First flamethrower attack

On 26 February 1915, in the Malancourt wood on the west bank of the Meuse, north-west of Verdun, the Germans attacked French trenches with a new weapon. The experimental detachment of Landwehr Major Bernhard Reddemann drenched the enemy positions with jets of burning liquid from flamethrowers. The British, who encountered the weapon themselves a few months later, called it liquid fire. This attack is usually regarded as the first combat use of flamethrowers in this war.

The fireman and the pyrotechnist

The idea of the flamethrower was developed in Germany by two men. At the beginning of the 20th century the pyrotechnist Richard Fiedler offered the army a device that used compressed gas to project a jet of burning oil through a lance. Bernhard Reddemann was a reserve officer of the pioneers and a professional fireman, chief of the fire brigade in Posen and later in Leipzig. According to accounts, as early as manoeuvres near Posen in 1907 he defended a fort with fire hoses, and he then began experimenting with burning liquids. The German army adopted two types of flamethrower: a large one, operated by several soldiers, and a smaller one carried on the back.

Flamethrowers were regarded as equipment for taking fortresses and were assigned to pioneer units. According to some sources the Germans had tried to use burning liquid as early as the autumn of 1914 in the Argonne, but these first attempts had little effect and the equipment was withdrawn from the front. Reddemann, however, was convinced that the new weapon could give the infantry an advantage in trench warfare. At the turn of 1914 and 1915 he was entrusted with forming a special unit. According to the most commonly cited figures it numbered 48 volunteers, many of them firemen.

“It was hell”

Under cover of darkness the pioneers carried the heavy tanks, apparatus and hoses through communication trenches to the front line opposite the Malancourt wood. At the appointed moment, according to some accounts at noon, they opened the valves. On a sector about 700 metres wide, where the opposing trenches were between a dozen or so and about 35 metres apart, a dozen or more devices hurled fire at the French positions. Reddemann later described how twelve jets of flame flew with a loud hiss over the enemy parapet, and cries of pain rang out on the other side. Those who did not catch fire leapt out of the trench and ran. One of the captured French officers is said to have exclaimed: “It was hell!”.

The German infantry took the French trenches without difficulty. It was, however, only a local experiment, without the forces that could have exploited the success. Fighting in the Malancourt wood continued on 27 February, and fire from French units halted further German progress. The number of casualties of this attack is uncertain.

A new kind of weapon

The success convinced the German command. As early as March 1915 Reddemann was given a larger unit, the 3rd Guards Pioneer Battalion, whose companies were equipped with flamethrowers. He was backed by the Crown Prince Wilhelm, commander of the 5th Army, in whose sector Malancourt lay. From then on flamethrower sections were assigned to attacks on particularly difficult positions, and from the summer of 1915 the British also encountered them in Flanders.

The French quickly began building their own flamethrowers. The first French attack using them, carried out in June 1915 at Vauquois by sappers drawn from the Paris fire brigade, ended in failure, however. The Germans remained the masters of this weapon until the end of the war. In the following years their flamethrower pioneers carried out hundreds of attacks.