Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [68]
Ordnance engineers also produced a heavier firebomb. Using the same casing as the M69, the M74 dispensed with tail fins or streamers. Its “three-way” fuses detonated whether the bomb landed on its nose, tail, or side. Upon igniting, the incendiary bombs spewed a burning stream of jellied gasoline at least 180 feet with enough momentum to penetrate typical Japanese structures.
The third incendiary weapon loaded into B-29 bomb bays was the M76, evolved from the M47 that Doolittle’s Raiders had used. Weighing 500 pounds, the ’76 was called the “block burner” because it delivered a much larger amount of napalm and ignited bigger, more visible, fires. Therefore, M76s frequently were dropped by pathfinders who marked target areas for nocturnal B-29s.
Among those urging wider use of incendiaries against Japan were both military leaders and civilian advisers. None was so forthcoming as Arnold’s deputy, Lieutenant General Ira Eaker, when he said, “It made a lot of sense to kill skilled workers by burning whole areas.”
However, some airmen were reluctant to endorse incendiaries, though apparently more for practical than ethical reasons. After all, until 1943 the U.S. military had almost no experience with such weapons. Among the most insistent advocates of fire raids was Horatio Bond, chief engineer of the National Fire Protection Association and a military adviser. After the war he recalled, “it was necessary for those of us familiar with fire destruction to keep a constant pressure on the air force and their scientific advisors to get on with the business of exploiting fire attack to bring about the end of the war.”
Another influence was William M. McGovern, a member of the Office of Strategic Services intelligence agency. Having observed Japanese at home and in China, he declared, “The panic side of the Japanese is amazing,” alluding to what he called “internal panic.” Nothing so incited that panic as fire, “one of the great things they are terrified at from childhood.”
Certainly McGovern made a strong case, and not only for Japan. The primal dread of rampant flames arose from deep within the human psyche, sowing something far beyond fear: widespread panic rooted in atavistic terror. The result could become the headlong rush of a city’s population to escape the inescapable, only compounding the death toll as people were trampled in the hundreds or even thousands.
In the twenty-first century, when any violence inflicted against civilians by a nation-state is widely condemned as immoral, the norms of 1940s warfare may appear horrifically callous at best. Certainly the military engineers who designed firebombs did not consider themselves immoral, nor did the civilians who manufactured them. Rather, they were driven by wartime patriotism melded with resignation to the immediate task at hand.
Perhaps lost in the argument is the contemporary certainty that the Second World War could not be ended without destroying the enemy’s ability (versus his will) to sustain the violence. As noted in Chapter One, bombing has never broken the morale of an entire nation, but in the 1940s the concept was too new to be evident.
The first firestorm had been inflicted upon Coventry during the German Blitz against England in November 1940. An industrial-munitions center, the medieval city was targeted by nearly 450 Luftwaffe bombers that rained fifty-six tons of incendiaries (30,000 firebombs) and more than 500 tons of explosives in an all-night deluge. As many as 200 small fires grew into one huge, raging inferno that destroyed or damaged about three-quarters of the city’s factories, leaving some 550 people dead. It was reckoned a success by the Luftwaffe, but a modest one compared to the firestorms that followed.
Owing to doctrinal and technical concerns, British retaliation was two and a half years in the making. But in July 1943, the Royal Air Force delivered many Britons’ heartfelt sentiment: “Give it them back.