Welcome to right this moment’s Photo of the Day! This World Battle I 4-barrel flare launcher was a part of a 1917 German navy contract for round 2,500 items designed to light up airfields for night time operations. Manufactured by Gebruder Rempt, with this instance being serial quantity 123, it employed an modern system of removable 4-barrel “clusters” pre-loaded with 25mm illumination flares. Eight of those clusters had been issued with every launcher, permitting crews to quickly swap depleted items as an alternative of reloading particular person chambers.
The launcher’s easy mechanics used a progressive set off to fireside the 4 flare barrels in sequence. A outstanding mounting bracket enabled fixing the launcher’s intention in predetermined instructions, as a number of items could be arrayed across the airfield’s perimeter. Whereas the design was superior for its rapid-reload clusters, solely round two dozen examples from the seven contracted producers are recognized to have survived to the current day.
“That is a particularly uncommon instance of a late WWI German Air Drive 4-barreled flare pistol as manufactured by the Gebruder Rempt firm. These distinctive flare pistols had been primarily designed to light up giant battlefields and airfields for prolonged intervals of time with out the necessity to reload. Flares weapons had been probably the most environment friendly strategy to mild giant swathes of the battlefield by night time, and had been very helpful in stopping enemy trench raids meant to disable barbed wire, and/or eradicate trench sentries and machine gun positions. It has a stacked single cartridge meeting that holds 4 completely different barrels. It has a double motion kind mechanism with 4 separate firing pin assemblies that in concept had been designed to fireside a single flare with every set off pull. The higher rear space of the body has a big mounting lug with a gap by the middle the place the flare pistol had been meant to be mounted on prime of a pole (or perhaps a removable shoulder inventory), thus permitting the flare pistol to be angled up in any course. It’s estimated that roughly 2,500 had been truly produced by six completely different corporations, and in line with a collectors flare gun registry, solely 22 examples of this 4 barreled variant flare weapons have been registered, indicating that this small quantity perhaps all which can be recognized to be in existence, with the remainder in all probability being buried in numerous trenches in France. “
Lot 1455: Uncommon WWI Imperial German Gebruder Rempt 4-Barreled Flare Pistol. (n.d.-e). Rock Island Public sale Firm. {photograph}. Retrieved March 20, 2024, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/element/71/1455/rare-wwi-imperial-german-gebruder-rempt-4barreled-flare-pistol.
