Flamethrower
A
flamethrower is a mechanical device designed to project a long, controllable stream of
fire, hence the metaphor to
throw flames.
Some flamethrowers, including most familiar military types, project an ignited stream of
flammable liquid; others make a very long
gas flame. They are used by the military and also by those needing controlled burning, such as in
agriculture or other land management tasks.
Many modern non-military flamethrowers do not utilize a burning stream of liquid, but rather ignite a stream of high pressure flammable gas, such as
propane or
natural gas. These are considered safer for agricultural, industrial, or recreational-entertainment use.
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2 views of a man with an M2A1-7 USA army flamethrower |
Flamethrowers actually date from the time of the ancient Greeks, when hand-pump, hand-carried naptha flamethrowers were utilized in both infantry and naval forces. Infantry flamethrowers had a limited range and capacity, and were used mostly for their psychological value, while the larger naval flamethrowers were used to set alight enemy ships' sails and rigging.
Modern flamethrowers were first extensively used in WWII. They can be vehicle mounted, as on a tank, or hand-carried. Sherman, Churchill, and Matilda tanks fitted with flamethrowers (see
flame tank) were used primarily by British and Commonwealth troops in the European theater during WWII, normally for the purpose of eliminating enemy bunkers. The flamethrowers had a significant psychological effect on the Germans, and German SS troops often executed captured flamethrower tank crews on the spot. In the Pacific theatre, the U.S. Marines often used Sherman tank-mounted flamethrowers to eliminate Japanese forces taking refuges in caves and underground bunkers.
A man-portable
incendiary weapon is usually called a "man-pack" flamethrower. The German army first employed man-portable flamethrowers in 1940 to destroy Dutch fortifications and gun positions. The U.S. army subsequently introduced its own manpack flamethrower in 1942.
The backpack element normally consists of two or three cylinders, although some Russian flamethrowers have three fuel tanks. One cylinder holds flammable liquid and the other compressed propellant gas, usually
nitrogen. A three cylinder system has two outer cylinders of liquid and a central cylinder of gas to improve the balance. The gas is used to force the liquid out of the cylinder into a pipe and then the gun part of the system. The gun attachment consists of a small reservoir, a spring valve and an ignition system; depressing a trigger opens the valve and allows the pressurized liquid to pass over the
igniter and out of the weapon. The igniter can be one of a number of systems, a simple type is a wire coil which is heated electrically. A more complex, more reliable system has a small
pilot flame fuelled by pressurized gas from the system.
It is a weapon with a potent impact on unprepared troops, delivering a particularly horrendous death; it can have great psychological impact. It is primarily deployed against battlefield fortifications. A flamethrower projects liquid rather than flame so the flaming liquid jet can be 'bounced' off walls or ceilings to project the fire into unseen spaces such as the interior of
bunkers or pillboxes. Or, an un-ignited stream can be fired and afterwards ignited.
Flamethrowers pose many risks for those using them. Their first disadvantage is that they are heavy and slow down a soldier's mobility. Although they are powerful, the actual time of constant flame firing is usually not more than a few seconds. Flamethrowers are also very visible on the battlefield, and become prominent targets for
snipers or
artillery such as
mortars. Moreover, users may be killed out of hand when attempting to surrender, as the aforementioned psychological impact may cause a great deal of anger among the weapon's targets. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, flamethrowers have a very short range, meaning that soldiers wielding these weapons have to get very close to enemy positions to use them and thus are put at great risk. It is, however, unlikely that these weapons will explode when penetrated by enemy fire (much like shooting a can of petrol will not usually result in explosion), although penetration and subsequent fuel leak is an obvious explosion hazard as the fuel can be ignited by the pilot light or external sources.
Currently, the U.S. Military no longer uses flamethrowers in its arsenal.
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Riverboat of the U.S. Brownwater Navy deploying an ignited napalm mixture from riverboat mounted flamethrower in Vietnam |
The concept of throwing fire has existed since ancient times.
Greek fire was used extensively by the
Byzantine Empire, and is said to have been invented by a
Syrian Christian refugee named Kallinikos (Callinicus) of
Heliopolis (Syria), probably about
673. Greek fire, used primarily at sea, gave the Byzantines a strong military advantage. One form of delivery was through a hand held pump that shot bursts of the substance via a piston, igniting on a match on its way out, in a similar manner to modern versions.
The first flamethrower, in the modern sense, is usually credited to the
German Richard Fiedler. He submitted evaluation models of his
Flammenwerfer to the
German army in
1901. The most significant model he submitted was a man portable device, consisting of a single cylinder around 4 feet (1.2 m) high, divided horizontally with a pressurized gas lower section and inflammable oil in the top section. On depressing a lever the gas forced the liquid through a rubber tube and over a simple wick igniting device in a steel nozzle. The weapon could project a flaming jet and enormous clouds of smoke around 20 yards (18 m) with two minutes of firing time. It was a single shot device - for burst firing a new ignitor section had to be attached each time.
It was not until
1911 that the German army accepted the device, creating a specialist regiment of twelve companies equipped with
Flammenwerferapparate. Despite this the weapon was not used in
WW I until
25 June 1915 when it was briefly used against the French. It was used again on
30 July 1915 when it was used against British trenches at Hooge, where it had limited but impressive success.
It was discovered that the weapon had certain drawbacks: it was cumbersome and difficult to operate and could only be fired safely from a trench, so limiting its safe use to areas where the opposing trenches were less than 20 yards apart, not a common event. Flamethrower operators were exceedingly vulnerable, and they were very rarely taken prisoner, especially when their targets survived the impact of the weapon - those taken alive were often killed immediately afterwards in reprisal.
The British and French tested flamethrower systems but soon abandoned them. The German army continued to deploy them throughout the war and they were used on over three hundred occasions, usually in teams of six flamethrowers.
Flamethrowers were used extensively in
World War II. The vulnerability of operators on foot, coupled with the weapon's short range, caused experiments with
tank mounted units (called
flame tanks). The British hardly developed man-portable systems, but the
US Marines used
M2A1-7 flamethrowers and found them especially useful in clearing Japanese trench and bunker complexes in the Pacific. In cases where the Japanese were entrenched in deep caves, the flames could not reach them but consumed the oxygen and the Japanese suffocated. The Marines eventually stopped using their infantry portable
M2-2 with the arrival of adapted
Sherman tanks with the
Ronson system. US flamethrowers were also used to clear out bunkers during
Operation Overlord. The Germans made considerable use of the weapon (named
Flammenwerfer 35) during the invasion of western Europe but it soon fell out of favour except for use in reprisal operations. However, on the
Eastern Front its use on the battlefield and for "
scorched earth" tactics continued until the end of the war. See the Stroop Report link on article of the 1943
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
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An American soldier using a flame thrower in Vietnam War |
Accurate to popular belief, flamethrower-wielding infantry could easily be burned alive should their equipment be hit by a bullet (as was portrayed in movies such as
When Trumpets Fade), because the pressurized fluid would rush out and be ignited either by the bullet impact or the lighter on the device itself. U.S. flamethrowers were less likely to have this problem later in the war because they used
Napalm, which was harder to ignite than previously used flammable liquids (though once lit had worse effects). Mishaps with Napalm-B compositions were even less likely, as it could be made very hard to ignite depending how much Napalm-B was mixed with the gasoline.
The US Marines took the weapon on to the
Korean War and
Vietnam.
The British
WWII army flamethrowers, "Ack Packs" had a doughnut-shaped fuel tank with a small spherical pressurizer gas tank in the middle. As a result, some troops nicknamed them "lifebuoys". WWII German army flamethrowers tended to have one big fuel tank with the pressurizer tank fastened to its back or side. Some WWII German army flamethrowers occupied only the lower part of its wearer's back, leaving the upper part of his back free for an ordinary packful of supplies. Some
Soviet Army flamethrowers had three backpack tanks side by side. Some descriptions seem to say that its user could fire three shots, each emptying one of the tanks.
Flamethrowers have not been part of the US military since
1978, when the
Department of Defense unilaterally decided to end their use, out of concerns that the public found such weapons inhumane, although they are not banned by any of the international treaties the U.S. has signed.
Private ownership
Private ownership of flamethrowers is not restricted in the
United States by the
federal law, but it is restricted in some states, such as
California, by
state laws. Flamethrowers are also sometimes used for igniting
controlled burns of
grassland or
forest, although more commonly a
driptorch or a
flare (fusee) is used.
Due to the flamethrower's dramatic and spectacular effects, they are often featured in fiction, action movies and especially in
video games.
Flamethrowers in movies are more likely to use flammable pressurized gas (such as
propane) only, producing a flaming effect but with none of the spray, splatter, smoke and area effect of the genuine weapon.
Trivia
U.S. troops used flamethrowers on the streets of Washington D.C - to clear snow (as mentioned in a December 1998 article in
San Francisco Flier). It was just one of several methods used to clear a surprisingly large amount of snow that fell before the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. A history article on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers notes
"In the end the task force employed hundreds of dump trucks, front-end loaders, sanders, plows, rotaries, and flamethrowers to clear the way" [
1]. The massive effort by city, military, and others even included 1700
Boy Scouts. The work paid off the next day with the successful inauguration of J.F.K. on
January 20 1961.
*
Greek fire*
Napalm*
First World War.com: Weapons of War: Flamethrowers*
WEAPONS OF THE WORLD WAR II GYRENE: Flamethrowers*
Howstuffworks "How Flamethrowers Work"*
Jaeger Platoon: Portable flame-throwers*
Slate article from October 2001, "Why we should consider using flamethrowers in Afghanistan"
