I'm going to have to buy your flamethrower books too. Incredibly interesting stuff.
After reading your thread in the other forum it's kind of shocking to me that they wouldn't even engage you. I mean if they want to disagree fine, go for it, it's healthy to have a little good natured debate. These guys turned on their collective, intelligentsia heels when what you put forward didn't jive with their collective wisdom. I've never seen a more head in the sand approach.
That's is why you people here are so awesome. It's extremely rare to meet a whole community of people who share the same values of curiosity, openness, and willingness to be entertained.
One thing lacking in the military-history community is a sense of humor. I don't mean actual present-day warriors. I've gotten some amazing PMs from bass-playing troops reading this thread. Members of the service tend to be really funny people. On that other forum the funny people seem to be all ex-service members. But the academics? The historians? As funny as multiple sclerosis.
A story from that forum:
There's a guy over there who claims to be an expert on British flamethrowers of World War I. With apologies to the Brits reading this, but the British flamethrower effort in World War I was ludicrous. Their "portable" flamethrower weighed 130 pounds. They built a "semi-portable" weapon shaped like a milk churn that weighed 150 pounds and was carried into battle by two men using poles, like it was a sedan chair with a big, fat pasha sitting in it. When they set it up, they plugged the two poles into sockets on the back of the flamethrower, because without the poles to support it, it would do a back flip when you turned it on. And the oil-ejection pipe--the lance--would pop off because it was held in place by a friction coupler. This would drench the squad with burning oil.
The British large flamethrower was 50 feet long and was assembled underground in mining galleries. It weighed 4000 pounds and held 300 gallons of oil. After the gallery was dug and the weapon assembled, the lance would be pushed up through the earth with a hydraulic jack, emerging above ground like a submarine periscope. An automatic igniter would set off the jet of flame, which could reach up to 300 feet, and the lance--called the "monitor"--would rotate back and forth, back and forth, cooking everything in front of it. The thing was, the Germans weren't idiots, so when they saw this mechanical dinosaur head and neck slowly rearing out of the ground and starting to fizzle and smoke, they said "
Nein danke!" and ducked down into their trenches, and the flame jet would go harmlessly over their heads.
The Brits were the only combatants who sent their flamethrower operators into battle with no protection from infantry. Those poor b*stards with the semi-portables didn't even make it out of the trenches before they were shot down.
So, after adopting insane designs and worthless tactics, the Brits declared that the flamethrower was useless. They launched a total of 18 flamethrower attacks in the entire war, compared to 653 by the Germans. The Brits also experimented with what they called "incendiary crates," which were boxes packed with cans of oil fired from underground shafts 20 feet long, dug at a 45-degree angle. Of course it was a disaster, as the crates blew up in midair, destroyed by the powder charges used to launch them. Again, they showered the men using them with burning oil.
I related all this, in exactly the tone I used above, and I got an indignant PM from this British "expert" on flamethrowers, telling me he could take anything but ridicule, and by making fun of the men who fought in the war, I was doing a huge disservice to them.
I told him I wasn't making fun of the brave men forced to use these stupid designs and suicidal tactics; I was making fun of the idiot leaders and designers. But he wasn't mollified. I'd already had a few exchanges with him, since he was supposed to be an expert, and he was worse than useless. I already knew more about the topic than he did. But he's a Big Dog in the British World War I history world, and I'm miserable Yank peon, so I told him I'd moderate my language, even though I wanted to tell him to cram it.
My descriptions of the British flamethrower effort went over like a lead balloon, as you can imagine. One total mental patient--a published author over there--really laid into me for disrespecting his fallen ancestors. I tried to tell him I wasn't disrespecting anybody; when the U.S. entered the war in 1917, we used 1914 tactics, ignoring all the advice from the Brits and French, and our poor men were mowed down in literal rows. The 1952 movie
What Price Glory? depicts accurately what happened. James Cagney, as the veteran captain, is forced to watch his fresh young recruits killed as they march stoically into the machine-gun fire, and he goes nuts. Screaming, "Little
boys! Little
boys!" he charges the machine gun nest and kills the Germans with hand grenades. I admitted to all these Brits that we made mistakes in that war, too.
No dice. Nobody accepted my apologies or explanations. The mental-patient writer got nastier and more sarcastic and really personal, in that insufferable way perfected by Brits who hate Americans because they think we're dumb burger-chompers, and the thread had to be locked by the moderator.
This is the only forum I've been on that doesn't seem to be overrun by crazy people looking for a fight, people whose heads are made of oak, or people who despise anything not easily slipped into a convenient niche. You all seem to actually appreciate art, humor, genuine emotion, and individual thought. It's given me great hope to comment here, because I thought most of that was extinct in our culture. I'm glad to find an island of sanity and taste in the maelstrom of poo I thought had washed over me for the final time.
For once I'm ecstatic to have been proven 100-percent wrong.
P.S. Just for fun, here's a drawing I did of the large British flamethrower. The oil tanks are in the middle and the propellant bottles are on the left. The "monitor" on the right is the part that rammed up through 20 feet of earth and spouted flame. The flamethrower was fired by pulling the lever on the far left. It had a crew of seven and took 250 men to transport it in its component pieces. Possibly the dumbest weapon ever created. It took so long to assemble that of the four scheduled to be used in action on July 1, 1916, two were blown up by random German shelling and buried, leaving only two, which of course had no effect on the outcome of the battle.
You can't get photos of this thing because the only ones left all belong to museums and the British National Archives and they charge tons to license them, so I did a drawing and posted it on that British forum. Free information! Took me days to do the drawing. I thought they'd appreciate it.
No reaction. None whatsoever. Not a single comment. Every now and then, someone will post a question asking what the Livens "Large Gallery"
Flammenwerfer looks like, and nobody there ever links to my drawing. It just sits there, dead as its inventor, Lieutenant William Howard Livens, Royal Engineers Special Brigade.
I actually wondered if I'd died myself and was a ghost, because almost everything I did in the military-history field went into the ether and disappeared without a trace.
.
One of the reasons we seem so open-minded is you haven't tipped any sacred cows, or trod on sacred toes. With the British flamethrower deal, you walked into a room full of people that venerate British military history and told them a chunk of their True Cross was actually paper mache, and that the officers in charge were idiots. Over here, you'd have to post that tube amps are garbage and Leo Fender was an idiot. 
