Swiss Schleuderbeton SplitterBomb (not for training but for operational use)

[Dreamk]

The Swiss Hunziker company developped in 1937 a Splitter bomb made from "spun concrete" (Schleuderbeton) in order to offer a solution to the shortage of metal taht was already becoming acute in Swiss - This shortage will in fact delay the production of the 200kg bomb till after ww2.
The description given by the company was as follows:
"The projectile body has a fairly thick spun concrete shell containing a large number of spheres cast into it, which are intended to act as fragments upon detonation (a bomb as shown in the attached illustration is intended to contain 8.5 kg of spheres in the bomb body)."
Total weight was given as 13kg
Such bombs were tested in 1939, in collaboration with the French, at Bourges and the results were satisfying, even raising the interest of the British Defense authorities.
The outbreak of WW2 seem to have cut short further developments this experimental design.

 

[Temistocle]

Below the Swiss patent for the bomb (CH195362A, from 1938, in German) and the French patent (FR822679A, 1938), with a sketch of the bomb, from Hunziker & Cie, a Zurich concrete company. There were another Swiss patent and a French addition, respectively CH200293A and FR49339E, for another construction method of the bomb. I attached the drawings from the patents.

 

[Dreamk]

Thanks a lot.
It appears from texts in the Swiss archive that Hunziker proposed initially, in 1937, a model of his beton bomb as a penetration weapon against shelters, but tests showed its lack of effectiveness in this role. It apparently correspond to the second pattent which description emphasizes the "great resistance" of the tubular structure.

Then they developped this splitter beton bomb that was tested at Bourges in 1939 with promising results - it would be quite have been attractive in view of the growing shortage and steel and explosive that Switzerland began to be facing. But the outbreak of ww2 apparently closed any further develpment of this venture.

It is interesting that the Germans pursued the same line of development with their SBe-50 and SBe-250 (Splitter Beton 50kg and 250 kg ) actually developed and deployed at the beginning of the war in 1940 as fragmentation bombs - an adequate emergency solution to their lack of capacity of produce enough bombs in the 1939-40 period, that led them also to use whatever booty bomb they could find - concrete bombs with chopped steel in the concrete and a charge of approximately 5kg of explosive for the SBe50 and 50 kg of explosive for the SBe250. The SBe 250 has a metal cap at the front over the ogive, and the concrete was only applied around the cylindrical body of the bomb - musch as what is shown on the Hunziker patent. The Sc-10DW was alos a Beton splitter bombe but I am not sure whether it was developped in teh same initial period of ww2

Here're the corresponding figures from Fleisher's German Air-Dropped Weapons to 1945