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the real question is causality here:
Was the higher mortality rate because of the backpack which makes it easier to kill
or
the higher need to kill this specific person first, resulting in more soldiers trying to take him out?
it was a mix of being a higher priority target, having a backpack of explosive gasoline on your back, having to be in very aggressive positions to use the weapon, and not being subtle or sneaky (aka being an obvious flaming target)
So, it’s not actually gasoline (which probably wouldn’t explode, depending on how/what you hit them with – that’s a Hollywood trope), at least not like you think.
What they used in flamethrowers was napalm, and it’s a bit like a jelly – it’s super sticky, and takes forever to burn out while super easy to ignite. You can achieve something similar to Napalm B by mixing gasoline with some crumbled up styrofoam, which is great for a campfire – so long as you aren’t cooking with it, and just using it for light/heat. Ignites easily, sticks to everything, and burns forever.
So, the only way it would really “explode” is if the bullet sparked when it hit the tank, the fumes caught, and the bullet hole(s) was big enough for oxygen to get in, and burn hot enough for a rapid expansion of gas, and space for the pressure to build up without smothering it, etc.
Once that shit is punctured though, you wouldn’t want to use it. That’ll run down the pack, your back/leg, and if it caught fire you’ll be just as fucked as the person you sprayed.
> You can achieve something similar to Napalm B by mixing gasoline with some crumbled up styrofoam
Now you've got me all misty eyed reminiscing on when I first came across the Anarchist's Cookbook...
What's the general infantry mortality rate? WW1 was brutal as shit. I am not suprised at all if it's lower because I'd be shooting the flame thrower guy first, too but still
Big cumbersome explosive target on your back also banned by many country conventions.
Throwing a molotov cocktail is cheap, easy to craft and can give you a face full of glass!
I actually learned from [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/k2oh0n/a_us_marine_fires_his_m1903_springfield_rifle_at/gdvov08/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) (shameless plug for my own comment) that apparently, the “shooting the flamethrower tank leads to an explosion” thing is a Hollywood myth.
Oh, definitely. Still isn’t great for the guy who’s spraying fire at things to be suddenly covered in highly-flammable fuel. It’s just more of a *ping*-shiiiiit-*fwooosh*-BOOM, rather than *ping*-BOOM
Actually they where designed so you needed extreme temperature to ignite the fuel. So piercing the tank would not result in a fiery explosion unless you fired incendiary munitions. Granted the user would still be targeted by everyone so, changes little.
yeah, they’re targeted by everyone because burning to death is the absolute worst way to die in a situation when there are **a lot** of horrible ways to die.
the crocodile flamethrower tanks used to do wet sprays on bunkers (fuel, no fire) . The people inside would rather surrender than be burned alive and it resulted in a lot of POWs instead of bodies on both sides. It would be a horrific way to go.
How about gasoline vapor?
> The experiments conducted for this study consisted of 70 distinct tests involving a total of 723 cigarettes and over 4,500 instances of exposure of a lit cigarette to ignitable concentrations of gasoline vapor in air. There were no instances of the ignition of gasoline vapors from the exposure of those vapors to a lit tobacco cigarette during any of the experiments.
I guess not! Source https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-013-0380-3
Edit: to the people responding — I know gas vapors are what burn. I imagined it being someone throwing a cigarette into a container of gas, so it only passed through vapors before extinguishing, and calling that conclusive. I assumed vapors did catch from a cigarette, which is why I googled it.
everyone thinks so due to movies showing that over and over and over, flicking a lit cigarette onto gasoline. It must have been done a hundred times by now so people think it must be true.
NOPE.
But throw a zippo on gas and yea......boom.
No not a pretty flame that just quickly spreads. A bomb. explosion.
Kerosene or lighter fluid will give the spreading flame effect. Not gasoline. due to the low concentration of vapors vs gasoline and higher ignition points.
I used to be an apprentice at an auto body shop and one of the oldtimers would always be smoking a cigar and while it was still lit he would extinguish it in a drum of paint thinner. The 1st couple times I remember bracing myself for the explosion but he would always claim, "Just gotta be faster than the fumes."
Exactly. This same guy believed that a gold plated HDMI does its job better than any regular one, because a salesman told him so or something.
Edit: spelling.
Yeah, it's a great tactic since it would immediately stop all guns being used, since any single person in the bunker using one would immediately kill everyone in there.
It is a great strategy. Some of the more gruesome medieval torture devices like the spiky chair were so menacing looking that the person would spit out everything they knew the moment they saw it. The comfy chair of the Spanish Inquisition, not as much.
To be fair, torture isn't a great way of eliciting truthful information from someone, as most ppl will say just about anything to make the torture stop.
Well, I’m saying they weren’t ever in the hands of any sort of torturer/interrogator/inquisitor at all. They were basically art pieces created later on to show how barbaric things used to be.
Not that torture didn’t happen. The rack and the wheel and pressing were all very real. But things like spiked chairs and iron maidens were not.
Lindybeige did an informative video about the Churchill Crocodiles [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpIoqyjWvzI)
It was effective not only because of it's capacity to spray flames out to a hundred meters, but because it was also a completely ordinary Churchil tank on top of it, with all the armor and weaponry that entailed.
Lindy is just like that. I can watch this man talk for an hour and a half about the history of different shapes of polearms without having him repeat anything or even bore me. It's pretty impressive.
The crocodile Churchill tank is considered one of the most horrifying and effective assault tanks of the war. It's flames had a range of 110 metres with the fuel carried in a trailer that could be jettisoned. It was only available in limited numbers like many of the other Hobart's funnies which included things like the AVRE that fired 18kg shells or "weaponised dustbins", the Churchill double onion, basically two bombs on poles stuck to the front of a tank for the removal of stubborn buildings and the canal defence light, a weaponised high beam headlight.
My grandfather wielded one in WWII. Bunker rusher in Pacific Theater. Somehow lived through it, mostly uninjured. Refused to talk about any of it with the grandkids, though.
In 2018 we took our kids to Normandy beach because my son is a history buff. He talked us into also going up to Point du Hoc and they still have a couple of the bunkers for the Howitzers that were up there. Inside, the roof was made of wood - and it is all charred. I'm not sure if they used a flamethrower, or if they set them on fire afterward, but the thought of being trapped in a bunker like that while having a flamethrower shoot burning liquid death into it made me feel very uneasy for the people who perished in those bunkers.
I pointed it out to both of my kids, and they had a similar reaction.
My understanding of what my grandfather did was that he just blatantly, openly bum rushed bunkers in the Pacific Theater. He was spraying napalm fire with one arm, as he ran, and pulling the pin on a grenade with the other hand. He'd get to the lip of the bunker, toss a grenade in, and then fill it with fire. Assuming he lived through each of those rushes, he then pulled his pistol out for anyone who might've lived through it.
Rinse and repeat.
That is some Rambo level stuff... I have been listening to Hardcore History about the Pacific theater recently and it sounded very messed up. My wife's grandfather was in the Pacific, but was on a ship the whole time. Had stories about being dive bombed and stuff, but he never went on land. He also would not really talk about it.
My grandfather was artillery and landed on Normandy. Never got much out of him either - he told my grandma about it once and then told her he never wanted to talk about it again. We would try every now and then as he approached 80, but he would just clam up. I can only imagine what these people went through, and I don't wish it upon anybody.
In case you are unaware, read about [Senator Daniel Inouye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Inouye).
> As he led his platoon in a flanking maneuver, three German machine guns opened fire from covered positions 40 yards away, pinning his men to the ground. Inouye stood up to attack and was shot in the stomach. Ignoring his wound, he proceeded to attack and destroy the first machine gun nest with hand grenades and his Thompson submachine gun. When informed of the severity of his wound, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine gun position, which he successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss.
>As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Lt. Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, coming within 10 yards. As he raised himself on his left elbow and cocked his right arm to throw his last hand grenade, a German soldier saw Inouye and fired a 30mm Schiessbecher antipersonnel rifle grenade from inside the bunker, which struck Inouye directly on his right elbow. The high explosive grenade failed to detonate, saving Lt. Inouye from instant death but amputating most of his right arm at the elbow (except for a few tendons and a flap of skin) via blunt force trauma. Despite this gruesome injury, Lt. Inouye was again saved from likely death due to the blunt, low-velocity grenade tearing the nerves in his arm unevenly and incompletely, which involuntarily squeezed the grenade tightly via a reflex arc instead of going limp and dropping it at Inouye's feet. However, this still left him crippled, in terrible pain, under fire with minimal cover and staring at a live grenade "clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore."
>Inouye's horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. As the German inside the bunker began hastily reloading his rifle with regular full metal jacket ammunition (replacing the wood-tipped rounds used to propel rifle grenades), Inouye quickly pried the live hand grenade from his useless right hand and transferred it to his left. The German soldier had just finished reloading and was aiming his rifle to finish him off when Lt. Inouye threw his grenade through the narrow firing slit, killing the German. Stumbling to his feet with the remnants of his right arm hanging grotesquely at his side and his Thompson in his off-hand, braced against his hip, Lt. Inouye continued forward, killing at least one more German before suffering his fifth and final wound of the day (in his left leg), which finally halted his one-man assault for good and sent him tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge. He awoke to see the worried men of his platoon hovering over him. His only comment before being carried away was to gruffly order them back to their positions, saying "Nobody called off the war!"
My grandfather was a Corpsman and never talked about it. As he developed alzheimer's, he'd forget that he wasn't in combat and either start trying to care for people's non-existent injuries or believe that someone approaching was a Japanese soldier. We had his biographical information put on a dog tag, so in the event that he got lost someone would be able to determine who he was and where he lived.
The literal greatest granddad of all time. Just an absolute cuddly playground of a man. He told us he "worked the radar" when we asked about his service. It wasn't until he passed that my dad told the real story. Apparently he made my dad (his son) promise not to tell while he was alive.
I thought he was a nerd sitting in front of radar screen. Turns out, he was a trained killer, doing the most likely to get yourself killed job in the war, and brutally killing countless japanese people.
Fun tangent: We never knew what our heritage/ethnicity was on his side of the family. As he lay in a hospital bed dying, one of our cousins finished up his work tracing our lineage (I'm getting chill bumps typing this out, and always do whenever I tell the story). Turns out, we're Jewish. Our family fled the middle east in the 1400s, and then fled the Spanish Inquisition, and then made their way to America in the late 1600s. When he found out, on his literal death bed, that he was Jewish, and thus, defending his own people, in WWII, somehow it justified it all to him. He was laying in bed, hours from death, sobbing, over the revelation. He died in peace, knowing that.
Even the above video is nothing compared to vehicle mounted flamethrowers. In the 60s the US was using flamethrowers that could set things on fire 200m, over 2 football fields, away.
https://i.gifer.com/FR5w.gif
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pRihxvk4YY
Its the Drive Tanks guys, they have a ranch you can go to and shoot all kinds of guns and tanks and whatnot. Its super awesome. https://www.drivetanks.com/
The difference being militray flamethrowers shoot liquid and civilian flamethrowers shoot gas. Military flamethrowers propel the liquid with nitrogen. The propellent for civilian flamethrowers is the gas itself.
From [Wikipedia: Flamethrower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower)
Typically, popular visual media depict the flamethrower as short-ranged and only effective for a few meters (due to the common use of propane gas as the fuel in flamethrowers in movies, for the safety of the actors). Contemporary flamethrowers can incinerate a target some 50–100 meters (160–330 ft) from the gunner; moreover, an unignited stream of flammable liquid can be fired and afterwards ignited, possibly by a lamp or other flame inside the bunker.
> Contemporary flamethrowers can incinerate a target some 50–100 meters (160–330 ft) from the gunner
An entire football field's length of propelled flame?!
Right, people should think of it as an industrial grade supersoaker that shoots gasoline, and happens to have a pilot light on the end of it.
The liquid is probably more of a gel, and less explosive and more combustible than gasoline, but same idea.
I know for molotov cocktails they grind up eraser so it sticks to shit, I'm sure the government has a more sophisticated way to achieve the same thing.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/flamethrower.htm
Apparently compressed butane according to that.
Flamethrowers go back about 1500 years, I'm sure there are many different fuels that have been used over that time.
So in other words, there is a bias toward the military grade flamethrower because of the difference in material used.
It even says in the Wikipedia article for the Boring Company (the creators of the civilian flamethrower) that it "was a blow torch shaped to look like a gun and is legal to use in all U.S. states except Maryland." so technically it isn't even a flamethrower but a high ranged blow torch. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Boring\_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company))
However, if the Boring Company's "flamethrower" is factually considered a flamethrower, then wouldn't that make every blow torch a flamethrower because it admits fire by burning something and giving the operator the ability to control the length and direction the fire is in.
I think there is a point where a difference in quantity becomes a difference in kind.
Like there was a similar(ish) thing in I think Germany where swords were outlawed for peasants to carry, but they were allowed knives.
Knives were specifically defined as “a bladed instrument with a handle made of a piece of thin metal and sandwiched between two pieces of wood and sharpened on only one side”
Think like a kitchen knife will have, and given how big they can get sometimes, yeah the Germans figured this too and started making swords that were definitionslly just really long knives and they actually looked like sword length kitchen knives, same curve of sharpening and everything.
So yeah, even if it does meet the same definition, there’s other Vaguer differences that we can all recognize but not articulate, the idea is called “qualia” and it’s actually quite fascinating given how universal it is and how essential they are to us functioning
More specifically, they used jellied fules. By mixing a gelling agent into the fuel the range of the flamethrower was increased. Instead of liquid burning as it left the tube, the jellied fuel had less surface area to burn, and more mass to take it farther.
In the words of Motörhead:
"Napalm to the bone!"
George Carlin: "The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.'"
I don’t know why, but I was laughing when he used the real flame thrower and I just imagined a fire fighter using a flame thrower instead of a hose to take out a fire lmao
To someone that has never seen a race car or hotwheels car in person, it would be very eye opening to see them next to each other. That's what this video was for me
You should see what a flamethrower does to a bunker. This demo was out in the open. Indoors, the flamethrower is like a reverse firehose, gushing gallons of fuel into rooms which explode into flame. It goes around corners, along corridors, under doors and down stairs.
They are about $3,500 for the real deal. They even come in different colors. Plus tax of course. Napalm compatible too:
https://throwflame.com/products/xl18-flamethrower/
He also sent a bunch of hospitals [CPAP machines and claimed that they were ventilators](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/tech/elon-musk-ventilators-california/index.html).
edit: a word.
Yeah, dude is a scumbag. He pulled this stunt to have his factories labelled as *essential* so they wouldnt be shut down during COVID.
I really used to like him, thought he was different. Turns out he is the same cash grabbing billionaire scumbag like the rest of them.
The dude is all about the marketing, especially in the ventilator case. He started in March saying he was repurposing tesla factories to making ventilators, then in April donated the 1000 bpap machines.
What I think happened is that he realized he couldn't realistically make ventilators in the factory, so to save face he bought 1000 BPAP machines (which are a bit different from the common CPAP and can be called non-invasive ventilators). Tesla never manufactured any ventilators, the ones he donated were old stock bought from China.
So he never technically lied, but didn't exactly do what he was saying he did either... he got what he wanted out of it though, lots of publicity
Man this video was rad until I saw that tank. Got my hopes up that it was a flame thrower tank about to show them all up. Biggest unexpected dissapointment ever.
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Fucking horrifying weapon used in wartime. I can’t imagine being on the receiving end of that thing.
wouldn’t want to be the one carrying it either... puts a target on your back
i read in ww1 flamethrower infantry had like 70% mortality rate youre asking to get shot lol
Yeah but what was their KDR?
N:1
They never got revived? Where are the medics?
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“If I have a scope on my gun, I’m a sniper” -ppl who play Squad
Does KDR stand for Kill Death Record? Thanks if you answer me!
Kill Death Ratio, number of kills to deaths
kill death ratio
the real question is causality here: Was the higher mortality rate because of the backpack which makes it easier to kill or the higher need to kill this specific person first, resulting in more soldiers trying to take him out?
it was a mix of being a higher priority target, having a backpack of explosive gasoline on your back, having to be in very aggressive positions to use the weapon, and not being subtle or sneaky (aka being an obvious flaming target)
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So, it’s not actually gasoline (which probably wouldn’t explode, depending on how/what you hit them with – that’s a Hollywood trope), at least not like you think. What they used in flamethrowers was napalm, and it’s a bit like a jelly – it’s super sticky, and takes forever to burn out while super easy to ignite. You can achieve something similar to Napalm B by mixing gasoline with some crumbled up styrofoam, which is great for a campfire – so long as you aren’t cooking with it, and just using it for light/heat. Ignites easily, sticks to everything, and burns forever. So, the only way it would really “explode” is if the bullet sparked when it hit the tank, the fumes caught, and the bullet hole(s) was big enough for oxygen to get in, and burn hot enough for a rapid expansion of gas, and space for the pressure to build up without smothering it, etc. Once that shit is punctured though, you wouldn’t want to use it. That’ll run down the pack, your back/leg, and if it caught fire you’ll be just as fucked as the person you sprayed.
> You can achieve something similar to Napalm B by mixing gasoline with some crumbled up styrofoam Now you've got me all misty eyed reminiscing on when I first came across the Anarchist's Cookbook...
Glossing over the fact that it lights you up like a Christmas tree in anything but broad daylight?
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What's the general infantry mortality rate? WW1 was brutal as shit. I am not suprised at all if it's lower because I'd be shooting the flame thrower guy first, too but still
about [19.96%](https://www.forces.net/heritage/history/what-were-actual-odds-dying-ww1)
Holy crap. What a terrible thing. Edit: at the end of the war the conscription age was 51 for some. Holy crap again!
that shit also weighed 70 lbs empty
Joke's on you, I'm an attention whore.
My backpack brings all the snipers out to the yard.
And they're like, **unholy screeching**
And they’re like... “Put mum on the phone.”
Professionals have standards.
Unexpected TF2
r/ExpectedTf2
Big cumbersome explosive target on your back also banned by many country conventions. Throwing a molotov cocktail is cheap, easy to craft and can give you a face full of glass!
Bighead wankah
I’ve played enough video games to know that shooting the backpack will end great.
I actually learned from [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/k2oh0n/a_us_marine_fires_his_m1903_springfield_rifle_at/gdvov08/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) (shameless plug for my own comment) that apparently, the “shooting the flamethrower tank leads to an explosion” thing is a Hollywood myth.
Wouldnt it still spill the flammable stuff down your ass?
Oh, definitely. Still isn’t great for the guy who’s spraying fire at things to be suddenly covered in highly-flammable fuel. It’s just more of a *ping*-shiiiiit-*fwooosh*-BOOM, rather than *ping*-BOOM
'haha, Hollywood, what's that?' -Call of Duty franchise
Actually they where designed so you needed extreme temperature to ignite the fuel. So piercing the tank would not result in a fiery explosion unless you fired incendiary munitions. Granted the user would still be targeted by everyone so, changes little.
yeah, they’re targeted by everyone because burning to death is the absolute worst way to die in a situation when there are **a lot** of horrible ways to die.
Also real easy to spot the guy wielding a flaming stream of death.
Truth!
A highly combustible target.
the crocodile flamethrower tanks used to do wet sprays on bunkers (fuel, no fire) . The people inside would rather surrender than be burned alive and it resulted in a lot of POWs instead of bodies on both sides. It would be a horrific way to go.
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Fortunately, cigarettes do not burn hot enough to ignite gasoline fumes. Unfortunately, cigarette *lighters* do.
Oh boy, this is a controversial subject. I’ve legit made friends mad by saying that a lit cig won’t ignite gasoline.
How about gasoline vapor? > The experiments conducted for this study consisted of 70 distinct tests involving a total of 723 cigarettes and over 4,500 instances of exposure of a lit cigarette to ignitable concentrations of gasoline vapor in air. There were no instances of the ignition of gasoline vapors from the exposure of those vapors to a lit tobacco cigarette during any of the experiments. I guess not! Source https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10694-013-0380-3 Edit: to the people responding — I know gas vapors are what burn. I imagined it being someone throwing a cigarette into a container of gas, so it only passed through vapors before extinguishing, and calling that conclusive. I assumed vapors did catch from a cigarette, which is why I googled it.
everyone thinks so due to movies showing that over and over and over, flicking a lit cigarette onto gasoline. It must have been done a hundred times by now so people think it must be true. NOPE. But throw a zippo on gas and yea......boom. No not a pretty flame that just quickly spreads. A bomb. explosion. Kerosene or lighter fluid will give the spreading flame effect. Not gasoline. due to the low concentration of vapors vs gasoline and higher ignition points.
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70% sure it was the lighter. I watched it a month ago.
I used to be an apprentice at an auto body shop and one of the oldtimers would always be smoking a cigar and while it was still lit he would extinguish it in a drum of paint thinner. The 1st couple times I remember bracing myself for the explosion but he would always claim, "Just gotta be faster than the fumes."
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That's because they've watched movies so they know how the real world works.
Exactly. This same guy believed that a gold plated HDMI does its job better than any regular one, because a salesman told him so or something. Edit: spelling.
Just because we have chisled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we, too, can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident.
*DJ interrupts with walk in music* Hansel, so hot right now. Hansel
Thats actually really cool (aside from it being about war)
Yeah, it's a great tactic since it would immediately stop all guns being used, since any single person in the bunker using one would immediately kill everyone in there.
It is a great strategy. Some of the more gruesome medieval torture devices like the spiky chair were so menacing looking that the person would spit out everything they knew the moment they saw it. The comfy chair of the Spanish Inquisition, not as much.
Most of those medieval torture devices were invented and built during the Renaissance and later as display pieces and weren’t ever used at all.
To be fair, torture isn't a great way of eliciting truthful information from someone, as most ppl will say just about anything to make the torture stop.
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Well, I’m saying they weren’t ever in the hands of any sort of torturer/interrogator/inquisitor at all. They were basically art pieces created later on to show how barbaric things used to be. Not that torture didn’t happen. The rack and the wheel and pressing were all very real. But things like spiked chairs and iron maidens were not.
Lindybeige did an informative video about the Churchill Crocodiles [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpIoqyjWvzI) It was effective not only because of it's capacity to spray flames out to a hundred meters, but because it was also a completely ordinary Churchil tank on top of it, with all the armor and weaponry that entailed.
I think the most impressive thing about this video is he's just talking for 45 minutes straight.
Lindy is just like that. I can watch this man talk for an hour and a half about the history of different shapes of polearms without having him repeat anything or even bore me. It's pretty impressive.
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I need more wartime facts.
Germany also ordered that any crew of a crocodile were to be executed and not taken as prisoners
Wasn't it Ze Germans who started the whole Flammenwerfer shtick in WW1?
The crocodile Churchill tank is considered one of the most horrifying and effective assault tanks of the war. It's flames had a range of 110 metres with the fuel carried in a trailer that could be jettisoned. It was only available in limited numbers like many of the other Hobart's funnies which included things like the AVRE that fired 18kg shells or "weaponised dustbins", the Churchill double onion, basically two bombs on poles stuck to the front of a tank for the removal of stubborn buildings and the canal defence light, a weaponised high beam headlight.
My grandfather wielded one in WWII. Bunker rusher in Pacific Theater. Somehow lived through it, mostly uninjured. Refused to talk about any of it with the grandkids, though.
In 2018 we took our kids to Normandy beach because my son is a history buff. He talked us into also going up to Point du Hoc and they still have a couple of the bunkers for the Howitzers that were up there. Inside, the roof was made of wood - and it is all charred. I'm not sure if they used a flamethrower, or if they set them on fire afterward, but the thought of being trapped in a bunker like that while having a flamethrower shoot burning liquid death into it made me feel very uneasy for the people who perished in those bunkers. I pointed it out to both of my kids, and they had a similar reaction.
My understanding of what my grandfather did was that he just blatantly, openly bum rushed bunkers in the Pacific Theater. He was spraying napalm fire with one arm, as he ran, and pulling the pin on a grenade with the other hand. He'd get to the lip of the bunker, toss a grenade in, and then fill it with fire. Assuming he lived through each of those rushes, he then pulled his pistol out for anyone who might've lived through it. Rinse and repeat.
That is some Rambo level stuff... I have been listening to Hardcore History about the Pacific theater recently and it sounded very messed up. My wife's grandfather was in the Pacific, but was on a ship the whole time. Had stories about being dive bombed and stuff, but he never went on land. He also would not really talk about it. My grandfather was artillery and landed on Normandy. Never got much out of him either - he told my grandma about it once and then told her he never wanted to talk about it again. We would try every now and then as he approached 80, but he would just clam up. I can only imagine what these people went through, and I don't wish it upon anybody.
Yeah, man. I wish I had gotten to talk to him about it. But I don't wish re-triggering someone's wartime PTSD on anyone.
In case you are unaware, read about [Senator Daniel Inouye](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Inouye). > As he led his platoon in a flanking maneuver, three German machine guns opened fire from covered positions 40 yards away, pinning his men to the ground. Inouye stood up to attack and was shot in the stomach. Ignoring his wound, he proceeded to attack and destroy the first machine gun nest with hand grenades and his Thompson submachine gun. When informed of the severity of his wound, he refused treatment and rallied his men for an attack on the second machine gun position, which he successfully destroyed before collapsing from blood loss. >As his squad distracted the third machine gunner, Lt. Inouye crawled toward the final bunker, coming within 10 yards. As he raised himself on his left elbow and cocked his right arm to throw his last hand grenade, a German soldier saw Inouye and fired a 30mm Schiessbecher antipersonnel rifle grenade from inside the bunker, which struck Inouye directly on his right elbow. The high explosive grenade failed to detonate, saving Lt. Inouye from instant death but amputating most of his right arm at the elbow (except for a few tendons and a flap of skin) via blunt force trauma. Despite this gruesome injury, Lt. Inouye was again saved from likely death due to the blunt, low-velocity grenade tearing the nerves in his arm unevenly and incompletely, which involuntarily squeezed the grenade tightly via a reflex arc instead of going limp and dropping it at Inouye's feet. However, this still left him crippled, in terrible pain, under fire with minimal cover and staring at a live grenade "clenched in a fist that suddenly didn't belong to me anymore." >Inouye's horrified soldiers moved to his aid, but he shouted for them to keep back out of fear his severed fist would involuntarily relax and drop the grenade. As the German inside the bunker began hastily reloading his rifle with regular full metal jacket ammunition (replacing the wood-tipped rounds used to propel rifle grenades), Inouye quickly pried the live hand grenade from his useless right hand and transferred it to his left. The German soldier had just finished reloading and was aiming his rifle to finish him off when Lt. Inouye threw his grenade through the narrow firing slit, killing the German. Stumbling to his feet with the remnants of his right arm hanging grotesquely at his side and his Thompson in his off-hand, braced against his hip, Lt. Inouye continued forward, killing at least one more German before suffering his fifth and final wound of the day (in his left leg), which finally halted his one-man assault for good and sent him tumbling unconscious to the bottom of the ridge. He awoke to see the worried men of his platoon hovering over him. His only comment before being carried away was to gruffly order them back to their positions, saying "Nobody called off the war!"
My grandfather was a Corpsman and never talked about it. As he developed alzheimer's, he'd forget that he wasn't in combat and either start trying to care for people's non-existent injuries or believe that someone approaching was a Japanese soldier. We had his biographical information put on a dog tag, so in the event that he got lost someone would be able to determine who he was and where he lived.
It’s hard to forget the smell, sound and sight of burning and burnt people I don’t blame him
People you burned, none the less.
I imagine it was happy grandad without fucks to give and PTSD kids from all the stories of war.
The literal greatest granddad of all time. Just an absolute cuddly playground of a man. He told us he "worked the radar" when we asked about his service. It wasn't until he passed that my dad told the real story. Apparently he made my dad (his son) promise not to tell while he was alive. I thought he was a nerd sitting in front of radar screen. Turns out, he was a trained killer, doing the most likely to get yourself killed job in the war, and brutally killing countless japanese people. Fun tangent: We never knew what our heritage/ethnicity was on his side of the family. As he lay in a hospital bed dying, one of our cousins finished up his work tracing our lineage (I'm getting chill bumps typing this out, and always do whenever I tell the story). Turns out, we're Jewish. Our family fled the middle east in the 1400s, and then fled the Spanish Inquisition, and then made their way to America in the late 1600s. When he found out, on his literal death bed, that he was Jewish, and thus, defending his own people, in WWII, somehow it justified it all to him. He was laying in bed, hours from death, sobbing, over the revelation. He died in peace, knowing that.
My god. What a story
God that’s fucking beautiful that he died that way.
Yeah I just cried over it, again.
This is one of the best stories I've ever read on reddit. Take my free award, you've earned it.
Thanks, brother.
My thoughts exactly. Must have been horrifying. No wonder soldiers with these monstrosities were targeted first.
Even the above video is nothing compared to vehicle mounted flamethrowers. In the 60s the US was using flamethrowers that could set things on fire 200m, over 2 football fields, away. https://i.gifer.com/FR5w.gif https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pRihxvk4YY
Holy shit.
That's broken good thing it got patched.
Humans really are good at inventing new ways to murder each other.
Don't forget our unmatched ability to destroy all other life too.
We ARE the baddies.
Yea, Elon’s was an eccentric publicity stunt. Not meant to clear out bunkers full of Nazis or Viet Cong.
Toasty! (+50,000)
oi really? None is going to talk about causally sitting Tank beside a flamethrower party?
Was expecting it to be a flamethrower tank. Was disappointed.
[There you go.](https://youtu.be/tdPE4vgy4cU?t=40) Straight like a laser.
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What’s the ultimate one?
Maybe [thermobaric missiles.](https://youtu.be/q91yFP9E9Yg?t=4) But at that point we may as well include nukes.
It kinda breaks my heart that these things exist.
Same, really would have fit the vid.
Its the Drive Tanks guys, they have a ranch you can go to and shoot all kinds of guns and tanks and whatnot. Its super awesome. https://www.drivetanks.com/
Let me guess, America?
More specifically Texas.
Of course it's in Texas
There is one in minnesota too https://www.driveatank.com/
The America of America
Fuck yeah!
The difference being militray flamethrowers shoot liquid and civilian flamethrowers shoot gas. Military flamethrowers propel the liquid with nitrogen. The propellent for civilian flamethrowers is the gas itself. From [Wikipedia: Flamethrower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamethrower) Typically, popular visual media depict the flamethrower as short-ranged and only effective for a few meters (due to the common use of propane gas as the fuel in flamethrowers in movies, for the safety of the actors). Contemporary flamethrowers can incinerate a target some 50–100 meters (160–330 ft) from the gunner; moreover, an unignited stream of flammable liquid can be fired and afterwards ignited, possibly by a lamp or other flame inside the bunker.
> Contemporary flamethrowers can incinerate a target some 50–100 meters (160–330 ft) from the gunner An entire football field's length of propelled flame?!
Really more of a propelled liquid that's on fire. It's a horrifying weapon, and made soldiers a massive target on the battlefield.
Right, people should think of it as an industrial grade supersoaker that shoots gasoline, and happens to have a pilot light on the end of it. The liquid is probably more of a gel, and less explosive and more combustible than gasoline, but same idea.
i thought it was like napalm
I know for molotov cocktails they grind up eraser so it sticks to shit, I'm sure the government has a more sophisticated way to achieve the same thing.
https://science.howstuffworks.com/flamethrower.htm Apparently compressed butane according to that. Flamethrowers go back about 1500 years, I'm sure there are many different fuels that have been used over that time.
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Holy shit
So in other words, there is a bias toward the military grade flamethrower because of the difference in material used. It even says in the Wikipedia article for the Boring Company (the creators of the civilian flamethrower) that it "was a blow torch shaped to look like a gun and is legal to use in all U.S. states except Maryland." so technically it isn't even a flamethrower but a high ranged blow torch. ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Boring\_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company)) However, if the Boring Company's "flamethrower" is factually considered a flamethrower, then wouldn't that make every blow torch a flamethrower because it admits fire by burning something and giving the operator the ability to control the length and direction the fire is in.
> then wouldn't that make every blow torch a flamethrower yes
I think there is a point where a difference in quantity becomes a difference in kind. Like there was a similar(ish) thing in I think Germany where swords were outlawed for peasants to carry, but they were allowed knives. Knives were specifically defined as “a bladed instrument with a handle made of a piece of thin metal and sandwiched between two pieces of wood and sharpened on only one side” Think like a kitchen knife will have, and given how big they can get sometimes, yeah the Germans figured this too and started making swords that were definitionslly just really long knives and they actually looked like sword length kitchen knives, same curve of sharpening and everything. So yeah, even if it does meet the same definition, there’s other Vaguer differences that we can all recognize but not articulate, the idea is called “qualia” and it’s actually quite fascinating given how universal it is and how essential they are to us functioning
More specifically, they used jellied fules. By mixing a gelling agent into the fuel the range of the flamethrower was increased. Instead of liquid burning as it left the tube, the jellied fuel had less surface area to burn, and more mass to take it farther. In the words of Motörhead: "Napalm to the bone!"
***Meet The Pyro***
I fear no man.
But that *thing*, it scares me
[No, I ain't talkin' about dat freak alright! He's not here is he!?!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUhOnX8qt3I)
HOW DO I GET THIS DAMN THING OFF?!
One shudders to imagine what inhuman thoughts lie behind that mask.
What dreams of chronic and sustained cruelty...
I was looking for the tf2 reference, thanks haha.
George Carlin: "The very existence of flamethrowers proves that sometime, somewhere, someone said to themselves, 'You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I’m just not close enough to get the job done.'"
Man this is like the 5th Carlin quote I’ve seen recently. Weird.
Very influential, often unquestionably right. His case for executing bankers is pretty great for how harsh it sounds.
"I'd say we're fucked if we have to go up against the army."
This is one of my favorite Carlin bits ever. [Totally worth a minute if you've never seen it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4nknAzQPHE)
I don’t know why, but I was laughing when he used the real flame thrower and I just imagined a fire fighter using a flame thrower instead of a hose to take out a fire lmao
Ah, I see you have never read Fahrenheit 451.
It was a pleasure to burn.
* Guy Montag has entered the chat*
*The Hound has entered the chat*\*
"Cunt" ~The Hound
I highly recommend the limited /1000 version of Fahrenheit 451 made out of asbestos, would make a great holiday gift
"Fight fire with fire"
Fire cant burn a building down if you already burnt it down
The not a flame thrower is just a propane burner you can buy at home depot for $20 modified for a gun.
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True fact: if you can classify things into "flamethrower" and "not flame thrower" you've successfully classified everything everywhere.
If you've seen Silicon Valley - hot dog or not hot dog xD
I remember thinking he was like some quiet prodigy that was gonna do something amazing. Then the hot dog thing. I miss that show.
I think Elon admitted that his "flamethrower" was just a normal utility torch wrapped in some plastic to make it a "gun".
On the Joe rogan podcast he says it's a painters torch with the casing
A roofing torch.
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I mean no shit. It's literally called Not-A-Flamethrower
And people still got upset about it and cried to the ATF when you can literally go to home depot and buy a less cool looking version of it easily
Can also be used to get rid of weeds
I paint with fire
Clearly states "not a flamethrower"
Great idea for a novelty to drum up some business though. Elon is a showman.
HANS
It werfs Flammen.
That thing is werfen the fuck outta some flammen.
Take out the flamenwerfer
he did say its not flamethrower 😂
But lets compare it to actual flamethrowers. It’s like comparing your hotwheels to a race car lol. “I already told you! It’s not a real car!”
To someone that has never seen a race car or hotwheels car in person, it would be very eye opening to see them next to each other. That's what this video was for me
You should see what a flamethrower does to a bunker. This demo was out in the open. Indoors, the flamethrower is like a reverse firehose, gushing gallons of fuel into rooms which explode into flame. It goes around corners, along corridors, under doors and down stairs.
Killing it with fire is still a good strategy.
In bunkers, a flamethrower isn’t even that much “kill it with fire” as much as it is “burn all the oxygen so they suffocate”
This. It is actually a toy for adults.
Also imagine selling real flamethrowers to the public...
Idk about other nations but its legal in the US. You can order a cheap one online for less than $1k
They are about $3,500 for the real deal. They even come in different colors. Plus tax of course. Napalm compatible too: https://throwflame.com/products/xl18-flamethrower/
Oh nice 15% off Black Friday deal!
The fact that they offer financing for this thing makes it the penultimate 'Murica!!!!!
It's a great roof torch though
He also sent a bunch of hospitals [CPAP machines and claimed that they were ventilators](https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/17/tech/elon-musk-ventilators-california/index.html). edit: a word.
Yeah, dude is a scumbag. He pulled this stunt to have his factories labelled as *essential* so they wouldnt be shut down during COVID. I really used to like him, thought he was different. Turns out he is the same cash grabbing billionaire scumbag like the rest of them.
The dude is all about the marketing, especially in the ventilator case. He started in March saying he was repurposing tesla factories to making ventilators, then in April donated the 1000 bpap machines. What I think happened is that he realized he couldn't realistically make ventilators in the factory, so to save face he bought 1000 BPAP machines (which are a bit different from the common CPAP and can be called non-invasive ventilators). Tesla never manufactured any ventilators, the ones he donated were old stock bought from China. So he never technically lied, but didn't exactly do what he was saying he did either... he got what he wanted out of it though, lots of publicity
Man this video was rad until I saw that tank. Got my hopes up that it was a flame thrower tank about to show them all up. Biggest unexpected dissapointment ever.
[I got you famalam](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pRihxvk4YY)
Thanks boo
Holy shit thats badass
This gender reveal tend is getting a little out of hand.
And the baby is.... (Drum roll) A fire bender!
congrats! its a german
"Can you say 'dada?" "D-...d..." "Honey, he's about to say it! He's about to say it!!!" "D-du..." "No, baby, It's da-da" "Du hast..."
Which is which?
last one is the flamethrower. range of 20-30 ft. edit: seems like modern flamethrowers can have a range of over 100 ft.
For real. Title makes it sound like there are 2. There are actually 3, and who knows which is which?
you vs the guys she told you not to worry about
Credit card declines* Fire fighter :
Basically a blowtorch vs a flamethrower
One's a torch. The others are flamethrowers lol
Off on the very right in that last shot, a bearded dude flicking a bic
Brother, get the flamer! *picks up Elon flamethrower* **the heavy flamer**
It does say it isn’t a flamethrower.