The B 29s soared over the Pacific on a route that had been used many times before. They were heading for a target so far away such a bombing mission would have been unthinkable early in the war. Enough 29s had already flown this route, though, to have wiped out some of Japan’s strategic industries such as airframe factories and oil refineries. The Japanese had managed to disperse other industries all around their country, but that didn’t matter now. The Americans were after cities. Tonight’s target was the huge Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area.
The bombers swooped to low altitude as they approached the Japanese coast and unloaded their deadly cargo over the port city of Yokohama and the Japanese capital, Tokyo, then returned to Guam after experiencing hardly any resistance. Behind them, 16 square miles of homes and businesses were ablaze.
They had created a fire storm — the biggest one in history.
A fire storm occurs when a conflagration becomes so big and hot that it creates a powerful updraft over the center of the fire, consumes all the oxygen in the affected area, and draws so much cool air to the center of the fire that winds reach gale force. The winds make the fire more intense. The heat in Tokyo was so intense that the water in the city’s canals boiled. In places, the fire took all the oxygen out of the air. Many of those caught in the firestorm, even though sheltered from the flames, suffocated for lack of oxygen. In this raid, some 86,000 people — almost all civilians (men, women, and children) — died.
In June 2004, John Yoo, a law professor explaining some memos (which he helped write) defending the use of torture on prisoners in the Iraq War, said,
“This is an unprecedented conflict with a completely new form of enemy that fights in unconventional ways that violate the very core principles of the laws of war by targeting civilians.”
The weapon that made possible conflagrations such as the Tokyo-Yokohama fire and the fires that destroyed all of the largest cities of Japan was based on an incendiary substance known and used by every American: gasoline. It was jel-lied by mixing it with aluminum naphthenate, a naphtha-based soap, and aluminum palmate, a palm-oil-based soap. The thickened gasoline clings to whatever it touches and burns more fiercely. It was also used in American flamethrowers during World War II. Because of the thickening, flamethrowers projected in a narrow stream with greater range than would have been possible with gasoline.
The jet of fire could be made to ricochet around corners. Newer fire bombs use a liquid, not a gel, called napalm B, composed of polystyrene, benzine, and gasoline. It is said to burn three times longer than the older mixture and cause more destruction.
The idea of napalm bombs came from fighter-bomber pilots who discovered that if one of their auxiliary gas tanks were dropped while still loaded, it ignited spontaneously. That made it a potentially deadly weapon, and substitut-ing napalm for aviation gas made it even more deadly. Most napalm bombs were quite large, in contrast to the thermite bombs that initiated this horrible form of warfare, first by the Germans, then by the British.
Thermite, too, is a combination of common materials — powdered aluminum and ferric oxide — better known as rust. Neither component, though, is generally considered a fire-starter. Thermite had been used to an extent in the First World War when German zeppelins bombed cities. At that time, it formed the center of a cone of resinous material bound with tarred rope. In the Second World War, the Germans used thousands of 2-pound bombs that looked like a magnesium rod with tail fins. Each consisted of a thick-walled casing of magnesium with a core of thermite. The thermite ignited the magnesium, which burned so intensely it could not be extinguished with water. Water only made it burn more fiercely, because the hot magnesium took oxygen from the water, which, of course, is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Air raid wardens were encouraged to cover the burning bombs with sand or else spray them with a fine spray of water to make them burn themselves out more quickly without spread-ing the fire. The longer the bomb burned, the more likely it was to cause a bigger fire. Thermite and magnesium burned hot enough to melt any metal and pulverize several inches of concrete.
When the British began bombing German cities, they turned thermite against its former users and added some refinements. One was a bomb that parachuted to Earth. When it landed, the tail blew off, then it forcibly ejected seven thermite bombs over a period of 10 minutes while thermite in its nose burned where it landed.
Artillery use a variety of incendiary shells. Some contain thermite, some white phosphorus, some other chemicals. Small arms also shoot incendiary ammunition. Tracer bullets are incendiaries, so were what the British called
“Buckingham bullets,” which had small amount of white phosphorus or an explosive in the nose. One high-tech incendiary is depleted uranium solid shot, widely used by U.S. forces against armor. DU, as it’s called, gives off sparks when it strikes something hard, such as armor plate. The sparks have an extremely high temperature, which makes them likely to ignite anything inflammable, such as gasoline vapor in the interior of a tank (see Chapter 49).
Fire has been a weapon of war for long before Greek fire, probably for as long as there has been war, but it never gained the importance it did in World War II with the advent of thermite and napalm aerial bombs.
Chapter 45
Jumping and Coasting Into War: The Parachute and the Glider
The Belgian government was resolved that 1914 would not be repeated.
Overlooking the Albert Canal, a little north of Liege, the Belgians built Fort Eben-Emael. Eben-Emael incorporated all of the technology used in the famous French Maginot Line. It had armored rotating gun cupolas whose low, curved shape made a direct hit impossible, and that could be lowered beneath the surface of the Earth. These cupolas mounted five 60 mm, 16 75 mm, and two 120 mm guns — all quick-firers. The fort was surrounded by an antitank wall and barbed wire. It had armored positions for searchlights, grenade throwers and many, many machine guns. Everything was underground, protected by a thick-ness of reinforced concrete that would have defied Big Bertha. Some 700 trained soldiers made up its garrison.
At 5:20 a.m.,on May 10, 1940, seven gliders landed on the top of Eben-Emael. The Belgian stronghold had practically no antiaircraft defenses. Out of the gliders climbed 55 Germans equipped with flamethrowers and shaped demolition charges as well as the usual infantry arms. They used the shaped charges to blast the cupolas and other armored positions or they burned the defenders out of them with flamethrowers. They tossed explosive charges down the air vents. The defenders fought from tunnel to tunnel when the Germans entered the underground fortress. Some of them even managed to fire on the regular German troops who were trying to cross the canal. The Germans got across, however, and when they brought up reinforcements the next day, the garrison surrendered. The garrison commander shot himself.