Use of Napalm in WWII
Brandon Huffman & Daniel Kahill
The Creation of Napalm
Napalm was invented in 1942 by Louis Fieser, a Harvard organic chemist. The reason for creating this substance was to have a weapon that was stable enough to carry around, but also highly flammable and sticky to cause massive destruction to anything it hits.
Project X-Ray
Fieser became involved in “Project X-Ray,” a scheme to drop millions of hibernating bats, with tiny napalm time-bombs stapled to their chests, over Japanese cities, where the bats would roost in the attics of homes and factories and start uncontrollable blazes a few hours later. The bat-bomb project was eventually canceled, but the use of napalm was still in affect.
Use of Napalm
Napalm bombs became a huge part of aerial campaigns later in the war. In 1944, Allied forces dropped the first napalm bombs on Tinian Island in 1944, 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, 1945, killed an estimated 100,000 people and burned 15 square miles