Apologies if this has been asked before, a reddit search turned up nothing.
Sticky bombs - socks with explosives covered in something sticky - were shown in Saving Private Ryan and in the game Company of Heroes. But I've never heard of this in any history book, nor read it in any field manual. And according to Tom Hanks, its in the manual.
So was this a real thing, or Hollywood at it's best?
I can't find any reference to sock-based explosives in a contemporary Field Manual, so the film might be conflating two British grenades: the No. 74 Sticky Bomb and No. 82 Gammon Bomb.
The sticky bomb was hastily developed in 1940 as an anti-tank weapon. It consisted of a glass sphere filled with explosives and covered with adhesive, with a metal shell and handle fitted. The shell was removed just before the bomb was thrown or placed on an enemy tank as [demonstrated by the Home Guard] (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205199041). The adhesive was, as the name suggests, very sticky (a series of IWM photographs of the production process [include one in which] (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205200160) "... the director, Mr A L Sinclair (holding the sticky bomb) and the technical manager, Mr H K Hartley (wearing a white coat) discuss ways in which to make the already very sticky adhesive even stickier") so they had to be handled with care lest they stick to the grenadier with less-than-hilarious consequences. US Rangers like Hanks in the film may have been familiar with sticky bombs as they were used during the Anzio campaign of early 1944 ("Lacking antitank guns or heavy weapons, the Rangers fought back with bazookas and sticky grenades. One enemy tank was quickly set aflame. As a second tank rumbled down on a squad commanded by Sgt. Thomas B. Fergen, he hit it with a sticky grenade. One of his men blasted it with a bazooka and another finished the tank off by climbing up on it and dropping a grenade down the turret.", American Forces in Action Series: Anzio Beachhead, from the Historical Division of the War Department).
The sock part of the bomb in the film more resembles a [Gammon bomb] (http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30019919), named for its inventor Capt. 'Jock' Gammon. This consisted of a stockinette bag fitted with a fuze and filled with explosives but it didn't have a sticky covering, it exploded on impact. According to [Tony Hibbert's memoirs] (https://paradata.org.uk/articles/major-tony-hibberts-account-early-days-no-2-commando-and-11-sas-battalion) "Apparently part of his research involved saving up his girlfriends' discarded stockings!" They were used by both British and US airborne troops (Gammon bombs, that is, not the stockings), I'm not sure about Rangers.