The German produced Kleinflammenwerfer is probably the most feared weapon in military history, but how it was actually invented and what it did to the soldiers who were ordered to carry it into battle is a story that almost nobody talks about. So, we’re going to tell you everything about the horrors their respective operators faced, but I have to warn you, what you’re about to hear is hard to stomach.
During World War I, every side was searching for the weapon that could finally end the deadlock of trench warfare and Germany found theirs in one of the oldest fears known to mankind, which is fire. See, humans had been weaponizing fire for over a thousand years already because the Greeks, Byzantines, and the Chinese had all used pressurized flaming oil in warfare going back to the 5th century BC.
But at the time, nobody had figured out how to make it portable enough for a single soldier to carry onto a battlefield and aim it like a rifle. That changed in 1901 when a Berlin engineer named Richard Fiedler realized that gasoline fired from a pressurized tank could be ignited and aimed as a controllable stream of burning fuel. He patented the design that same year and the German army began funding his work right away.
By 1905, he had built the prototype and only 7 years later it had been refined into a single cylinder design called the Kleinflammenwerfer, which means small flamethrower. Now, there were actually two versions of the weapon and they worked very differently. First was the Grossflammenwerfer, the larger static model that weighed about 75 kg when full and needed a crew of five to operate because it was way too heavy for one man to carry.
Operators would set it up in the forward trench and fire the burning fuel upward so that flames rained down into enemy positions rather than spraying flat across the top. It could sustain a jet of flame for about 40 seconds at a range of roughly 40 yards, but could not be moved once the fighting started. But the Grossflammenwerfer was nothing compared to its smaller counterpart when it came to horror.
The second version was the Kleinflammenwerfer and this was the one that would become truly infamous. It had a vertical cylindrical fuel tank worn as a backpack by one soldier with a high pressure propellant container attached to it and a long hose reinforced with corrugated steel wire running to a lance tube with an ignition device at the nozzle.
One soldier carried the tank and turned the fuel valve while a second soldier aimed the lance and pulled the firing valve sending burning fuel oil spraying outward at a range of 20 to 35 yards. In total, it required a four-man squad with two operators on the device, one officer directing the attack, and a grenadier to storm the position once the flames had done their work.
But in reality, it was a death sentence for nearly everyone involved. Before the flamethrower ever reached a real battlefield, it needed someone who understood how to use fire in combat and that turned out to be a former fire chief named Bernhard Redemann. Redemann had spent years running fire departments in Leipzig and Breslau, so he understood pressurized fuel and how fire spread through tight spaces better than any military officer.
He had also served in a German pioneer battalion, so he had the military background to match his knowledge of fire. So, when the First World War broke out in the trenches started forming, Redemann went back to active duty with a very specific idea. At the end of 1914, he formed the first flamethrower special force made up of just 48 men, mostly volunteers and former firefighters who already understood how fire moves.
But what happened when it finally saw combat would terrify both the victims and the operators in ways that nobody had prepared for. On February 26th of 1915, Redemann’s unit carried out its first attack against French trenches near Malancourt, just north of Verdun. His men carried their heavy iron gas tanks through trenches in darkness and set up 10 Grossflammenwerfer devices where the French positions were only 15 to 30 yards away.
Soldiers on the French side saw jets of burning fuel pouring over their positions and the psychological effect was instant because the fear of fire is one of the deepest instincts humans have. They then abandoned their trenches in panic and ran into the open, which was exactly what the Germans had counted on as a few machine gunners were waiting and opened fire.
You see, most casualties from flamethrower attacks were not actually caused by the flames at all because soldiers were so terrified of burning alive that they just jumped from cover and got cut down by rifle and machine gunfire instead. So, the flamethrower was as much a psychological weapon as a physical one and the Germans had just proven it could break a defensive line in a few minutes.
But the success at Malancourt was only the beginning of something much larger. Now, the German High Command wanted much more and Redemann’s unit grew quickly from 48 men into a full battalion by the second year of the war. Crown Prince Wilhelm became a major supporter of the program and personally observed demonstrations of the weapon.
Eventually, Redemann’s command expanded into the Guards Reserve Pioneer Regiment, a force of over 3,000 men in three battalions led by 80 officers and this became the main flamethrower formation in the German army for the rest of the war. After their 150th flame attack on July 28th of 1916, the regiment was awarded the Totenkopf insignia, a death’s head badge worn on the left sleeve of their uniforms marking their bravery.
Soldiers across all fronts came to know them as the Totenkopf Pioniere or the death’s head pioneers and they were one of the most feared units in the entire conflict. But what happened next to these men would turn out to be far more grim. The first large-scale flamethrower attack against British troops came on July 30th of 1915 at the Hooge Crater near Ypres in Belgium.
At 3:15 in the morning, the ruins of the Hooge stables were blown up and at the same time, the men of the 8th Rifle Brigade were hit with jets of burning fuel streaming from the Germans in the darkness. One British officer later described a sudden hissing sound followed by a bright crimson glare that turned the whole scene red with jets of flame shooting across the trench like powerful hoses spraying fire instead of water.
Believe it or not, the sky turned red while a bombardment of shells and machine guns hammered the ground between the front and support lines. So, what made Hooge so devastating was not the fire itself, it was the total panic it caused. British defenders were overwhelmed or forced back in confusion and after two days of heavy fighting to stabilize the line, they had lost 31 officers and 751 men in their first encounter with the flamethrower.
British generals called it an inhuman weapon and the German High Command was so impressed that it ordered flamethrower units expanded across all fronts immediately. But the most horrifying use of the flamethrower came during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, specifically during the fight for Fort Vaux.
You see, Fort Vaux was a concrete fortress in the ring of defenses around the city of Verdun that had been pounded by thousands of artillery shells per hour for weeks. On June 2nd, about 10,000 German troops launched a final assault and battalions from the 50th Division began scaling the outer structures of the fort. They lowered clusters of grenades in front of the gun slits and sealed up ventilation shafts and pumped in poison gas.
And then they brought in pioneers armed with the Kleinflammenwerfer. But what followed inside Fort Vaux was closer to a vision of hell than anything that belongs in human warfare. German pioneers fitted their flamethrowers with long curved tubes to direct burning fuel through doorways and ventilation openings into the corridors where 600 French soldiers were sheltering under Major Sylvain Eugène Raynal.
The burning fuel poured through the tight hallways and ignited everything it touched while producing thick oily black fumes that choked the men on both sides in total darkness. And at one entrance, the French actually managed to capture a German flamethrower and turned it right back on the attackers, which tells you something about how desperate the fighting inside that fort had become.
For five days, the French held on behind sandbag barriers fighting with grenades and bayonets while their water ran out completely. Raynal’s last carrier pigeon named Vaillant carried a desperate plea for help before dying from gas exposure during the flight and it later became the only bird ever decorated with the French Legion of Honor.
On June 7th, Raynal surrendered and the German Crown Prince was so impressed that he personally gave Raynal a replacement officer’s sword as a sign of respect. But then the flamethrower was used on a scale that nobody had ever seen before. On the Eastern Front in November 1916 at Skrobowa, Russia, the German 5th Reserve Division attacked a massive Russian trench network that stretched 4 km wide and nearly 1,000 m deep.
German forces deployed 216 Klein Flammenwerfer and 24 Grossflammenwerfer devices in a single coordinated assault, which is the largest flamethrower attack in the history of warfare. After a long artillery barrage, shock troops and flamethrower teams advanced ahead of six infantry battalions to storm the trenches and silence strong points.
It ended after just 1 hour with nearly 4,000 Russian prisoners taken along with machine guns and trench mortars. A German army commander later said the flamethrower units were of decisive importance to the entire victory. And by the end of the war, the Germans had launched over 650 flamethrower attacks across all fronts and Redemann’s record showed his troops were successful in more than 80% of them.
But those numbers hide something that the commanders preferred not to talk about. For all the terror the flamethrower caused to the enemy, it was arguably worse to be the soldier ordered to carry one. You see, you were strapping a tank full of pressurized fuel oil to your back with a container of highly compressed gas attached to it and that combination was about as volatile as it sounds.
Early models had a serious tendency to malfunction and leaking couplings or bullet punctures could cause the whole apparatus to engulf the operator inside a massive fireball without warning. There were cases where the lance operator was killed while firing and the burning stream would spin around and shower his own comrades in flames.
One French account from 1916 described how a single 75 mm artillery shell hit a fuel container and the blazing substance caught the operators who ran screaming. But the equipment was one thing, the real danger was what every enemy soldier wanted to do to you. The moment you fired a flamethrower, every soldier on that section knew where you were and was trying to kill you because there is nothing more visible than a 60-ft stream of burning fuel.
British and French troops learned quickly to concentrate all rifle fire on any area where flamethrowers appeared and snipers targeted the fuel tank carriers because they were so easy to spot. However, the hatred soldiers felt toward flamethrower operators went far beyond just wanting to stop the weapon. You see, burning to death is widely considered one of the worst ways to die because it is far from quick and soldiers who had watched their comrades burn alive developed a hatred that had very real consequences.
Flamethrower operators were in many cases executed on the spot if captured. But as sick as this sounds, it was simply an understood reality on both sides of the war. If you carried a flamethrower and you were taken alive, you were almost certainly going to be killed anyway and every operator knew this before they went into combat.
Redemann himself recorded only 890 deaths among the thousands of men who served under his command during the four years of the war, which might sound high until you remember these men were always at the very front of every assault. His officers also learned that not everyone had the steady nerves to do this work and the regiment was strictly volunteer-based because many men who tried simply could not handle the psychological weight of what the weapon did to other human beings at such a close range. So, the Totenkopf pioneers
were in a terrible position because they were hated by the enemy who shot them on sight, feared by their own side who were glad not to be carrying that equipment, and haunted by what they saw their weapon do every time they fired it. But then something unexpected happened. The Allies copied the Flammenwerfer and made their own version.
The British experimented with a truly enormous design called the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector for the Battle of the Somme in 1916, and these things weighed about 2 tons each. They built four of them directly into a forward trench that had been secretly dug in no man’s land just 60 yards from the German line, assembling each one piece by piece over many nights.
Two of the four were destroyed by enemy shells before the Somme even began on July 1st, 1916, and the remaining two were used as planned with a range of about 90 yards. Both were effective at clearing trenches directly in front of them, but provided absolutely no wider benefit, and the British abandoned massive static flame devices after that.
The French developed their own one-man flamethrower called the Schilt, which was used in trench attacks during 1917 and 1918, and the Germans kept improving their own designs and produced the Wechselapparat in 1917, a lighter model that could self-ignite, but had a range of only 15 to 20 yards. But, what really mattered was how the Germans combined it with their new assault tactics.
Redemann’s pioneers did not fight as a single regiment, but instead detached companies to support attacks wherever they were needed alongside stormtrooper units. During the Spring Offensive of 1918, the regiment saw its heaviest action with 105 attacks between March and July as Germany tried to win before American troops arrived. By 1916, flamethrowers were also being used against Allied tanks and sometimes alongside poison gas, which created combinations that were nightmarish for the soldiers on the receiving end.
Despite all of this tactical success, the flamethrower could never win on its own. Its range was always desperately short, which meant the operators had to get within pistol distance before they could even fire, and it could only sustain flames for 20 to 40 seconds before the fuel ran out. After the war ended on November 11th of 1918, every major army in the world developed its own versions for the next conflict, and improved models were used on an even larger scale during World War II.
In the Pacific, the Americans used flamethrowers to clear Japanese soldiers from caves and bunkers on islands like Iwo Jima where regular infantry simply could not reach them. British mounted flamethrowers on Churchill tanks, which could spray fire over 140 yards, making them some of the most feared vehicles on the battlefield.
There were even documented cases of German units executing captured British flame tank crews on site because the hatred of fire as a weapon followed the flamethrower from one war straight into the next. But, gradually over the decades that followed, a flamethrower began to disappear from the world’s arsenals. The United States banned the tactical use of flame weapons in 1978, and today most military forces no longer deploy them against human targets.
The flamethrower was a weapon equally despised by the soldiers it was aimed at and the soldiers ordered to carry it, and that might be the most telling thing about it. It took a brave man to strap bulky tanks of fuel and compressed gas onto his back and step into the line of fire knowing that everyone on the battlefield wanted him dead more than anyone else, and knowing that capture meant certain death.
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