Revisionist History - May the Best Firebomb Win

Episode Date: July 16, 2020

Basement laboratories. Mad scientists. Sticky gels, and a bake-off in the desert. The strange story behind Curtis LeMay’s weapon of choice. Part two. Get Revisionist History updates first by signing up for our newsletter at pushkin.fm. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. A couple of years before the United States entered the Second World War, there was a meeting at Harvard University. The president of Harvard was there, the president of MIT, a Nobel Prize winner, the president of the Standard Oil Development Company, and two professors, Louis Fieser from Harvard and the chair, Hoyt Hoddle from MIT. Come 39, a lot of people thought that a war was something we'd be in sooner or later, and our state of preparedness was poor. Hoddle was slender, high forehead, generous eyebrows, a giant in his field.

He'd been tapped by the National Defense Research Committee, the NDRC, the top secret government group charged with developing new weapons for the American military. The most famous effort of the NDRC was, of course, the Manhattan Project, the multi-billion dollar operation out of Los Alamos to develop the first atomic bomb. Hoddle's group was a more obscure subcommittee. They weren't physicists, they were chemists, and their focus wasn't on finding better ways to blow things up. It was on finding better ways to burn things down. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,

my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part two of a four-part series about Curtis LeMay and the events of March 1945. Part one, which you should listen to first if you have not already, was about the rise of an insurgent group of pilots known as the Bomber Mafia. They believed that wars could be won entirely from the air. But bombers need bombs. And this episode is about the scientists who tempted the bomber mafia with one of the most seductive and the most deadly weapons of the modern era.

It is important not to confuse the chemists of World War II with the physicists. They belong to different ecosystems. Robert Oppenheimer, who ran the Manhattan Project, was the archetypal physicist. Brilliant, handsome, charismatic, moody. Oppenheimer grew up in luxury in Manhattan, in an apartment with paintings by Picasso and Van Gogh. He fell in love with beautiful communists. In the world of science, Oppenheimer was an aristocrat.

He had no difficulty persuading the government to build him a massive, secluded research facility at Los Alamos, near his ranch in Santa Fe, where Oppenheimer and his fellow physicists could pursue the holy grail of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project cost $2 billion in 1940s dollars. The people who worked on it were quite literally the smartest people in the world. The operation was infiltrated by spies.

Everyone was having affairs. Los Alamos was like a high IQ reality show. That was physics in the 1940s, the province of glamour and intrigue. The chemists were not like that. Hoyt Hottel and his obscure subcommittee weren't trying to split the atom or glimpse some distant scientific horizon. They were interested in the oldest and most basic of all weapons of war, fire. They talked about it, obsessed about it, dreamt about it. On the day of my arrival, I was

scheduled to talk before the Zoroastrian Society. This is Hoddle in an interview near the end of his life with the Science History Institute, talking about meeting his counterparts in England in the middle of the war. The Zoroastrian Society was an informal group of military men, professors, and mathematicians. They named themselves for an ancient Persian religion which had special rituals based on fire. And the Zoroastrian Society talked about how better to put out fires or how to do this, that, or the other, passed on the quality of bombs. This was Hoddle's kind of crowd.

His personal specialty was flamethrowers. And I thought it would be a good thing to get General Motors into a tank-mounted flamethrower with intermittent ejection. Intermittency permitted you to use a very much larger diameter nozzle. If you mounted a flamethrower on a tank, well, that really grabbed his imagination. But the NDRC needed the country's scientists to think bigger. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and controlled much of East Asia. The Germans were in command of Europe. America needed new weapons, fast.

Physicists were dispatched to New Mexico to split the atom, and the chemists were asked to re-examine the lethal qualities of thermal combustion. We needed to know more about incendiary bombs. So Hoddle gathered his elite circle, university presidents, Nobel Prize winners, Ivy League professors, all of them specialists in the particular consequences of combining oxygen, fuel, and heat. And he proposed a competition, a bake-off, if you will. Let us see who among us can build the finest weapon for burning things down.

Let the best firebomb win. Hoyt Hoddle's bake-off would eventually involve some of the biggest industrial companies in the country. But there was one dark horse, Louis Fieser. Some of the biggest industrial companies in the country. But there was one dark horse. Louis Fieser.

Some of the demonstrations of this film are of standard, frequently repeated operations. And I will show you the way in which my own students are supposed to carry them out. Fieser was born in Ohio in 1899. He majored in chemistry at Williams College, got his Ph.D. from Harvard, postdocs at Oxford and Frankfurt. Fieser probably should have won a Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin K, but the war got in the way. His research assistant was his wife, the equally brilliant Mary Fieser. Women didn't get hired as chemistry professors in those days,

but together the couple wrote one of the definitive chemistry textbooks, co-authors Fieser and Fieser. Louis was largely bald, a little heavyset, mustache, always with a cigarette. Shall we go into the laboratory? Don't forget your safety glasses. Louis Fieser was a man of imagination and whimsy. His scientific memoir, published in 1964, begins with his wartime work, but then quickly turns to detailed descriptions of things like a pocket firebomb he calls, in an inspired bit of brand awareness, the Harvard candle. A chapter on attaching incendiaries to bats, an extended riff on how to ignite a 1,000-gallon oil slick. And the coup de grace, a chapter on his Siamese cat Sin Kaipu and his concept for a squirrel-proof bird feeder. Fieser wasn't a physicist thinking big thoughts under the big skies of New Mexico. He didn't have security guards

monitoring his every move like the physicists at Los Alamos, or review boards monitoring his every move, like the physicists at Los Alamos, or review boards monitoring his progress, or anxious military men checking in every day. He just went to his basement laboratory and made stuff. We don't have many recordings of Fieser, but in the Science History Archives, there's an extended interview with a colleague of his, someone named William von Eggers-During, who taught chemistry for years at Yale and Harvard. It gives you a sense of this world of scientists with a license to be just a little mad. God, what was the compound we were after? Oh, yes, trinitrobenzonytrane.

The interview goes on for hours, and it's weirdly riveting. Part of me just wanted to run the whole thing since it's so, well, you'll hear. Let me just play for you the part where Von Eggers starts reminiscing about working in Fieser's laboratory at the very beginning of the war. Listen to this. You put it it remember those heavy carriers too so you put in about 20 or 30 grams

of TNT you poured a little excess of bromine no solvent you sealed it in you put it in a from bromine, no solvent. You seal the damn tube. You put it in a bomb, an iron bomb, you know,

with a wire wrapped around it to raise the temperature. So that, in effect, if you put the heating tube in that little space. Then if it blew up, the glass would hit this little part of the wall and the other. Well, of course, half the tubes blew up. Understand that Von Eggers was one of the great chemists of his generation. He published his first

scientific paper in 1939 and his last in 2008. Eight decades of work. In every picture I've ever seen of him, he's wearing a polka-dotted bow tie. His great-uncle was president of the Reich Bank in Germany. I may one day devote an entire revisionist history episode to him. How can you not love this guy? A laboratory would be so broken. And you wonder, when is the TSP going to detonate? He's like a 13-year-old kid with a chemistry set.

Oh, God, it was marvelous times. The Germans have a word to describe certain persons as tierish angst, which means having an animal-like seriousness. The Germans have a word to describe certain persons as tearish ants, which means having an animal-like seriousness about them. And I must say that there was very little of that in those days. When Louis Fieser came down to Von Egger's lab with his ever-present cigarettes, the grad students would play pranks on him. Louis would come in to talk to his people and would invariably throw his cigarettes, still burning, into the sink. And so the game was to try to guess when he was coming down and then pour ether into the sink

in the hopes that it would catch fire. In the hopes that it would catch fire. These were the scientists the government gathered during the war for the second obscure subcommittee of the NDRC, the basement chemists. They kept on meeting around the country, planning, scheming, tinkering. And one day, May 28, 1941, at a National Defense Research Committee meeting in Chicago, Fieser hears about a curious incident that had just happened at a DuPont chemical plant. A group in one of DuPont's paint factories had been working with something called

divinyl acetylene. It's a hydrocarbon, an oil byproduct, and if you mix it with a pigment, the paint will dry into a tough, thick adhesive film. But the film kept bursting into flame. That was obviously bad news for someone to make a better paint, but the film kept bursting into flame. That was obviously bad news for someone to make a better paint, but not for people thinking about how to make a better firebomb. When Louis Fieser was told of the strange fire at the DuPont paint factory, he offered to investigate. In his memoirs, he writes, I volunteered chiefly because I had available in my peacetime research group a man ideally qualified to experiment with and evaluate a hazardous chemical, Dr. E.B. Hirshberg.

Do you know how he got hooked up with Fieser? Yes. First, he's from Boston area. That's Robert Hirshberg. His father, E.B. Hirshberg, was Fieser's research fellow. I think the very quick and short answer was there were limited places for employment for Jews, and Fieser couldn't care less about religion. So that's the lab he wound up in. E.B. Hirschberg was, in Louis Fieser's words, a masterful experimentalist in organic chemistry, and also versed in engineering, in mechanical drawing, in carpentry, and in photography. Fieser goes on, he 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 Hirshberg stirrer, the Hirshberg stirring motor,

and the Hirshberg melting point apparatus. In our basement, we had defused bombs and things of that nature and pictures of explosions that occurred. Some of the incendiary devices were in the desk drawers. So these were just the devices that he and Fieser had been experimenting with during the 40s? Yeah, they invented them. That lab, and there were other people, but there were things like notebooks that had incendiary devices in them that if you were captured and you pulled the pen out,

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's E.B. Hirschberg. So he and Louis Fieser go to Wilmington, Delaware to investigate the DuPont compound that makes paint catch on fire, divinyl acetylene. Then they come back to Harvard and start cooking up batches of it. They would put the batches in pans and place them in the window well of Fieser's basement lab.

They noticed how the substance gradually changed from a liquid to 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. 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, end quote. 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 on, and keep burning, and keep burning, and keep burning. Hirschberg 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 different gel formulations did in burning it down. Divinyl acetylene was good, but a gel made of rubber and benzene was better. And gasoline was even better than benzene. They tried amber-colored smoke 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 Washington, giving it to the porter to carry, who 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. So 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.

That's Robert Neer, author of Napalm, an American Biography. If the gelled 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-sized chunks. So it had to be a balance in between too thick and too thin and just right. And that's what they ultimately hit upon with napalm. I met Robert Neer at Harvard and asked him to take me on what he calls his napalm tour of the campus. Is this the soccer field?

Yeah, this is O'Harey Field. It's named after one of the greatest Harvard soccer players ever. And it's the soccer field now, and it also was used as a soccer field in the 1940s. The Harvard soccer field, right behind the business school, is across the river from the main campus. E.B. Hirshberg had figured out a plan to turn their new gel into a bomb. He suggested 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. Hirschberg and Fieser come to test here when? What year? Do you remember? It's a 43? It was on Independence Day, 1942. So they finalized the formulation for the gelled incendiary on Valentine's Day, February 14th of 1942. And then they figured out the white phosphorus

burster ignition system and got the bombshells from the military and built their prototypes. And as I had mentioned, dug this lagoon into the field. So in the middle of this field, how big was the lagoon? The lagoon was, I believe, about 100 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. So in the initial pictures of the test, there are people dressed in whites playing on the tennis courts, which are still just right over there. You can see 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. But, I mean, 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. And how does the gel explode past the...

No. It's all contained within the liquid? Oh, I see. There's no disaster. Yeah. They know, in other words, they have some idea about how far the gel is going to flow. Yeah, these are genius engineers and incredibly skilled people. And so they know how far things will fly based on the amount of explosive that they've put inside the device.

Yeah. And they're right. Yeah. amount of explosive that they've put inside the device. And they're right. This was the firebomb that Fieser and Hirschberg entered in the National Defense Research Committee bake-off, up against some of the biggest chemical companies of the day. Standard Oil had a sodium soap nicknamed Applesauce. Kodak had a prototype made out of ground-up newsprint. Wieser and Hirschberg had napalm. And a fourth one showed up. DuPont had a methyl methacrylate thickened gel. Hoyt Hoddle organized it all.

The army sent generals to monitor the proceedings. The Bake Off testers slammed the explosives with something hard. They tested the explosives in the attics of houses. They flew them at high altitudes in the bombing bays of planes, resting in beds of dry ice. Test after test. How well did the ingredients disperse? How hot did they burn? And what won after months and months of this?

Napalm, created at Harvard University, perfected in the soccer fields along the meandering Charles River. The philosophy taught at the Air Corps Tactical School was based on precision and elegance. Fly high, use some kind of sophisticated aiming device to perfectly line up the target, disable a city by surgically destroying its water supply or its power plants or its bridges with one beautifully choreographed attack. When Curtis LeMay arrived in Europe, he made his flight crews spend their spare time

studying the targets they were supposed to bomb. No one had done that before. Most commanders just gave their flight crews their orders and let them go. But to the bomber mafia, that was crazy. How could you hit something, precisely, that you'd never seen before? Any crew could hit a target if he could see it and had an opportunity to hit it. But there's a lot of difference between bombing circles in the desert and bombing a northeast corner of a factory building

in the midst of an industrial buildup of industrial haze and bad weather and poor visibility and so forth. LeMay made his crews pore over maps, memorize, plan. At least they became familiar with the geography, the prominent landmarks, so that if they saw anything through a hole in the clouds, they could immediately translate it to the map and know where they were. This is what the bomber mafia meant by precision bombing. It relied on skill and preparation.

But there was another school of bombing, area bombing. It had the same goal, break the morale of the enemy. But the area bombers said, why bother trying to hit an aqueduct from 30,000 feet? Why not just bomb everything in sight?

Carpet bomb. Much easier. Can we turn now to Dresden? What, 1944, 45 was it? The bombing of Dresden? Yes. Yes. The great proponent of area bombing was the head of the Royal Air Force's bomber command,

Arthur Harris, known as Bomber Harris to the British press and Butcher Harris to his men. Once, the story goes, Harris was stopped for speeding during the war. The policeman said, you could kill innocent people driving like that. Harris replied, young man, I kill thousands of people every night. Harris was interviewed by the British Forces Broadcasting Service in 1977. Well, of course, people are apt to say, oh, poor Dresden, a lovely city, certainly engaged in producing beautiful little China shepherdesses with frilly skirts. As a matter of fact, it was the last viable governing center of Germany.

Dresden was one of the signature atrocities of the Second World War. An entire city reduced to rubble in one night by Harris's pilots. How do you answer criticisms that you did bomb civilian populations and kill civilian populations rather than members of the armed forces? everything that made it possible for the German armies to continue the war. That was the whole idea of the bombing offensive, including, as I say, the destruction of the facilities for building submarines and the armament industries throughout Germany and the people who worked in them. They're all active soldiers, to my mind. People who work in the production of munitions must expect to be treated as active soldiers. Otherwise, where do you draw the line? That statement, they were all active soldiers, to my mind, went to the heart of the difference between the precision bombers and the area bombers.

The precision bombers said, you limit yourself to only the most critical targets, the aqueducts and the power plants and the bridges, because civilians should not be primary targets of any bombing campaign. The area bombers said, there is no such thing as a civilian in time of war, which meant the bomber could bomb whatever he wanted. Air Marshal Harris liked his pilots to fly in at night, because they didn't particularly need to see their targets, did they? Plus, flying in at night was safer,

since it was harder for the enemy to shoot down your planes. And Harris loved incendiary bombs. To his mind, they made so much more sense. You drop explosives on a factory, and with luck you blow up the factory. You drop incendiaries on the same factory, and with luck the fire burns down the whole neighborhood. Support for area bombing was strongest among the British, but right from the start of the war, it had its proponents on the U.S. side as well, people who didn't buy the elaborate theories of the bomber mafia, especially when it came to the question of how to fight Japan. This is an example of the war supplies that are being sent to General MacArthur. Look at the bombs to be hurled upon the Japs,

and Air Force motorized equipment of every sort, lines upon lines of vehicles. Let me read to you from an essay published in Harper's Magazine by two American analysts, a few months after Pearl Harbor. When it comes time to attack Japan, the authors argue, there's a really easy way to do it. Fire. Osaka is their case study. Look, they argue, Osaka's streets are really narrow. Narrow streets means that fire can jump easily from one side of the street to the other. Plus, Japanese cities aren't built of bricks and mortar like Western cities. Japanese houses were tinderboxes. The article goes on, After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage

in the 25-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80%, as opposed to 15% for London. 80%. That's almost everything. They lay out the strategy over thousands of cold-blooded words, and then at the very end, almost as an afterthought, write, the suffering in some areas would be terrible to contemplate. The bomber mafia read that last line and said, that's the point. That's why area bombing is unthinkable. But the chemists read everything else and thought, oh, what an opportunity. Let's just burn it all down. 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. Hoyt Hoddle needed to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Fieser and Hirschberg's napalm, the winner of his bake-off,

could burn down a Japanese city. He chose to do it at Dugway, the Army's 800,000-acre test facility in the middle of the Utah desert. There, Hoddle's team would build a Japanese city, a perfect replica, and a German one too, for comparison purposes. It's amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things. They brought in top-level architects. For the German village, Erich Mendelssohn, a brilliant German-Jewish architect who had designed some of the most beautiful Art Deco and Art Moder modern buildings of the 1920s and 30s. For the Japanese village, Hoddle conscripted Antonin Raymond, who lived in Japan for years and to this day is probably Japan's most celebrated Western architect.

We decided that the two-inch thick rice straw mat 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 tatamis. They built 24 different Japanese residences, 12 complexes with two units each, with shoji, Japanese sliding partition doors, and perfect replicas of Japanese outdoor shutters. And Raymond wanted the cabinet work on making these things under his eye in New Jersey. Now here we wanted to build a place in Utah. The wood was in the Pacific. The cabinet work was to be in New Jersey. And these are absurdities. As for the architect, Antonin Raymond, he would say almost nothing about that time.

In his autobiography, a gorgeous, massive coffee table-sized book, there is just one line hinting at what it must have felt like to have devoted his career to creating Japanese buildings and then being asked by his country for help to burn them down. He wrote, It was not an easy task for me and my wife to be instrumental in devising means of defeating Japan. But Hoddle and his project manager, Slim Myers, were perfectionists. 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. In the summer of 1943, Hoddle's model villages were ready for the Air Force bombers. One plane

after another dropped their bombs. And after each round, the teams on the ground rebuilt whatever was damaged. They compared British thermite bombs, which were the incendiaries favored by Bomber Harris in his night raids on Germany, with Hirschberg and Fieser's napalm, which now went by the name M69. Hoyt Hoddle and his team stood by, keeping score. We early 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. The whole point was to analyze the damage. There were three categories of destructiveness. A. Uncontrollable within six minutes.. B, destructive if unattended. And C, non-destructive. Napalm was the hands-down winner. 68% success rate in category A on Japanese houses. In other words, it caused uncontrollable fires. By contrast, British thermite ran a poor distant second. With napalm, the U.S. had built itself a superweapon. The main component of the M69 bomb, 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. The lethal power of napalm was now an empirical fact, and the question of what to do about Japan was no longer in the realm of abstract argument, which presented the bomber mafia's ideology with a temptation of biblical proportions. It burns at approximately 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for 8 to 10 minutes. Did the precision bombers stay true to the purity of their dogma, or did they succumb to the destructiveness of napalm? For airdrops, the M69 is assembled in groups of 38.

The E23 adapter is used in forming 500-pound aimable clusters carried by planes equipped to handle this size bomb. What did Satan say to Jesus during his 40-day ordeal in the wilderness? The devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. All this I will give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. The clusters are given high and low altitude tests at Edgewood Arsenal with a B-25 loading the 500 pounders. All the bomber mafia had to do was bow down and worship the chemists, and all of Japan would be theirs. The cluster is released and opened, and the individual bombs with

Gauze streamers trailing drop toward the target. In the next episode of Revisionist History, part three of the Curtis LeMay story, Curtis LeMay attacks Japan. Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Lee Mingistu with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson.

Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Hedda Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks for watching!