Quote:
Originally Posted by scorpio_rocks
With the advent of gunpowder the early fire weapons (greek fire, etc) were eclipsed and fell in to neglect, flame throwers were re-introduced to deal with fortifications, bunkers and then tanks. They are hellishly effective (their only drawbacks being short range and fragility).
There is a reason people fear fire / flamethrowers - and why people often believe they are banned...
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Flame weapons have never been primary AT weapons... While some early WW2 light tanks were pretty vulnerable to Molotov cocktails, later medium and heavy tanks resisted their effects better simply by having better protected engine compartments. Already in the Winter War the T-28 proved to be very difficult to destroy with Molotovs.
Infantry flame throwers were in general not very effective against tanks. Heavy vehicular flame throwers were somewhat better, but their short range put them at a disadvantage against tanks, and usually only very long flame bursts would work, further complicating their tactical usefulness. Most of the time the tank could simply drive away from the flame.
With the introduction of napalm there was renewed interest in using flame weapons against tanks, but test showed that air-dropped napalm did not work as well as AT bomblets. In the 1950s new tank designs also took the napalm threat into account, further reducing its effectiveness.
Flame throwers were never banned, but almost no modern army has used them after the 1960s. The Soviets designed many thermobaric weapons to replace flame throwers and by all accounts they work much better against bunkers than flame throwers ever did while still having much better range and being much safer to the operator. Still, even they do not work against modern AFVs with NBC protection (overpressure) system.
It seems that Cross beat me to it, but I'll post my €0.02 worth anyways.