Introduction & General
Without coming back to the origin of flare guns, we would just like to remind
their final goal was signaling!.
In the same time, as telephony,
they participate to the objective of communicating information.
Even if the first original objective
was to illuminate (one of their original roles during the First World War
to illuminate combat field during the night) the second one was to communicate
between men due to the lack of today's known communication (such as
phone).
It offered a simple way to
communicate between distant places using several codes.
These codes (based on colors,
sequence of colors, frequency and type of cartridges uses (with or without
sound, smoke aso) allowed people to exchange and understand message even if to
line were available (for phone) or if they can't see them each other (hidden
for protection or watching to prevent). So it was a way to prevent that a tank
were coming, to designate a target or an objective, to trigger an attack, to
alert there are some injuries or that the normal communication ways wasn't
working.
For that purpose, the German
army was equipped with flare guns designed as Leuchtpistole (abbreviation
LP).
We will use that acronym: LP to
describe flare guns.
After the high use of flare guns
during the First World War, flare guns needed to be modernized (most of them
were Hebel type like (created in 1894).
The evolution doesn't change a
lot but we will here describe the different models born after WWI and during
WWII:
For more information and to
access to them, you just need to click with our mouse on the here below
hyperlinks or directly on the different pictures of flare guns:
Mod. 26
Mod. 34
Mod. Heer
Mod. Zink
Mod. LP 42
Mod. Kampfpistole
Mod. Sturmpistole
Mod. Luftwaffe
Mod. Kriegsmarine
Mod. (Heer) 26
Mod.
(Heer) 34
Mod. Heer
Mod. Zink
Mod. LP 42
Mod.
Z
(Kampfpistole)
Sturmpistole
Finally, some more specific
flare guns were manufactured for specific armies such as:
Luftwaffe,
Mod. L
Kriegsmarine, Mod. Sl & Sld
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