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

Modele 26

Mod. (Heer) 34                                                                    Mod. Heer                          

Modele 34                         Modele Heer                     


                 Mod. Zink                                                                                                                    Mod. LP 42                  
 Modele Zink                       Modele 42                 


Mod. Z (Kampfpistole)                                                                                   Sturmpistole                                                                

Kampfpistole
                                                             


Finally, some more specific flare guns were manufactured for specific armies such as:

               Luftwaffe, Mod. L                                                                                Kriegsmarine, Mod. Sl & Sld            

Modele Luftwaffe                         Modele Kriegsmarine                

 

 

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