You’ve just walked through the rise and fall of one of the strangest weapons the U.S. ever built: the T13 “Beano” grenade — a baseball-shaped experiment that promised to turn every American GI into a deadly grenadier… and instead became the only U.S. weapon of World War II that injured more Americans in testing than it ever killed in combat.

Let’s unpack what this story really reveals — not just about the grenade, but about war, innovation, and the thin line between brilliance and disaster.

1. The Problem: Our Own Grenades Were Killing Us

By late 1942, the U.S. had a very unglamorous but deadly serious problem:
American soldiers were too close to their own explosions.

The standard Mk 2 “pineapple” grenade weighed about 21 ounces and could only be thrown 30–35 yards by the average recruit.

Its lethal radius? Roughly 30 yards.

In training reports from places like Fort Benning, instructors documented that nearly 40% of recruits couldn’t throw the grenade far enough to reliably escape its blast. In combat, it was even worse. German stick grenades, with their long handles, could be thrown farther and with more leverage. In close fighting among hedgerows and ruins, that was a real tactical edge.

Officially, the Mk 2 was considered the best possible compromise between explosive power and throwability. Unofficially, it meant this:

The U.S. was sending young men into battle with a weapon many of them physically couldn’t use safely.

That’s the context in which Stanley Platt Lovell stepped onto a training field and saw something the Army had missed.

2. The Civilian Outsider Who Asked the “Wrong” Question

Stanley Lovell wasn’t a soldier, a general, or a weapons designer. He was a chemistry guy — a Cornell-trained industrial chemist who worked with paint and coatings before World War II.

But when William “Wild Bill” Donovan recruited him in 1942 to head research and development for the OSS (the wartime intelligence agency that would later become the CIA), he was given one crucial mandate:

“Do the things the Army would never think of.”

On that grenade range, he noticed something simple and profound:

These same recruits who struggled with grenades were throwing baseballs effortlessly.

A baseball — about 9 inches in circumference, weighing roughly 5 ounces — was embedded in American muscle memory.

A Mark 2 grenade? Awkward shape, wrong weight, wrong grip.

So Lovell didn’t ask, “How do we teach soldiers to throw grenades better?”
He asked, “Why don’t we give them a grenade that’s shaped like a baseball?”

That was the seed of the T13 Beano grenade.

3. The Beano: A Brilliant Concept with a Fatal Flaw

Lovell partnered with Eastman Kodak — yes, the camera company — because they were experts in precision mechanical parts and had classified project clearance.

The Beano’s design was bold:

Shape: A steel sphere, slightly larger than a baseball.

Weight: About 12 ounces — heavier than a baseball, but still throwable.

Explosive: Roughly 2 ounces of TNT, relying on shock and concussive force rather than fragmenting into sharp shrapnel.

Fuse: And this is where it all went off the rails — a two-stage impact fuze.

The concept:

    The soldier pulls a pin and throws the grenade.

    A small safety cap attached to a 20-inch cord flies off during flight.

    When the cord fully unwinds, it arms the grenade.

    Any impact after that — ground, wall, vehicle, enemy — detonates the grenade.

On paper, it solved multiple problems:

Soldiers could throw it instinctively and farther, thanks to the baseball-like form.

Instant detonation on impact meant the enemy couldn’t throw it back.

No waiting around for a fuse to burn down.

But the same thing that made it revolutionary made it lethal — to the wrong people.

4. The Tests: Innovation Turns Into Shrapnel

At Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, in early 1944, the Army tested thousands of T13s.

At first, the results on distance and accuracy were spectacular:

Average throw distance went up to nearly 60 yards.

Even weak throwers were hitting 45 yards — far better than the Mk 2.

Skilled throwers were routinely reaching 70+ yards.

It looked like Lovell was right. The baseball grenade worked.

And then it started detonating early.

Case 1: The Overpowered Pitch

Sergeant James Morrison — former semi-pro pitcher — threw a Beano with textbook form:

At about 4.5 seconds into flight, with the grenade still in the air…

It detonated.

The fuze had armed early from the sheer spin generated by his powerful throw. The grenade did exactly what it was designed to do — detonate on impact — except the “impact” was internal stresses and spin before it ever reached the ground.

Result: Morrison survived, but his arm and hand were shredded. He would live with partial disability for the rest of his life.

Case 2: The Death Grip

Another test, another flaw:

Private Leonard Chin gripped the grenade hard in his hand during windup.

That pressure prematurely detached the safety cap in his hand.

The arming cord pulled out while the grenade was still near him.

The grenade landed at his feet and detonated.

He died on the field. Two nearby soldiers were badly wounded.

The grenade was so sensitive that normal variations in throwing style — extra spin, tight grip, awkward angle — could arm and trigger it too early.

By the time testing ended:

2 American soldiers were dead.

44 more were wounded.

0 enemy soldiers had ever been hit with a Beano.

It holds the grim distinction of being the only WWII U.S. weapon whose casualty list is entirely American.

5. Why the Army Still Tried to Push It Forward

And yet, in June 1944 — even after those accidents — the Army ordered 10,000 Beanos into production.

Why?

Because they were staring down the barrel of D-Day and urban combat in France, and commanders desperately wanted anything that might give American infantry an edge in short-range fighting.

They gambled that:

Engineering tweaks could fix safety issues.

Training could teach soldiers to throw “differently.”

The potential tactical advantage justified the risk.

But reality caught up with them.

By early 1945, after limited field trials in Europe, it became clear:

Even the improved fuze was still temperamental.

Premature detonations continued — not at lab rates, but at battlefield-unacceptable ones.

Commanders had no confidence they could widely issue this to terrified 19-year-olds under fire.

On March 15, 1945, Eisenhower’s headquarters made the final call:

No Beano grenades for combat. All units to be returned and destroyed.

The weapon disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared.

6. The Idea Wasn’t Wrong — Just Pushed Too Far

If the Beano was such a mess, why does this story matter?

Because Lovell wasn’t wrong about the core insight.

He was absolutely right that:

A baseball-sized grenade fit American throwing instincts.

Soldiers could throw a sphere farther and more accurately than an awkward Mk 2 pineapple.

You didn’t need fragmentation to be lethal in confined spaces — concussion could be enough.

After the war, the Army quietly absorbed those lessons:

In the 1950s, it fielded the M26, a more spherical grenade with improved fragmentation and a simple time-delay fuze, not an impact one.

In 1968, the U.S. adopted the M67 — the classic “baseball” grenade still widely used today:

2.5 inches in diameter

14 ounces in weight

Effective throwing distance and blast radius… with no impact fuze.

The shape and ergonomics were Beano’s legacy.
The dangerous elegance of impact detonation? That got left on the cutting room floor — and likely for good reason.

7. The Human Cost and the Quiet Lesson

The official histories barely mention the Bino. The project files were closed. Most grenades were destroyed. A few inert samples sit in museums or private collections today, curiosities from a forgotten experiment.

But in the lives of the men who tested it, the story stayed very real:

James Morrison, the ex-pitcher, lived with his injuries for decades. Later he said both the Mk 2 and the Beano had failed soldiers in different ways:

“At least with the Beano, they were trying to fix the problem.”

The families of Leonard Chin and David Martinez, killed in testing, were told their sons died in “training accidents,” with no details about the experimental weapon that took their lives.

Lovell, in his unpublished memoirs, wrote one painful line about the project:

“I was seduced by the elegance of impact detonation… The men who died at Aberdeen died because I couldn’t accept that ‘good enough’ was better than ‘perfect.’”

That line might be the sharpest lesson of all.

8. What the Beano Really Teaches Us

The T13 Beano grenade is a case study in how war drives innovation — and how that innovation can cross from bold into reckless when urgency overwhelms caution.

It shows us:

Innovation needs constraint. Pushing a concept too far, too fast, can make a good idea deadly.

User psychology matters. Weapons must work with human instincts, not against them — but you can’t ask people to override instincts built since childhood.

Testing saves lives. As brutal as it was, the Beano’s failure in trials kept it from failing on beaches, in ruins, and in foxholes full of scared kids.

In the end, the Beano never saw combat — and that might be its quiet success.

Its concept lived on in safer designs that did help soldiers survive. Its failures echoed through the weapons labs and boardrooms where later engineers decided to take a little more time, run a few more tests, accept “good enough” when “perfect” came with too many funerals.

Sometimes the most important stories in military history aren’t about the weapons that won wars — but the ones that didn’t, and what they forced us to learn.