The TERRIFYING Job of WWI Flamethrower Operators

The TERRIFYING Job of WWI Flamethrower Operators There is a reason the German Army called them the Death's Head Pioneers, and it was not because they wanted a dramatic name for a pamphlet. It was because everyone involved, the men, their commanders, the soldiers on the other side of the wire, understood the basic arithmetic of the job. You strap a tank of pressurized burning oil to your back. You walk to the front of the assault. And then every enemy soldier on that section of line, every sniper who has been watching the German parapet since dawn, every Allied officer who has briefed his men on what to do when they see a man with a distinctive circular backpack coming toward them: all of them have one priority. You. The Garde-Reserve-Pionier-Regiment launched over 650 flamethrower attacks across the First World War. By 1918, 890 of their own men were dead, killed by enemy fire, by wounds, by accidents, and in some cases by the equipment they were carrying when nothing on the other side had even fired yet. Reddemann, the man who built the regiment, counted every name himself. After the war, his men published a death book. Not a casualty report. A book of names. There is a difference, and the men who made it knew what that difference was. This is the story of what it actually meant to do that job. Not what the weapon did to the enemy, though we will get to that, and it is not something you will find easy to set aside. What it meant to be the man carrying it. What it weighed. What it smelled like before you ever reached the front. What you knew going in that most soldiers in that war never had to know. And what the men who did it left behind when they were gone, which in most cases was a name in a book and nothing else. To understand how this job came to exist at all, you have to go back to 1901, and a Berlin engineer named Richard Fiedler who had been thinking about nozzles. Fiedler was not a military man. He was interested in the mechanics of spraying liquids under pressure, industrial work, the kind of problem that has nothing to do with warfare until someone notices that a pressurized stream of flammable oil, directed at a target and ignited, does something that no other weapon at that time could do. In 1901 he patented the design, presented evaluation models to the German Army, and received funding to continue development. The Army was interested. They were also in no particular hurry. It took another decade before they formally adopted the weapon and formed three specialist pioneer battalions around it in 1911. The flammenwerfer existed. What nobody had yet worked out was what to do with it.