In 1901, German inventor Richard Fiedler developed the first Flammenwerfer. He worked steadily with others from 1908 to 1914, refining the weapon’s design and creating two versions for battlefield use. “It is hoped that it is less frightfully inhuman than it seems.” “The most dramatic hand weapon of World War II and the most effective for its purpose was the flamethrower,” Edwin Tunis wrote in Weapons: A Pictorial History, his classic compilation of weapons through the ages. Even today, Russia still has flamethrowers in its inventory. The result is a device with as much psychological impact as lethality-perhaps the chief reason why United States, Great Britain and other world powers used the flamethrower from World War I through the Vietnam War. Germans soldiers with flamethrowers in World War Iīut during the 20th century, engineers and scientists placed flames under advanced technological control in an effort to make fire-spouting weapons portable, reliable and reasonably safe-a different kind of “friendly fire” that would not kill the operator while he was doing his best to kill the enemy with a weaponized inferno. The order “set fire the village” is as old as military history. Medieval sieges almost always included hurling “fire pots” over the walls of fortified towns or castles in an effort to start a conflagration. Fifth-century Greeks during the Peloponnesian War developed a bellows-powered device that squirted flaming liquid at an enemy.
“Under the protection of these hideous weapons the enemy surrounded the advance pillbox, stormed it and killed the garrison.”įire on the battlefield is nothing new. “When the nozzles were lighted, they threw out a roaring, hissing flame 20 or 30 feet long, swelling at the end to an oily rose, six feet in diameter,” Guy Chapman, a British infantryman at Passchendale, recalled years later in an account about one such assault. Carried by specially trained assault teams, German flamethrowers were highly effective weapons that would either drive men from their defensive positions … or simply incinerate them.
The Flammenwerfer-or, in English, the flamethrower. Among the British forces there were many seasoned infantrymen who could claim to have seen all the technological terrors so far gathered together on World War I battlefields-machine gun fire, poison gas, strafing and bombing by aircraft.īut for many soldiers, they would face a weapon for the first time that the Germans had introduced just two years before. Between July and November of 1917, one of the greatest disasters of the Great War unfolded near the Belgian town of Ypres, where the British and their allies fought the Germans for control of some ridges running through Flanders.īetter known as the Battle of Passchendaele, hundreds of thousands of men occupied trenches, dugouts and underground tunnels on the front lines.
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