The debut of flamethrowers On July 30, 1915, tough fighting broke out around Hooge, Belgium.. During the British attack a large crater emerged very close to the German trenches. A crater like this was a prized target, because it provided an element of protection to the army troops that captured it and a relatively safe point from which to shoot the enemy. To try to keep the British away from the crater, which was on the German frontline, the Germans used their dreaded heavy mortar projectile, the Minenwerfer, which the British called Minnie or Moaning Minnie. One of the British officers present at Hooge when the attack began, July 29, Lieutenant G. V. Carey, later recalled: "It was the biggest scare our teammates had stumbled upon until then. Apart from the amount of people that flew in the air, the explosions were so tremendous that everything that was found in a radius of about a hundred meters was likely to lose their reason within a few hours and the 7th Battalion had ...