The young men waited in the shadows until the Russian tank had passed them on the narrow city street. Then one jumped from a doorway, climbed on the vehicle and jammed a crowbar into its tread, bringing it to a halt.
When a member of the tank crew cracked open a hatch to take a look, another man threw a flaming molotov co*cktail, while the first man jerked open the hatch and dropped in a hand grenade. Other men then clambered over the tank, yanked out the Russians and shot them.
“As long as there are old bottles and gasoline supplies and rags to serve for fuses, no Russian tank will be safe in the streets,” a member of the besieged country’s defiant government declared in the New York Times. (His name was withheld for security reasons.)
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The Russian army has “met its match in the molotov co*cktail,” he proclaimed.
The city was Budapest. The year was 1956. And the Hungarian dissidents, according to accounts in the Times and The Washington Post, were fighting an invasion by Soviet Russia.
More than a half-century later, the homemade weapon they hailed is the same one being mass-produced by Ukrainian citizens today to battle the Russian invasion of their country.
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The molotov co*cktail — or petrol bomb, or gasoline bomb — is a simple device consisting of a glass bottle of incendiary fluid like gasoline with a cloth wick stuck in its mouth.
The wick is set afire. The bottle is thrown at a target, shattering on impact into a small lake of flaming gasoline.
In Ukraine, thousands of these makeshift hand grenades have been made, using soda, wine and beer bottles. Grated Styrofoam has been sometimes added, reportedly to make the flaming liquid sticky.
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The molotov co*cktail — so named by Finland during its war with Russia in 1939 and 1940 — has long been seen as the weapon of rebels, agitators and citizen soldiers.
It has been used for decades during street disturbances around in world, including in the United States, where protesters reportedly threw molotov co*cktails at police during recent unrest over the killings of Black men by White police officers.
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But the weapon was also featured in an official 1943 U.S. Army training film explaining how to destroy Nazi tanks, titled “Crack That Tank.”
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As a soldier in a foxhole demonstrates, a narrator (dressed as an army sergeant) explains: “Light the rag, heave the bottle so it busts on top of the tank and this is what you get.” The film shows a “co*cktail” exploding on a simulated tank.
“The burning gas pours through cracks and crevices in the tank,” the narrator says. “Nine times out of 10, it’ll find oil or grease or more gas inside.”
The device was heavily used by the Finnish army during its attempt to repel the Russian invasion in 1939 and 1940, according to the late American historian William R. Trotter, who chronicled the war in his 2000 book, “Frozen Hell.”
Russia had attacked Finland because the Finns refused demands for Finnish territory that would help protect Russia from a potential attack by Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Trotter wrote. The Finns fought bravely but were eventually overwhelmed, despite the molotov co*cktail.
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“The Finnish version was … powerful, consisting of a blend of gasoline, kerosene, tar, and chloride of potassium, ignited not by a dishrag but by an ampul of sulfuric acid taped to the bottle’s neck,” Trotter wrote.
“If a sufficient amount of flaming gasoline got sucked into the turret, there was a good chance it would ignite one or more rounds of ready ammo, which was usually stored in a rack near the main gun’s breech,” Trotter wrote in a separate essay posted on the Internet Archive.
“When that happened, the result was gruesome,” he wrote. “It was not the Molotov co*cktail itself that caused the destruction of so many tanks, but rather the secondary effects caused when its flames surged into the turret.”
The Finns supposedly named the molotov co*cktail after Vyacheslav Molotov, the Russian foreign minister at the time.
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Molotov had claimed that Russian planes bombing Finland were actually dropping humanitarian supplies as the Russian army was “liberating” the country, Trotter wrote in his essay.
The Finns thus called the bombs “Molotov’s Picnic Baskets,” which supposedly led them to call their gasoline bombs molotov co*cktails, Trotter wrote.
The best bottles, he wrote, were found to be the one-liter vodka bottles made at the State Liquor Factory, in Rajamäki, Finland, just north of Helsinki, the capital. There, thousands of the co*cktails were made.
“Working brutally long hours, 87 women and five men hand-crafted 542,194 Molotov co*cktails,” Trotter wrote. “And their product is credited with destroying approximately 350 Soviet tanks and other vehicles.”
But it was the Hungarian dissidents, rebelling against the oppression of their Russian-backed government a decade and a half later, whom Trotter says used the molotov co*cktail most effectively.
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“It was the Molotov co*cktail that enabled them to briefly seize control of central Budapest,” he wrote in his essay.
A Budapest newspaper sent the Associated Press office in Vienna teletyped messages at the height of the fighting. “Young people are making molotov co*cktails and hand grenades to fight the tanks,” one said. “We are quiet, not afraid.”
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By the time the two-week Hungarian uprising was crushed on Nov. 11, 1956, the street fighters of Budapest had destroyed 400 Soviet tanks, Trotter wrote. Three-quarters of them had been taken out with molotov co*cktails or similar devices.
The first reported use of the device by an organized armed force was in 1936 by the fascist forces of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War, Trotter wrote.
Franco won the war, and remained the repressive dictator of Spain for the next 35 years.
