WW2 Red Wooden bullets.

War is often a series of puzzles and mysteries. One that has never been solved is the mystery of the RED Wooden Bullets. In a den, we found boxes of rifle bullets with red stained wooden bullets. Genuine wooden rifle bullets. only the bullet... the casing was the normal brass rifle type

Another peculiarity is that all the German stick grenades had concrete heads, never metal. No one yet has come up with the mystery of those red wooden bullets?
Sapper

 

They are drill rounds. I have had several clips of these, both WW1 and WW2 dated. How they ended up in the front line, no idea!

 

Are they dangerous in any way?

 

No, the 'slugs' are wooden and there is no cordite in them, so they cannot be fired. They are used to practice operating the rifle, reloading etc.

 

I had always been under the impression that the wooden bullets were blanks; the wood breaking-up in the barrel when fired. Any truth to that or were they purely drill rounds?

 

Blanks are altogether a different beast. Wooden rounds are normally used for drill.

 

Concrete grenades in WW1 too...

 

Wow I didn't know that they were made of concrete? Are you taking about the top of the grenade? the green/grey top? Did the germans color them green?

Thanks, Michael

 

NO, they were just as made in concrete, I never saw a metal one. And I have seen stacks of them
Sapper

 

These red wooden rounds are 'bulleted blank', used for training with automatic weapons like the Bren gun. There was an attachment in the flash-hider at the muzzle that shredded the wooden bullets to coarse sawdust on their way out. The purpose was to generate sufficient gas pressure in the barrel to drive the piston without launching a highly-lethal projectile.

I don't know what the propellant was, but I'd guess some form of nitro as I don't remember clouds of blackpowder smoke when these things were fired in the CCF cadet group I was a member of in the 1960s.

I would imagine that, fired from an unobstructed barrel, they'd be seriously dangerous up to many tens of yards and perhaps further.

Regards,
MikB

 

There is no way that a blank cartridge would have anything at all in the end . Blanks are crimped over so that when fired there is NO projectile , wooden or otherwise. Drill rounds have an imitation bullet but no charge or primer in the cartridge.Even without a projectile a blank should never be pointed at a person as there is always a certain amount of residue from the explosion emitted from the barrel.

 

Sorry, but the bulleted blanks I've described did exist and were issued to cadet forces in the '60s. They came in the same size box as 300 round bandoliered 303 ball, and the box was stencilled 'Bulleted Blank', and the rounds had red-painted wooden bullets. I saw all this with my own eyes, and I saw them used in training as I described.

 

When I raised this subject, it was because we had discovered a soldiers hideout built into an earth bank. A big room under a bank with a door , and with coffee pot and chairs. All the comforts of home........
What made it so interesting was two things...The "German Smell" and these boxes of red wooden bullets?
Sapper

 

Ah, well, if they were certainly German rounds (rimless, 7.92x57) they probably wouldn't have worked in their light machine guns, because I think they were recoil rather than gas-operated. So they may have been 'ersatz' bullets or grenade blanks - see here:-
eBay Forums: Wooden bullet Tip ...

Vot iss zis Cherman smell of vich you speak..?

Regards,
MikB

 

Hi guys, me again. my ten cents worth. In the SA defence force we used a round with a red plastic head. We used them on the R1 rifles (FN) to set our sights. It was done over a very short distance 30 to 50 meters. We called them "rooi bekkies" direct translation wpuld be "red mouths". We also had a Regimental Sargeant Major that used to shoot the guys at the shooting range, if they took up a dangerous stance with the jacket rounds, with these rounds.

 

WITH THE 99TH DIVISION IN GERMANY -- PFC. George W. Akins of Mobile, Alabama, is glad that some of the cogs of Hitler's war machine are now being made of wood.
Akins, a member of the 99th Reconnaissance Troop, was bending over when a Kraut armed with a machine pistol burped a wooden slug into the seat of his pants.
When he recovered from the blow at his posterior, he was relieved to find his pants only full of splinters. The medics treated him for burns.

99th Recon

 

LOL! Jeff;
I too have heard of the red wood bullets. But I have never encountered them. At least not to my knowledge.

 

Sapper quick question, Was the whole projectile wooden or just the tip of the projectile? The reason I ask this is if it is just the tip then it will act as a soft point, the less dense wood decelerating quicker on contact with the target than the rest of the projectile; causing it to deform and expend its energy in the target. Resulting in more damage.
Some MKVII.303 projectiles had aluminiun tips under the copper jacket to achieve the same thing and some of the Indian made .303 had wooden tips under the copper jacket as aluminium was scarce.
Cheers
Webley

 

The looked exactly like normal brass rifle bullets, except that the end was red wood BNot a hard wood.
Sapper