by William Weir
The miniaturization of radar went on. One result was the greatest advance in artillery in the 20th century: the proximity fuse (see Chapter 19). For the first time in history gunners could explode their shells, whether for antipersonnel ground fighting or for antiaircraft fire, at the optimum distance from the target, and do it without failure.
Radar and sonar were the first of a great array of detection devices that are at the heart of many of our modern “smart” weapons (see Chapter 50).
Chapter 44
The Fires of War: Thermite, Napalm, and Other Incendiaries
National Archives from Bureau of Medicine and Surgery French soldiers repel German attack with flamethrowers.
On the night of March 9, 1945, as the B 29s took off from Guam, war was raging everywhere. In Europe that day, American forces had taken the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen, crossing the border of Germany for the first time. The Red Army had entered Germany and had trapped half a million German troops in a pocket against the Baltic Sea, but there were still months of fighting ahead. In the United States, the American Office of War Information was desperately trying to perpetuate the myth, based on Roosevelt’s promise to Churchill, that American forces were concentrating on defeating Germany first, after which they would turn to Japan.
Actually, there was no such concentration on Germany by American forces.
That propaganda line, politically correct at the time, has unfortunately been accepted by some later writers. That makes it sound as if Japan was a paper tiger that collapsed like a punctured balloon as soon as we were able to turn away from Germany. And that supposition ignores all the toil, blood, and hero-ism of the American forces that pushed Japan almost to the breaking point while their contemporaries were helping to defeat Germany. The British forces did concentrate on Germany, certainly. Germany was a near, clear-and-present danger. But, although the largest part of the U.S. Army was in the European and Mediterranean theaters, almost all of the major ships of the U.S. Navy — aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, and submarines, and most of the Marine Corps — were in the Pacific and had been for three years. Guam itself, the base of these super-heavy B 29 bombers, had been retaken from the Japanese less than a year before this. At the same time, at the Battle of the Philippine Sea (also known as the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot), the U.S. Navy had broken the back of Japanese naval air forces and dealt a heavy blow to the Imperial Navy. A few months later, on October 24 and 25, 1944, the United States struck an even heavier blow at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Japan lost four aircraft carriers, three battleships, 10 cruisers, and nine destroyers as well as 500 planes, and U.S. forces began the reconquest of the Philippines. They had gone from there to Iwo Jima on the doorstep of Japan — almost, in fact, one of the Japanese home islands. By this time, Japan had no airframe factories, almost no shipping, hardly any oil, and hardly any planes on the home islands.
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
National Archives from Army
Paratroopers jump at Munsan, Korea, in an unsuccessful attempt to cut off retreating enemy troops.
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.
While glider troops were attacking Eben-Emael, paratroopers dropped into Holland and seized bridges, making the vaunted Dutch water-defenses useless.
Even earlier, during the German invasion of Norway, a long narrow country broken up by fjords and mountains, the Germans dropped paratroops to seize key airfields. They were quickly reinforced by troops arriving on transport planes.
These attacks of troops from the sky seemed to many at that time like something from a science-fiction tale. For years, there had been reports of paratroopers of the Soviet Union’s Red Army and how they would change warfare.
But the publications that printed these stories also had articles on how the Japanese-owned fishing boats in Los Angeles Harbor would cover that immense body of water with oil and ignite it, roasting everyone in the Pacific Fleet. Then came the Soviet Union’s fumbling effort against Finland in the Winter War of 1939–1940. No paratroopers appeared, and the Red Army’s campaign was distinguished mostly by its ineptitude. The paratroop threat seemed on a par with the martian threat.
The aerial component of the Blitzkrieg was a shock, but worse was to come.
On May 20, 1941, the remnants of the British force that had been driven out of Greece were holed up on Crete with some 10,200 Greek allies. Soon after dawn, the defenders saw an enormous fleet of aircraft. Suddenly, parachutes blossomed behind the planes, thousands upon thousands of parachutes. Behind the parachutes came planes towing gliders that held artillery, more heavy equipment and more soldiers. On May 26th, Major General Bernard Freyberg of New Zealand, commander of the Allied forces on Crete, radioed his commander, General Archibald Wavell, that Crete could not hold out. On June 1, the Royal Navy evacuated 18,000 men. Some 12,000 of the British force had been captured, and 2,000 had been killed. The British and Americans put new emphasis on developing airborne divisions of their own.
The Allies used their paratroopers for the first time in the invasion of Sicily in 1943. The airborne troops avoided the main German mistake on Crete: dropping directly on enemy troops, something that caused them extraordinarily heavy losses. They landed away from enemy troop concentrations, then attacked outposts, bridges, road intersections, and made it almost impossible for Axis forces to reach the beaches being attacked from the sea.
D day, June 6, 1945, saw the greatest parachute and glider assault in history — one that will probably still be the greatest in history a thousand years from now. Four divisions, two American and two British, parachuted onto Normandy in the dead of the night. It was hardly a flawless operation. Most of the paratroopers landed at a distance from their intended drop zones, and wind scattered them so far that many did not return to their own units for 24 hours.
That wasn’t all bad. The troopers were scattered so widely that the Germans were utterly surprised to find enemy troops among them. The paratroopers took advantage of that surprise and captured many of the Germans’ rear installations. The landings greatly disrupted attempts to reinforce the German troops being attacked on the beaches.
One of the big factors in the success of the airborne assault was that much of Normandy, except for the front-line troops on the beaches, was defended by second-line troops with third-line equipment. Some of the German units were equipped with French tanks left over from the First World War and with under-powered artillery from the same war. Antiaircraft guns were in short supply. A mass jump, such as those on Normandy with troops wearing static-line parachutes, requires transport planes to fly in a fairly dense formation at a rather low altitude and continue on course until the last trooper has jumped.
And that is the answer to an antiaircraft gunners’ prayer. Before conditions that permit that kind of jump occur again, troops may be wearing antigravity boots or rocket belts. The glider forces did not have the luck of the Germans at Eben-Emael. Landing at night in a land of hedgerows and swamps, many of them crashed, and large numbers of troops were killed or suffered disabling injuries.
The German invasion of Crete had breathed new life into the concept of airborne operations, but enthusiasts overlooked a few facts. First, German losses at first were so great that General Karl Student, chief of the Luftwaffe’s airborne troops, thought his men had lost the battle on the first day of the invasion. They dropped directly on the airfields, and the defenders began killing them before they touched the ground. The slaughter was especially heavy at airfields held by New Zealand troops. German General Erwin Rommel said the New Zealanders were the best troops he fought in his North African campaigns.
Most of them were farmers, and they had been using rifles since childhood.
They shot a large proportion of the airborne invaders as they hung helplessly beneath their parachutes. Second, in spite of their skill, the defenders were refugees from the defeat in Greece. They had machine guns without tripods, mortars without shells, almost no motor transportation, absolutely no air cover, and, especially, they had a great shortage of radios. Freyberg was unable to coordinate his troops’ movements; his subordinate commanders didn’t know what other units were doing or where they were. When one New Zealand commander pulled back to regroup, he left a corner of the airfield he was defending uncovered. By a sinister coincidence, Student had just at that time dispatched a fleet of transport planes loaded with regular — not airborne — troops to that airfield. If the New Zealanders had been in their former position, the Germans would have been slaughtered. As it was, they gained a foothold and were able to continue to pour in reinforcements. Nevertheless, German deaths were more than twice those of the British: 5,000 to 2,000. This was largely because of losses the first day.
The Allies conducted more successful parachute drops after D day, seizing bridges just ahead of the ground forces and preventing their demolition by the enemy. These, though, were small scale jumps in territory held by forces whose top priority was getting away from there. One parachute drop was a disaster.
The British “Red Devils” jumped at Arnhem in the Netherlands “One Bridge Too Far,” as Cornelius Ryan’s bestseller put it, ahead of the British ground forces. They were all killed or captured. In Burma, the maverick British General Orde Wingate used gliders to successfully bring troo
ps and artillery to his “strongholds” in the jungle, pioneering what later developed into the “air mobile” tactical doctrine of such outfits as the U.S. First Air Cavalry Division.
Paratroopers jumped twice in the Korean War. Both times, the 187th Airborne Regiment tried to cut off retreating North Korean troops. But each time, the enemy had already retreated farther north than the drop zone. After Korea, troop-carrying helicopters made both parachutes and gliders largely obsolete.
Special Forces troops use steerable parachutes for small-scale special operations, but the mass jump of paratroopers with static cord chutes is a thing of the past. Some Special Forces troops jumped to secure airstrips in northern Iraq at the beginning of the Iraq War, but the jump itself seemed to be mainly for exercise. The airfields were undefended.
Still, just about every country in the world has paratroopers, even countries with hardly any airplanes. Paratroopers are considered elite troops. They are much like the grenadiers in the late 18th century — that is, highly trained masters of a military skill no longer needed. In combat, all other things being equal, including leadership, airborne outfits have proven to be neither better nor worse than ordinary infantry. That statement may anger paratroopers or former paratroopers who have been brainwashed to believe that they are superior to all “straight-legs,” but combat records permit no other conclusion.
