The US M-2 Backpack Flamethrower

The modern flamethrower was actually a German invention. The Kaiser's Flammenwerfer was invented in 1901 and saw extensive use on all fronts by the Imperial German Army in World War One. Several countries had added the flamethrower in their own indigenous design to their arsenal and it showed up in combat again in the Spanish Civil War and the Italio-Ethiopian War. By the opening stages of World War Two most modern militaries fielded a portable backpack style flamethrower. The United States began using flamethrowers in 1940. The initial US design, labeled the M-1 used a mix of diesel and gasoline propelled by hydrogen and ignited by an electric ignition system. It could shoot a flame some 10-15 yards and was thought impractical for open combat use. The igniter often failed and handlers would be forced to light their fire stream by hand. Even though not the best of designs some 14,000 of the M-1s were built in 1942-43, most of which went to the US Army. A redesign led to the M-2 in 1943 which replaced the obsolete M-1 in use and stayed as the primary flamethrower with the US and allied militaries for nearly a half century.

Use of the M2 Flamethrower

The M-2 was a safer and more efficient weapon over the M-1. It had a better ignition system, carried a napalm-gasoline mixture as a pyrotechnic and used nitrogen as a propulsion method. It could fire a stream of flame that burned at 1200 F up to 120 feet from the muzzle of the wand to the target. Empty, the device weighed 43 pounds, loaded with 4 gallons of fuel it weighed 68. This fuel load up would allow the handler to fire five bursts of flame. With the dug-in pillboxes set up by the Japanese forces in the Pacific, the flamethrower came into its niche. These weapons formed a lynchpin in the "corkscrew and blowtorch' tactics developed for use in the Marines island-hopping campaigns of 1944-45. By the end of the war each US Marine Corps regiment was issued 81 of the weapons. Flamethrower operator Corporal Hershel Williams won the Congressional Medal of Honor for risking fire to wipe out a machinegun nest with his weapon on Iwo Jima. The M-2 was also used in the European theater but in much smaller numbers. After the end of World War Two most of the inventory was given away to Allied countries or destroyed.

The Flame Thrower After WW II

Although augmented by the very similar M9A1-7 flamethrower from 1956 onward, the M-2 and its variants were never fully replaced. Post World War Two use with the US Army and Marines included service in the Korean Conflict (1950-53) and in South East Asia (1954-75). The weapon was also extremely popular in science fiction and action movies, appearing in more than fifty movies filmed during the same time period. The United States only withdrew it from inventory entirely in 1978 when the Department of Defense of President Carter ruled that the weapon was inhumane. This was two years before the weapon was declared so internationally. On October 10, 1980 the Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons (Protocol III) was adopted in Geneva, Switzerland. However the weapon was maintained in some non-signatory US allied arsenals until much later. The Australian Army held a number of M-2s that were lend-leased to them in World War II until 1987. Brazil only withdrew its last M-2s in the past few years, replacing them with the locally made Hydroar LC T1 M1 flamethrower. South Korea, Thailand, the Philippines and Taiwan are believed to still have numbers of M-2s and the newer M-9s in arsenal storage.

Sources:

Weapons of World War Two Gyrene.org

Canfeld, Bruce US Infantry Weapons of World War II Sperry 1999

Hammel, Eric Iwo Jima: Portrait of a Battle: United States Marines at War in the Pacific 2005

M-2 Flamethrower 1945 USMC Iwo Jima

flame thrower in use

Flame thrower USMC Iwo Jima

Diagram of M-2

M-2 with WW2 re-inactor

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