Welcome to today’s Photo of the Day! This World War I 4-barrel flare launcher was part of a 1917 German military contract for around 2,500 units designed to illuminate airfields for night operations. Manufactured by Gebruder Rempt, with this example being serial number 123, it employed an innovative system of detachable 4-barrel “clusters” pre-loaded with 25mm illumination flares. Eight of these clusters were issued with each launcher, allowing crews to rapidly swap depleted units instead of reloading individual chambers.
The launcher’s simple mechanics used a progressive trigger to fire the four flare barrels in sequence. A prominent mounting bracket enabled fixing the launcher’s aim in predetermined directions, as multiple units would be arrayed around the airfield’s perimeter. While the design was advanced for its rapid-reload clusters, only around two dozen examples from the seven contracted manufacturers are known to have survived to the present day.
“This is an extremely rare example of a late WWI German Air Force 4-barreled flare pistol as manufactured by the Gebruder Rempt company. These unique flare pistols were primarily designed to illuminate large battlefields and airfields for extended periods of time without the need to reload. Flares guns were the most efficient way to light large swathes of the battlefield by night, and were very useful in preventing enemy trench raids intended to disable barbed wire, and/or eliminate trench sentries and machine gun positions. It has a stacked single cartridge assembly that holds four different barrels. It has a double action type mechanism with four separate firing pin assemblies that in theory were designed to fire a single flare with each trigger pull. The upper rear area of the frame has a large mounting lug with a hole through the center where the flare pistol were intended to be mounted on top of a pole (or maybe a detachable shoulder stock), thus allowing the flare pistol to be angled up in any direction. It is estimated that approximately 2,500 were actually produced by six different companies, and according to a collectors flare gun registry, only 22 examples of this four barreled variant flare guns have been registered, indicating that this small number maybe all that are known to be in existence, with the rest probably being buried in various trenches in France. “
Lot 1455: Rare WWI Imperial German Gebruder Rempt 4-Barreled Flare Pistol. (n.d.-e). Rock Island Auction Company. photograph. Retrieved March 20, 2024, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/71/1455/rare-wwi-imperial-german-gebruder-rempt-4barreled-flare-pistol.
