Its inventor, a chemist who went on to do much good in the medical field, said that he never expected napalm to be used on people, only things. Neer, a visiting lecturer at Columbia University. Skip to main content. When they mixed this with gasoline, they got a viscous sticky brown liquid which burned more slowly and produced higher temperatures, making it a very effective weapon for fire-bombing cities, for example. Since then this formula has been refined many times.
Despite the fact it contained neither naphthalene nor palmitate, it became known as napalm B. It came into combat use in the Korean War and even though it has been used by many countries in different conflicts since then, it is imperishably associated with the Vietnam War. There is a photo of a nine-year-old Vietnamese victim of a misdirected napalm attack running down a road. She is naked because she has ripped off her burning clothes.
Napalm has not been outlawed as a weapon of war, but a United Nations convention forbids its use against civilian populations. Napalm is not beautiful, it is obscene. Decarbonising Transport: How do we work together to make an impact? The new agent, when combined with gasoline, made for a cheap, brutally effective weapon. It also could be shot long distances and was safer for the soldiers using it. Protocol III of the convention forbade the use of incendiary weapons like napalm on civilians.
The United States ratified the convention but isn't party to Protocol III and has used napalm in many conflicts since the substance's invention. The burns caused by incendiary weapons like napalm are tough for doctors to treat, according to Physicians for Social Responsibility [source: Crawley ].
Napalm can cause death by burns or asphyxiation. Napalm bombs generate carbon monoxide while simultaneously removing oxygen from the air. The air in the bombing area can be 20 percent or more carbon monoxide [source: GlobalSecurity. This effect occurs because napalm partially combusts the oxygen in the air, turning CO 2 carbon dioxide into CO carbon monoxide. In some cases, people have been boiled to death in rivers made hot by the heat of napalm bombs.
The raw ingredients of napalm can also be harmful, though certainly less so than when a napalm mixture is ignited as part of a bomb. If you've ever felt a little dizzy after breathing in fumes at a gas station, you can understand. But when polystyrene , another common ingredient in napalm, burns at high temperatures, it becomes styrene , which is toxic [source: GlobalSecurity. Although one of napalm's early uses was agricultural -- Dr. Fieser found that it destroyed crabgrass by burning the invasive species' seeds while preserving other, necessary grasses -- it has largely proved destructive toward the environment.
In Vietnam, the U. The extensive use of napalm in Vietnam, along with Agent Orange , herbicides and a variety of unexploded landmines and munitions, are now believed to have contributed to that country's ongoing environmental and public health problems [source: King].
In the United States, the storage of unused napalm has proven a contentious issue. In , protesters turned back trainloads of napalm on their way to recycling plants, perhaps fearful of napalm canisters leaking, as happened at the Weapons Support Facility, Fallbrook Detachment, in Southern California. This stockpile, supposedly the last batch of napalm in the U. The proposal was shot down out of concern over "very toxic compounds" produced by burning napalm [source: U.
Parliament ]. Napalm bombs, a type of firebomb, became a prominent part of aerial campaigns later in the war. In , Allied forces dropped the first napalm bombs on Tinian Island in , which is part of the Northern Mariana Islands in the northern Pacific Ocean.
Napalm devastated Japanese cities, especially since many houses were made of wood. A napalm bombing campaign against Tokyo on March 9, , killed an estimated , people and burned 15 square miles 39 square kilometers of the city [source: Laney ]. Allied forces also used napalm in European fighting, with around 3. The bombing, immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five," was part of a controversial campaign in which between 35, and , German civilians died [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica ].
If the blast didn't kill the soldiers inside, the heat likely did. Similar tactics were employed against Japanese soldiers occupying Pacific islands, who used extensive underground tunnel systems. During the conflict, U. High-altitude bombers and dive-bombers unleashed them on enemy tanks and soldiers. After the Korean War, the United States developed a more advanced form of napalm. This type of napalm wasn't made from naphthenic and palmitic acids the source of the original napalm name.
By then, napalm had already become a catchall term encompassing a variety of incendiary weapons, like when people say "Coke" to mean soda or "Kleenex" to stand for all facial tissues. Napalm-B, a napalm successor sometimes called super-napalm, NP2 or Incendergel, is made of 33 percent gasoline, 21 percent benzene and 46 percent polystyrene [sources: Browne , GlobalSecurity. The gasoline in napalm is generally the same as that found at most gas stations, and that gasoline already has some benzene in it, but the benzene level is increased for napalm.
First, it greatly increased the probability of igniting other inflammable materials in the target area. Second, napalm has great visco-elasticity, which extends the range of the jet of flaming fuel projected by flamethrowers.
These factors explain why the US military deployed napalm shortly after its creation. Napalm was deployed for the first time in the battlefield of Papua New Guinea, on 15 December with flamethrowers. The US military then delivered more and more napalm through aerial attacks, first in the Pacific 15 February near the Pacific Island of Ponhpei and six months later in Europe in the immediate aftermath of D-Day.
Although napalm was used in several conflicts in the aftermath of WWII -- for instance in the Greek Civil War and Indochina 10 --, these utilizations did not equal the quantity of incendiary weapons deployed by US planes during the short but devastating Korean War Not only did the allies drop more bombs on Korea than in the Pacific theater during WWII — , tons versus , tons — more of what fell was napalm, in both absolute and relative terms.
At this time, napalm was regarded as a very efficient weapon to achieve area or strategic bombing, that is bombing which not only targeted a tactical infrastructure or position but covered the whole area surrounding the target. In the period following the Korean War and preceding the Vietnam War , napalm reappeared twice on the battlefield, in Algeria and in Cuba. There is no official record of this, but several testimonies of journalists, and even militaries on the ground, acknowledge that napalm was used and produced in the French bases during the Algeria War The French were trained by US pilots to deploy napalm from the air.
Incendiary weapons -- especially napalm -- became a weapon of choice for destroying infrastructure and resources to break the morale and undermine support for rebels. The first known deployment of napalm during the Vietnam War occurred on 27 February By , napalm was a core element of the bombing strategy.
The peak of displayed napalm was reached in April Napalm, and with it America, had lost its first war. After Vietnam, napalm was used in several wars, especially in the s in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The US military acknowledged recently that many MK77 bombs had been used during these wars. Even though these bombs were not called napalm, their incendiary properties are very similar. If MK and napalm have a different name, only a slightly different distribution of constituents makes napalm different from the liquid contained in MK Effects and military advantage are considered identical. First, the US military still uses napalm, but in much lower quantity: this supports the fact that the weapon — and the strategy of attrition which aims at massively destroying military but also civilian infrastructures and resources - is perceived as being tactically effective.
This seems particularly true for counterinsurgency, where those who fight are hard to identify and hide among civilians. The military prefers not to explicitly mention the name napalm out of concern for public opinion. In order to understand why napalm fell into disgrace in the eyes of the military after the Vietnam War, and why the military questioned its strategic utility, it is first crucial to understand variations in the aerial attack doctrine.
A weapon can never be studied ex nihilo , apart from the doctrine that promotes — or impedes — its deployment. In this case, napalm cannot be dissociated from the aerial bombing doctrine. If the practice of aerial bombing was marginal before the massive German incendiary attacks of the Spanish Civil War notably, Guernica , they had preoccupied militaries since the s, and many of them tried to formulate the best aerial strategic doctrine. The debate over the best aerial strategic doctrine, that is the most efficient way to bomb the opponent, can be roughly divided into two positions: those who favor the attrition strategy i.
Of course, for the actors, these two positions are less two opposing stances than the two poles of a continuum: depending on the context and the opponent, the level of destruction or restraint can vary substantially. Following the precepts of Giulio Douhet, proponents of the strategy of attrition contend that the air bombings have to strike two targets.
They first have to strike civilians, preferably with maximum destructive power in order to break their morale and eventually lead them to stop supporting their government and their military. Weapons used to achieve attrition strikes generally have huge firepower with the capacity to destroy resistant infrastructure: after WWII and before the Vietnam War if the majority of European states used thermite and explosive bombs to realize attrition strikes, the United States designated napalm, soon after its invention, as the core weapon of its massive incendiary bombings.
0コメント