Wine and Warfare part 14: The Molotov Cocktail

(TDB) - The fortunes of an army in battle or even a nation in arms are dependent on several factors; discipline, training, morale and technology being chief among them.

Since David and Goliath, one side has usually been mismatched on the technology front, sometimes the problem is overcome and the enemy vanquished, sometimes not.

The action film stars of the 1980s could make weapons out of whatever bits of prop were lying around and when push came to shove real soldiers did the same.

In the early days of the First World War, soldiers designed their own hand grenades using glass jars and empty tin of bully beef, though these were usually as dangerous to their operators as they were to the enemy.

They constructed make-shift sling shots and catapaults to fling these unreliable projectiles further and crafted trench fighting tools that were brutal in purpose and appearance.

The most famous makeshift weapon of them all though is the Molotov Cocktail.

The “poor man’s fire bomb” made an appearance during the Spanish Civil War when Franco’s Nationalists used them against Soviet supplied T-26 tanks in 1936.

The Republicans, generally the most poorly equipped, were quick to adopt them too.

The most famous name now used to describe all manner of improvised fire bombs however first reared its flaming head in the Winter War of 1939 between Russia and Finland.

The Winter War was a tiny sideshow in the wider conflagration of the Second World War, the flames of which were only just beginning to grow.

In 1939 the German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov concluded an unholy alliance in the form of Nazi-Soviet pact.