Grenadier

The grenade is older than most soldiers realize — iron-cased explosive spheres were hurled by hand in seventeenth-century sieges, and the men selected to throw them were chosen for their size and strength. By the First World War the grenadier had been reborn in the nightmare of the trenches: men who could lob a Mills bomb or a stick grenade into a dugout thirty meters away while keeping their head below the parapet. Specialist training turned these soldiers into trench-clearing experts, lethal in the confined chaos of close-quarters fighting. Through the Second World War the role evolved — grenadiers became elite assault infantry carrying both rifles and grenades, leading breaches and clearing fortified rooms. This unit excels at flushing entrenched infantry from cover and cracking defensive positions at close range, but its relatively short effective radius leaves it outmatched in open-ground engagements.