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Truly deadly Home Guard weapon (no kidding) ...

Pillbox Study Group (UK)

An often-overlooked Home Guard weapon, and does not look up to much. However, the Flame Fougasse, or simply Fougasse, was potentially one of the most deadly weapons deployed by the UK Home Guard. Basically, this consisted of a drum of inflammable liquid, usually thickened in some way, buried in the ground in accordance with a particular pattern, combined with a remote ignition system, designed to emit a mass of flaming liquid over its target. Byzantine "Greek Fire" is probably a fair comparison. These things could be constructed simply. A straightforward, but typical example would be one designed to drench a road with liquid fire directly from a drum of fuel concealed in a culvert by the roadside directly. The example here seems to be of this type. Other variants would project the fuel on different trajectories, for example, the "hedgehopper", the purpose of which was fairly obvious. The example in this photo is a rare survival, uncovered by the UK Pillbox Study Group in Kent in 2007. For obvious reasons, most Flame Fougasses, which had been installed intensively in the South-East of England during the invasion scare of 1940-'41, were dismantled and removed at the end of the war, for very obvious reasons. Best regards, JR.