The Bomber Mafia, page 11
E. B. Hershberg was, in Louis Fieser’s words, “a masterful experimentalist in organic chemistry…also versed in engineering, in mechanical drawing, in carpentry…and in photography…Furthermore Hershberg…was experienced in the handling of military explosives, fuses, poison gases, smoke pots, and grenades” and had invented a long list of devices, including “the Hershberg stirrer, the Hershberg stirring motor, and the Hershberg melting point apparatus.”
As Robert recalled:
In our basement we had defused bombs and things of that nature, and [I have] pictures of explosions that occurred. And some of the incendiary devices were in the desk drawers…There were things like notebooks that had incendiary devices in them, that if you were captured, you pulled the pen out, [and] you had half an hour to write everything down and what you wanted and get out of there before it blew up and burned down the building.
That was E. B. Hershberg.
So Louis Fieser went to Delaware to investigate the DuPont compound that made paint catch on fire: divinylacetylene. After he returned to Harvard, he and Hershberg started cooking up batches of it. They would put the batches in pans and place them on the windowsill of Fieser’s basement lab. They noticed that the substance gradually changed from a liquid to a thick, viscous gel. They poked the gel with sticks. Then they set fire to it and noticed—and I’m quoting here from Fieser’s book, because this was the crucial insight—“that when a viscous gel burns it does not become fluid but retains its viscous, sticky consistency. The experience suggested the idea of a bomb that would scatter large burning globs of sticky gel.”
You drop the bomb, and the gel scatters. And it doesn’t just burn itself out. Big globs of gel fly in every direction, and those globs stick to whatever surface they land on—and keep burning and burning and burning.
Hershberg and Fieser now had to find a way to test this new concept of incendiary gels. So they built a little two-foot-tall wooden structure in the lab and compared how well various gel formulations did in burning it down. Divinylacetylene was good. But a gel made of rubber and benzene was better. And gasoline was even better than benzene. They tried amber-colored smoked sheet rubber. Pale crepe rubber. Rubber latex. Vulcanized rubber. They made a prototype and took it with them in a suitcase on the train to Maryland, giving it to the porter to carry. The porter said, “It feels heavy enough to be a bomb.”
Next they tried aluminum naphthenate, a sticky black tar made by a chemical company out of Elizabeth, New Jersey. The tar didn’t mix well with gasoline, but they solved the problem by mixing in something else called aluminum palmitate. Gasoline mixed with aluminum naphthenate plus aluminum palmitate.
Napalm.
Robert Neer, author of Napalm: An American Biography, told me why napalm is so effective:
If you want an effective incendiary, something that is sticky is much more effective than something that is not sticky, because it actually adheres to whatever it is transferring its radiation energy into. And that’s why napalm is so effective.
If the jelled material is too soft or too weak, then it won’t actually deliver a very large amount of radiation to whatever it’s sticking to. You can think of a Molotov cocktail that’s filled up with gasoline, exploding and delivering gasoline. It can burn somebody or something quite terribly, but the fire will go out relatively quickly. Whereas by contrast, if napalm is thrown on something, it will stick to it.
A gel that was too loose would produce what they described dismissively as applesauce. In other words, it wasn’t thick enough or solid enough in its globules to adhere to something. And something that was just right would form quite large-size chunks. It had to be a balance between too thick and too thin and just right. And that’s what they ultimately hit upon with napalm.
Neer and I visited the Harvard soccer field, right behind the business school, which is across the river from the main campus. It’s where Hershberg and Fieser tested napalm in 1942. Hershberg had figured out how to turn their new gel into a bomb: by inserting a stick of TNT with a layer of white phosphorus wrapped around it in the middle of a canister of napalm. Phosphorus burns at a very high temperature, so the TNT would go off, driving the burning phosphorus into the napalm gel, igniting it, and sending globs of it in every direction. For a bomb case, they used a shell that had originally been designed to hold mustard gas. Robert Neer described the scene:
It was on Independence Day, 1942. They had finalized the formulation for the gel incendiary on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And then they figured out the white-phosphorus-burster ignition system and got the bomb shells from the military and built their prototypes.
They dug a lagoon into the field. The lagoon was, I believe, about a hundred feet in diameter. It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large napalm bomb in a canister that they were going to explode in the center. So they put the bomb right in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department.
The birth of napalm. Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard’s soccer pitch. When he was doing his research, Robert Neer spotted a little detail in the photos from that day.
In the initial pictures of the test, there are people dressed in whites playing on the tennis courts. And then after the bomb goes off, you see that the tennis courts are abandoned…So maybe they told everybody that they were about to test this napalm bomb, or maybe they just let them keep playing tennis and then tested it and everybody ran away. I don’t know. Nobody was injured in these tests. After the bomb was exploded, they made a very careful catalog of the distribution and size of the extinguished globules of napalm, because that was part of determining the most effective consistency of the gel.
Fieser and Hershberg took their creation back to the National Defense Research Committee, and Hottel realized he had finally found what they were all looking for: napalm, created at Harvard University, perfected in the fields along the meandering Charles River.
2.
There was never any question what napalm was for. It was intended to be used against Japan.
A few months after Pearl Harbor, two American analysts published an essay in Harper’s Magazine. When it comes time to retaliate against Japan, the authors argued, there’s a really easy way to do it. Fire. Osaka was their case study. Osaka’s streets are very narrow. Narrow streets means that fire can jump easily from one side to the other. And the city didn’t have a lot of parks that could act as firebreaks.
Plus, unlike Western cities, Japanese cities weren’t built of bricks and mortar. The beams, joists, and floorboards of houses were all wooden. Ceilings were made of heavy paper soaked in fish oil. Walls were made of wood or thin stucco. Inside were tatami—straw mats. Japanese houses were tinderboxes.
As the analysts wrote, “After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in the twenty-five-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80 percent, as opposed to 15 percent for London.”
Eighty percent—that’s almost the whole city.
The people writing the article weren’t military officers or White House policy makers. The idea that you might destroy 80 percent of one of your enemy’s cities—burn it to the ground—was heretical. William Sherman, the general who led the Union Army on its final devastating course through the South after the Civil War, famously burned down Atlanta. But not all of Atlanta. The business and industrial districts. Not civilians in their homes. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical. Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? A gradual process of rationalization began to take hold.
Army War College historian Tami Biddle explains,
Regarding Japan, we still told ourselves, Well, there’s lots of industry in cities, which is what the British had told themselves when they switched over to area bombing.
If you are a morally guided person, and you want to be able to sleep at night and reconcile what you’re doing with your own principles, you’ve got to find language and concepts to tell yourself that what you’re doing is okay…
The decision at that point was Okay, gloves come off. We have to do whatever we can do to bring this nation down.
Hoyt Hottel heard those whispers, those rationalizations. Did he read that Harper’s essay? He must have. The NDRC told him to investigate the utility of incendiaries as weapons of war, and so he decided—good scientist that he was—to put this new weapon, napalm, to the test. He set up one of the most elaborate experiments of the war: an incendiary demonstration test at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s eight-hundred-thousand-acre test facility in the middle of the Utah desert.
As Hottel recalled, “These generals don’t believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things.” They built two sets of perfect replicas of enemy houses on the sands of the Utah desert.
Hottel brought in top-level architects. For the German village, he called on Erich Mendelsohn, a brilliant German Jewish architect who had designed some of the most beautiful art deco and art moderne buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. For the Japanese village, Hottel conscripted Antonin Raymond, who had lived in Japan for years and to this day is probably Japan’s most celebrated Western-born architect.
Hottel recalled how much care went into the replica villages: “We decided that the two-inch-thick rice-straw mats that characterized the Japanese home, the tatami, were important because they were the major resistance to the bomb passage through one floor after another. So we had to have tatami.”
They built twenty-four Japanese residences—twelve complexes with two units each. They included shoji—Japanese sliding screens—and perfect replicas of Japanese window shutters.
Antonin Raymond also set exacting standards. Hottel recalled, “Raymond wanted the cabinetwork on making these things under his eye in New Jersey. Here we wanted to build a place in Utah, the wood was in the Pacific, the cabinetwork was to be in New Jersey—and these are absurdities.”
Hottel’s project manager, Slim Myers, was another perfectionist. “Slim said, ‘Damn it, we’ve got to be absolutely right. These generals are not going to stop us because we didn’t have something that was really characteristic. We’ve got to be right.’”
By the summer of 1943, Hottel’s model villages were ready for their tests. The military assigned a fleet of bombers to Dugway. One plane after another dropped its incendiaries. And after each round, the teams on the ground rebuilt whatever was damaged. Hottel first tried British thermite bombs, which were favored by the RAF commander Arthur Harris in his night raids on Germany. They compared those results with those of Hershberg and Fieser’s napalm, packed inside bombs that went by the name M69. Hoyt Hottel and his team stood by, keeping score.
Hottel recalled, “We early [on] decided that we couldn’t wait for the fire truck. We had to rush out to take care of fires. In fact, we had to rush out before all of the bombs had dropped.”
Hottel grouped whatever fire he saw into three categories of destructiveness: (a) uncontrollable within six minutes, (b) destructive if unattended, and (c) nondestructive. Napalm was the hands-down winner, with a 68 percent success rate in the first category on Japanese houses. It caused uncontrollable fires. By contrast, British thermite ran a poor, distant second. With napalm, the United States had built itself a superweapon. And the Army was so proud of its new bomb that it made glowing promotional films about it.
The main component of the M-69 bomb [is] a cheesecloth sock containing specially processed jellied gasoline. When ignited, the gel filling becomes a clinging, fiery mass, spreading more than a yard in diameter…It burns at approximately one thousand degrees Fahrenheit for eight to ten minutes…For air drops, the M69 is assembled in groups of thirty-eight…The cluster is released and opened, and the individual bombs, with gauze streamers trailing, drop toward the target.
3.
Imagine that you were a member of the Bomber Mafia and you happened to sit in on that demonstration test at the Dugway Proving Ground. You saw the meticulous reconstruction of Japanese villages. Heard the B-29s—your B-29s—screaming down the skies to drop their fiery payloads. You saw the houses engulfed in flames. What would you have made of it all?
I’m guessing you would have been baffled. The Bomber Mafia was consumed with the potential of the Norden bombsight, a machine that used technology to redefine war, to make it more humane, to restrain the murderous impulses of generals on the battlefield. If you weren’t using human ingenuity and science to improve the way human beings conducted their ruinous affairs, then what was the point? This is what technological innovation was for.
But suddenly you were standing somewhere deep in the Utah desert, under a hard sun, observing a military exercise authorized and funded by the same US military that paid for your Norden bombsight. Except that these people are using science and ingenuity to create incendiaries, objects to be dropped from the sky with the intention of starting violent, indiscriminate fires. You had been going to elaborate pains to avoid hitting anything but the most crucial industrial targets. Now the Army was using your precision-bombing apparatus to obliterate people’s houses. Here was the government—your own military bosses back in Washington—pursuing a strategy 100 percent in violation of your principles. And that’s not even mentioning the top-secret work in the New Mexico desert, where the smartest people in the world were being given billions of dollars to create a weapon so devastating, so catastrophic in its effects, that it would change world politics forever. If firebombs were a betrayal of precision-bombing doctrine, then what was the atomic bomb? Good Lord. It was a technological Judas.
But then, after the initial outrage had passed, you might well have had a second thought. An unbidden thought. A temptation.
Because napalm would solve all the problems Haywood Hansell and all his precision bombers had had in the war thus far. Precision bombing wasn’t working. Hansell was struggling under some of the most difficult conditions faced by any combat commander in the entire air war. His planes couldn’t hit what they wanted to hit because of the high-altitude winds and the clouds over Tokyo. So maybe, the thinking went, don’t bother aiming at anything at all. Just burn everything down. The place is a tinderbox. All Haywood Hansell had to do was switch to napalm. He could carry out morale bombing against the Japanese, only with a weapon far, far deadlier than the bombs the British used on Germany. Sixty-eight percent success rate in category (a) on Japanese houses, where the fires became uncontrollable within six minutes.
In the Bible, Jesus spends forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, being tempted by Satan. Haywood Hansell launched his first air strike on Japan on November 24, 1944. His last day as head of the Twentieth Bomber Command was January 19, 1945. That’s fifty-five days in the wilderness of the Marianas when he was tempted to abandon all that he had fought for and believed in in exchange for the chance to defeat the Japanese enemy.
Over the course of those fifty-five days, the pressure on Hansell grew intense. The Army shipped thousands of napalm canisters to the Marianas. They urged Hansell to try—just try—a full-scale incendiary attack on Japan.
Hansell lost a B-29 on nearly every major mission. The margin of error for getting back to the Marianas was so slim that damaged planes would sometimes just plunge into the Pacific on the way home, never to be seen again. Morale dropped. The same General Hansell who had been almost absurdly upbeat about the prospects for precision bombing a year earlier now turned dark and angry. After yet another failed mission in which they missed the primary target entirely, one of Hansell’s key officers, Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, held a briefing for his airmen. He was trying to keep their spirits up. “Boys. It’s tough. It’s a tough mission. But I’m proud of you, and we’re doing well.” Then Hansell stood up. And blasted the room.
“I don’t agree with Rosie. I don’t think you’re earning your salt out here. And the mission. If it continues like it is…the operation will fail.” Hansell embarrassed one of his officers in front of everyone, something no commanding officer should ever do, not if he wants to maintain the respect of his men.
Historian Stephen McFarland described Hansell to me this way:
He’s kind of a tragic character in a way. His forte was thinking. He helped formulate this strategy, helped design the war plans that would lead to the bombing of Germany and Japan. He was almost philosophical. He was more of a thinker. He was more of a—I don’t want to say, pencil-neck-geek type of person.
He was not a combat officer. He was not the great leader. He spoke in terms of high ideals…He never cussed, and commanders in the war who never cursed, they weren’t much appreciated by the pilots. They wanted somebody who was down to earth, who understood what it was like.
By the end, Hansell was increasingly alone. Historian Tami Biddle put it like this:
I think when a commander goes into a command with an idea of what’s going to work, first of all, they believe it. They have to believe it because you couldn’t send so many men into combat if you just didn’t believe in what you were doing.
You send men into combat with an idea, and you’re anchored to that idea about what you’ve got to do to make it work and to justify those lives and to justify that blood and treasure…
I think commanders when they’re in the field, doing something that’s so intense as what Hansell was trying to do between basically October and December of 1944—he is fixated. I think he’s got one thing on his brain, and he’s just determined that he’s going to make it work.
