Axis Explosives & Propellant Constituents

Writing a paper on the sources and shortages of critical Axis (primarily German) explosives and propellant manufacturing and supplies, by which I mean primarily aircraft bombs, artillery and small arms shells, mines, etc.

Can anyone point me towards authoritative sources that describe or list the component parts of their munitions? I've checked everyplace I can think of on the net and found almost nothing on the subject.

This is analogous to the ball bearing industry and aircraft/vehicle production. Ball bearing manufacturing attacks failed because abundant supplies came from Sweden and a couple other sources. Munitions production was many orders of magnitude greater than things like ball bearings production, so I'm examining the entire supply chain of component elements. I know that some component elements came from petroleum processing, but have been unable to identify specifics.

TIA.

Ol' Mac

Well, once you get passed black powder Nitric acid is a greater or lesser component in just about everything.
Nitrocellulose powder.
Gun cotton.
Cordite
Picric acid (trinitrophenol) has got it in there somewhere
TNT, Trinitrotoluene.
And so on.
Nitrates are another family and that dates back to black powder. Sulfur and carbon are the fuels and saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is the oxidizer.
Things started getting a lot more refined in the late 1800s
Most of the time they were using nitrates of some sort as the oxidizer.

Explosives and industrial fertilizer are cousins
ammonium nitrate like Beirut in 2020 is just the last in series of disasters related to that compound.

Hope this helps, German chemical industry in the late 1800s was not based on oil. But coal was used for many products.

Thanks. What I primarily need are the types (specific names) of explosive and propellant powders the Germans used, some of which are not analogous to American/British powders. Once the types are identified I should be able to look up the constituent parts, which is the list I'm really after since disruption of the supply chain for the constituent parts prevents any final production unless substitutes are found and proven to work.

Same logic as for the ball bearings: For want of a nail the war was lost.

Old MacDonald said:

Thanks. What I primarily need are the types (specific names) of explosive and propellant powders the Germans used, some of which are not analogous to American/British powders. Once the types are identified I should be able to look up the constituent parts, which is the list I'm really after since disruption of the supply chain for the constituent parts prevents any final production unless substitutes are found and proven to work.

Same logic as for the ball bearings: For want of a nail the war was lost.

Click to expand...

A lot times they used different names for the same things or very similar things.
Picric acid (sometimes combined with other "stuff")was also known as
Lyddite
Melinite
Shimose powder
Ecrasite
Dunnite or explosive D.

Most of these were replaced by TNT which was more stable (didn't blow up in long term storage).
Toluene replaced phenol and although less powerful it was more stable and easier to use.
During the early 1900s and WW I Toluene was harder to get than phenol.

It may involve looking up some of the chemical formulas to find out what the different names were. But there really were not that many different compounds.

Like smokeless powder. There were two different main types. Single base and double base. Single base is nitrocellulose which does cover a lot of variations but you need nitric acid and sulfuric acid and cellulose. Then you play with different amounts and exact process.
Double base is adding nitroglycerin to nitrocellulose. usually 5-10%. Grain size and coatings (usually under 2%) control the actual burn rate.
Germans didn't much, if any, cordite but then cordite used a higher percentage of nitroglycerin with inert material (stabilizers) so we are back to a lot the same raw stock.

Again, some of the problem is figuring what the different names mean and/or if there is any significant difference. There could have been a host of different names or codes for artillery powder. But most of them are going to be within a few percent of each other in chemical composition and very close to small arms powder. Large grains/strings take longer to burn, small grains with holes in them change surface area while burning differently. Most single base propellent is closer to each other than double base but there are variations, enough to worry about when you are trying to decide to blow up nitic acid plant B or sulfuric acid plant K?

Old MacDonald said:

Can anyone point me towards authoritative sources that describe or list the component parts of their munitions? I've checked everyplace I can think of on the net and found almost nothing on the subject.

Click to expand...

Head over to the Library section of the Bulletpicker website. This site contains many publications on explosive ordnance, including several covering World War II. This page of the site has a list of U.S. Army explosive ordnance technical manuals. Of relevance to your query would be TM 9-1985-2 German Explosive Ordnance (1953) and TM 9-1985-3 German Explosive Ordnance (1953). I'd suggest scanning through the entire list given on that page as there are likely other technical manuals which may be of assistance.

German bombs of the war used a variety of explosive fillings including TNT, various Amatol compositions (30-70, 40-60, 50-50, 60-40), several Trialen formulations (105, 106, 109), and RDX.

Hi 33

Brilliant! This library is a treasure trove and although I haven't had time to go through most of the contents, I'm confident my main questions will be answered here. The "Fillers" section looks particularly useful once I've ID'ed the component parts of the main German explosives.

THANKS!

Ol' Mac

Old MacDonald said:

Can anyone point me towards authoritative sources that describe or list the component parts of their munitions? I've checked everyplace I can think of on the net and found almost nothing on the subject.

Click to expand...

Try the Picatinny Arsenal section of Bulletpicker. PATR 2510 in particular covers German explosives. FSTC 381-5042, Handbook of Foreign Explosives (1965) also has good summaries of explosives and countries that used them.

Missed those, so thanks. Also saw another report in that section covering a different piece of ordnance I'm writing about, so this was a win-win.