Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [67]
Then, as the rain-wet vegetation slowly dried in the tropic air, Curtis LeMay settled down for his longest night of the war.
Playing with Fire
What is the best way to incinerate a city?
That question absorbed Allied military and scientific planners throughout the Second World War.
When the Royal Air Force discovered in 1939–40 that daylight bombing incurred crippling losses, RAF Bomber Command switched to night attacks. But finding a blacked-out city posed serious navigation problems; bombing accurately with explosive ordnance was equally difficult. Eventually the British settled on massive “area attacks”—a euphemism for carpet bombing—that produced spectacular results if a firestorm could be created. Though often condemned as terror bombing, in truth area attacks represented what could be reliably achieved with 1940s technology.
At first the Americans did hardly better, even in daylight. In 1942 then Colonel Curtis LeMay examined post-strike photographs and, counting bomb craters, found that the 8th Air Force could not account for half the ordnance it dropped. He did much to improve AAF bombing performance but Germany was one thing—Japan quite another. Incendiary raids on European cities and factories often produced marginal results owing to steel and concrete construction. Japanese cities, however, were mainly built of wood. American planners began seeking efficient means of setting Japan afire.
Probably the most innovative concept for incinerating Japan was the bat bomb. Lytle Adams, a Pennsylvania dentist, had been impressed with bats he saw in New Mexico caverns and wrote President Roosevelt in January 1942. Since bats can carry more than their own weight, Dr. Adams opined that small incendiary devices could be attached to hordes of the flying rodents, which, when released in cluster bombs over Japanese cities, would roost in rafters until the weapons ignited. Though promising, the project was canceled when some armed bats escaped at an Army airfield in New Mexico and burned the test facility to the ground.
In order to determine the best way to destroy Japanese cities, the AAF constructed buildings to Japanese standards, then tested various methods against them. A vast facility with four such ranges—“Little Tokyos”—was established at Eglin Field, Florida. Subjected to different combinations of bombs, the results were studied by ordnance experts. The fruit of the exercise was a number of terrible but important revelations. Though the standard 500-pound demolition bomb could level a house, most of the damage was inflicted by blast, leaving the surrounding area relatively untouched. But incendiaries not only destroyed what they hit—they “kept on giving” as fires increased and spread. The most effective incendiary weapon was called napalm.
Napalm was developed by Harvard chemists working under Dr. Louis Fieser, who had produced blood-clotting agents and the first synthesis of vitamin K. In 1943 his team beat industrial experts from DuPont and Standard Oil to produce an effective firebomb. The Ivy Leaguers used aluminum salts of naphthenic and palmitic acids to produce a thickening agent for gasoline. In the proper ratio, it had the consistency of applesauce and clung to whatever it touched, burning with hellish intensity. Produced by Dow Chemical, napalm was used in flamethrowers and bombs, especially in the Pacific Theater where heavy foliage concealed Japanese positions.
The chief means of raining fire upon Japan was the M69 lightweight incendiary bomb, which released napalm on impact. However, when dropped from 30,000 feet in loose packets, the six-pound weapons were strewn over miles of terrain, far from the intended target. But an “aimable cluster” (with superior ballistics), usually containing thirty-eight M69s in a finned casing, provided reasonable accuracy. Typically the cluster broke apart at 2,000 feet, spewing its submunitions over a desirable area. The ultimate M69 was the X model,