The Dead in June 05: Flammenwerfer

In today's article, I'm going to be talking about another weapon used in World War One and this one has significance in the narrative of The Eyes of the Dead. I'll say no more than that though because otherwise that would spoil things.

The First World War saw the introduction of the flamethrower onto the battlefield by the German army. The name, flamethrower, deriving from the German, flammenwerfer. It was invented in 1901 by Richard Fiedler. It consisted of a vertical single cylinder that was four feet in length and then horizontally divided in two. Pressurized gas was stored in the lower compartment of the device and the flammable oil in the upper compartment. By depressing a lever on the device, the gas acted a propellant, driving the oil through the attached hose. Once it reached the steel nozzle at the end of hose, the wick would be activated and the stream of oil would be ignited. The fire and smoke produced would spread over an area of twenty yards. Though a devastating weapon, in psychological and real terms, it was only capable of firing once before the ignition wick in the nozzle needed replacing.

A regiment was created, the Flammenwerferapparaten, but it was not deployed until in 1915. The first deployment, in teams of six, was against the French outside Verdun in February and the first concerted action involving the flamethrower was against the British at the Hooge Crater in July.

The flamethrower was however cumbersome and difficult to operate, which meant that the Flammenwerferapparaten would often have to operate it from the relative security of their own trenches. With the range of the flamethrower being limited to twenty yards, it could not therefore be used in places where the enemy lines were at a greater distance than this. Additionally, the fuel would only last for two minutes before being spent.

The British attempted to employ fire by using the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, which was fifty-six feet in length and weighed in at two and a half tons. A carrying party of three hundred men was required to transport all of the components to the front line where it was assembled and operated by a team of eight. As it was constructed, it was placed in a shallow tunnel cut into the boggy earth of no man's land. The long chamber containing the fuel was below ground whilst a fourteen inch pipe and nozzle were on the surface. At the rear of the device was a piston that drove compressed gas into the chamber and then the fuel was pushed out through the pipe in a similar manner to the flammenwerfer and then directed towards the target by the operators.

Four Livens Projectors were deployed at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Two were destroyed before they could be used but the two that survived have been credited with reducing British casualties in their respective areas. Considering the heavy losses that were otherwise experienced during this notorious offensive, the projectors must have seemed like a blessing to those who survived.

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