On July 30th, 1915, at a ruined château in Belgium called Hooge, the German Army deployed a weapon that had never been seen on the Western Front. Within minutes, a British battalion broke. Not from shells or gas; from fire.
In Episode 27, we trace the full arc of the flamethrower in the First World War: from its terrifying debut at Hooge, through the doctrinal revolution that transformed it from a shock weapon into a precision tool of combined arms warfare, to its central role in the chaos of Passchendaele and the hammer blow of the German Spring Offensive in 1918.
At the heart of this story is the Garde-Reserve-Pionier-Regiment – the specialist assault unit built around Bernhard Reddemann’s vision of what fire could do to a defensive line – and the Canadian Corps, which faced German flamethrower teams in some of the most brutal engagements of the war.
We look at how the CEF learned to fight back, the brutal simplicity of the counter-doctrine they developed, and what it actually took to hold your ground when liquid fire was coming toward you across a Belgian mud crater.
It’s a story about a weapon. But more than that, it’s a story about adaptation: how armies learn, how soldiers function through primal fear, and how even the most terrifying technology eventually meets its ceiling.
Training footage showing a mock “combined stationary and pouncing attack” [“vereinten stehenden und springenden Angriff”] of the Garde-Reserve-Pionier-Regiment (Flammenwerfer). A type of attack that utilized both large emplaced and small portable flamethrowers (Grof and Wex in this instance). The large flamethrowers were fired at the enemy first lines while shock troops armed with portable flamethrowers, rifles, grenades, etc. rushed towards the trenches to roll and mop them up.
Here is footage of Sturmbataillon Nr. 2 training with elements of the Garde-Reserve-Pionier-Regiment at Wasigny in March 1918, in preparation for the Spring offensives.
Primary Sources
• War Diary, 5th Canadian Mounted Rifles, June 2–4, 1916 (Library and Archives Canada)
• Captain J.H. Symonds, message to 5th CMR HQ, June 2, 1916 (as recorded in 5th CMR War Diary)
• War Diary, 4th Canadian Mounted Rifles, January 24, 1916 (Flammenwerfer demonstration record)
Official Histories
• G.W.L. Nicholson, Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–1919 (Department of National Defence,
1962), Chapter V “The St. Eloi Craters and Mount Sorrel, 1916,” pp. 149–153 — explicit
confirmation of flame projector use against the 1st and 4th CMR on June 2, 1916
• Lord Beaverbrook, Canada in Flanders, Volume II (cited in Nicholson)
Secondary Sources
• Dr. Tim Cook, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914–1916 (2007)
• Dr. Tim Cook, Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917–1918 (2008)
• Dr. Spencer Jones (ed.), Stemming the Tide: Officers and Leadership in the British Expeditionary
Force 1914 (2013)
• Mark Zuehlke, “Retaking the high ground,” Legion Magazine (June 2021) — independent
confirmation of flame projector use at Mount Sorrel
• Paul Cornish, “Flamethrower,” 1914–1918-Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World
War (Imperial War Museums, 2016) — verified 105 attacks figure
• Thomas Wictor, German Flamethrower Pioneers of World War I (2007)
• Vimy Foundation, Sanctuary Wood and Mont Sorrel
• Canadian Centre for the Great War, “It Was Simply Hell!” (2021)
• Channel 4 Time Team, “The Lost Weapon of the Somme” (2011) — Centre for Battlefield
Archaeology, University of Glasgow (Pollard, Banks, Barton, Banning)
• Imperial War Museum, Hooge after-action record
