Discover the astonishing untold story of Corporal James Earl Thompson, the 22-year-old Iowa farm boy whose “dumbest damn” homemade grenades shattered a German defensive line in the freezing darkness of Baugnez during the Battle of the Bulge. While standard Mark II pineapples bounced harmlessly off pillboxes and bunkers, Thompson combined stump-clearing farm experience, scavenged battlefield scrap, and a jury-rigged fuse built from a cigarette lighter and radio parts to create a three-pound monster of steel, powder, and blast overpressure. Ridiculed by his own NCOs, threatened with court martial, and dismissed as a reckless tinkerer, Thompson would prove them all wrong in a single, brutal forty-five-minute night assault that turned four desperate Americans into a ghost team moving through German lines, destroying seven strongpoints, collapsing pillboxes, silencing mortars, killing at least thirty-one enemy soldiers, and opening a gap that saved Company B from annihilation. This meticulously crafted documentary follows Thompson from the mud and blood of the Hürtgen Forest, where he first realized standard grenades couldn’t crack reinforced bunkers, through his clandestine field experiments with nested ration tins and salvaged metal, to the moment his grenade rolled perfectly into a pillbox embrasure and detonated with such terrifying force that the structure itself seemed to jump. Drawing on declassified ordnance reports, postwar testimonies, and the secret Project Hammer that brought Aberdeen Proving Ground engineers to interrogate a frontline corporal about his improvised “super bombs,” this video reveals how one soldier’s illegal invention influenced postwar grenade design, shaped modern assault tactics, and haunted its creator for the rest of his life. From the chaos inside shattered German command bunkers to the quiet Iowa farm where Thompson died in 1996, buried with his Distinguished Service Cross and remembered by the men who lived because of him, we explore how battlefield ingenuity can override regulations, how mockery can turn to reverence, and how a single night in December 1944 proved that sometimes the most devastating weapon on the battlefield is the one nobody authorized.
Credit to : Last Words