Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
I was not aware of any combat use by the Australians, any chance that you can provide any further details?
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Apologies, I don't have any solid information at all really.
The footage I saw was in a compilation of black and white British newsreel footage in a film called Balikpapan that screened on free to air TV here in Australia on Anzac Day last year. I had a copy saved on my PS3 (which I use for recording TV) but I deleted it after re-watching it recently.
A quick internet search has turned up the following (none of it from the TV film I recorded):
There's US newsreel combat footage of a flamethrower being used at Balikpapan at 1m 16s in this video:
Allied troops invade - World War II - Australian 7th Division, Douglas-MacArthur . In that footage you can't see who's holding the flamethrower but given that the land combat forces involved were almost exclusively Australian, it's likely that it was an Aussie soldier.
The website
https://archive.org/ won't let me link directly to the video, but at 11m 18s of the video
July 1945 newsreel: from the Potsdam Conference to the 914mm "Little David" mortar (it includes US newsreel footage filmed at Balikpapan) you can see clearly that it's an Aussie soldier firing a flamethrower. Is it an M2-2?