenade was a fragmentation stick grenade deployed by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II.
History
In 1938, the Imperial Japanese Army copied the Chinese Stielhandgranate 24 and produced them at a Japanese factory in Manchuria.In 2015, Type 98s were documented to have been found in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Design
The weapon operated identically to the Chinese versions of the German Model 24 stick grenade, which had been encountered in the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was based on these grenades, except that a pull ring was attached to the igniting cord, and the actual fuse delay itself was reduced to four to five seconds.The explosive charge contained of picric acid. The Type 98 is much smaller than the Model 24 and the charge is less than half from the same grenade.
Like the Chinese grenades, it was a crude copy of the Model 1924 and a number of issues plagued its effectiveness.