Grappling hook

Design

A common design has a central shaft with a hole ("eye") at the shaft base to attach the rope, and three or four equally spaced hooks at the end, arranged so that at least one is likely to catch on some protuberance of the target. Some modern designs feature folding hooks to resist unwanted attachment. Most grappling hooks are thrown by hand, but some used in rescue work are propelled by compressed air (e.g., the Plumett AL-52), line thrower, mortar, or a rocket.

Applications

Military

Grappling hooks are used by combat engineers to breach tactical obstacles. When used as such, the grappling hook is launched in front of an obstacle and dragged backwards to detonate tripwire-fused land mines, and can be hooked on wire obstacles and pulled to set off booby traps on the wire. The rifle-launched grapnel (LGH), a single-use grappling hook placed on the end of an M4/M16 rifle, is used for this purpose. A crossbow-launched version has been produced. A grapnel can clear up to 99% of the trip-wires in a single pass. In WW1, the Russian pilot Alexander Kazakov once unsuccessfully attempted to use a grappling hook to bring down a German spy plane. During WW2 British and German ships towed grappling hooks in the hope of snagging or damaging enemy submarines, a tactic also employed by the Japanese. Grappling hooks were used by soldiers at the D-Day landings to aid in climbing the cliffs at the Normandy beaches. Some were rocket-propelled and launched from mortars.

Maritime

As well as the grapnel anchor, grapnels are used in the removal and repair of subsea cables. Large cable layer ships drag huge grapnels across the seabed until they snag a cable. They tend to have 4 more evenly spaced out hooks.

In popular culture

Grappling hooks, grapple guns, and their many variants have been a staple in many video games as well as some cartoons like Phineas and Ferb.

References

References

1. "The Roman Navy and the Grappling Hook".
2. "Naval Warfare".
3. "Boarding Hooks".
4. War in the Streets by Michael Dewar (Author)Publisher. David & Charles; Publication date. 30 Jan. 1992; {{ISBN. 0715394770
5. (September–December 1999). "The Launch Grapnel Hook (LGH)".
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7. (15 July 2011). "SAA International, Ltd.".
8. Field Manual 3–34.2 ''Combined Arms Breaching Operations.'' 31 August 2000. Para. C-57 and Table C-2
9. (22 May 2018). "Aleksandr Kozakov: The Tsar's Ace".
10. "A Brief History of Anti-Submarine Warfare".
11. (2007). "The USS Puffer in World War II: A History of the Submarine and Its Wartime Crew". McFarland.
12. Ladd, James. (1 January 1979). "Commandos and Rangers of World War II".
13. (17 October 2016). "Rudder's Rangers and the Boys of Pointe du Hoc: The U.S. Army Rangers' Mission in the Early Morning Hours of 6 June 1944".
14. (2013). "Subsea Cables – Maintenance / Repair Operations". KIS-ORCA.
15. (20 July 2018). "30 years ago, Bionic Commando proved video game grappling hooks are awesome".