Posted on 10/27/2014 6:00:03 AM PDT by C19fan
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.
Better known as the Battle of Passchendaele, hundreds of thousands of men occupied trenches, dugouts and underground tunnels on the front lines. 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.
But for many soldiers, they would face a weapon for the first time that the Germans had introduced just two years before. The Flammenwerfer—or, in English, the flamethrower.
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
I carried the M2A2 flamethrower when I was a PFC in 1965. Extremely capable weapon - we need them today when we fight battles at close quarters, like Fallujah.
Horrific weapon.
Unfortunately, you’re only one shot away from a very horrific death.
Perhaps a binary fuel mix?
Flame On!
It would help in both saving our guys lives and discouraging the bad guys.
It is foolish that we gave up the weapon. War is hell. The more gruesome and violent it is, the less people will do it.
“The day when two army corps can annihilate each other in one second, all civilized nations, it is to be hoped, will recoil from war and discharge their troops.”
- Alfred Nobel
Yes it was/is. One had to have big balls of steel to be a flame thrower operator - at least as I see it. Walking out there in the open, mostly, and one good hit could like you up like the Macy’s Christmas tree.
It was a very worthwhile weapon. It carried about 9-10 seconds of fuel per loading and you could shoot gasoline (large billowing flame, about 20m range ), diesel (longer stream of flame, lots of thick black smoke), or napalm (very long stream - 35m or so - sticks to the target).
For screening troops to cross streets under fire, nothing better. For suppressing machine gun positions, superb. You could even deflect the flame around corners with some practice.
Good for making Jihadis re-think their career objectives.
> Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps, objected to the battle, fearing it could not be won without a terrible expenditure in lives, but Haig was desperate for a symbolic victory and insisted on the effort, believing that even a limited victory would help to salvage the campaign. Having no choice but to attack, Currie prepared carefully for the fight, understanding that deliberate preparation, especially for his artillery and engineers, was the key to advancing over this shattered landscape.
http://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/history/battles-and-fighting/land-battles/passchendaele/
According to the page, the Canadian force of 100,000 lost almost 16,000; that’s a trustworthy figure, but the German figure appears to be the inflated wartime official propaganda of the British gov’t, which insisted that the Germans and Austrians were “running out of men”. If the German wartime losses had been that high, there would have *been* no second World War.
If german losses had been that much, the Ludendorff
spring offensive would not have been half as successful.
It was all for naught anyway.
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