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May the Best Firebomb Win · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:20
Speaker 2: A couple of years before the United States entered the
0:22
Speaker 2: Second World War, there was a meeting at Harvard University.
0:28
Speaker 2: The president of Harvard was there, the president of MIT,
0:32
Speaker 2: a Nobel Prize winner, the president of the Standard Oil
0:35
Speaker 2: Development Company, and two professors, Louis Feezer from Harvard and
0:40
Speaker 2: the chair, Hoyt Hoddle from MIT.
0:44
Speaker 1: Come thirty nine. A lot of people fought the war
0:50
Speaker 1: was something we'd be in sooner or later, and our
0:54
Speaker 1: state of preparedness was poor.
0:57
Speaker 2: Hoddle was slender, high forehead, generous eyebrows, a giant in
1:02
Speaker 2: his field. He had been tapped by the National Defense
1:05
Speaker 2: Research Committee the NDRC, the top secret government group charged
1:09
Speaker 2: with developing new weapons for the American military. The most
1:14
Speaker 2: famous effort of the NDRC was, of course, the Manhattan Project,
1:18
Speaker 2: the multi billion dollar operation out of Los Alamos to
1:22
Speaker 2: develop the first atomic bomb. Hoddle's group was a more
1:26
Speaker 2: obscure subcommittee. They weren't physicists, they were chemists, and their
1:31
Speaker 2: focus wasn't on finding better ways to blow things up.
1:35
Speaker 2: It was on finding better ways to burn things down.
1:41
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to revisionist history.
1:45
Speaker 2: My podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part
1:50
Speaker 2: two of a four part series about Curtis LeMay and
1:54
Speaker 2: the events of March nineteen forty five. Part one, which
1:59
Speaker 2: you should listen to first if you have not already,
2:02
Speaker 2: was about the rise of an insurgent group of pilots
2:05
Speaker 2: known as the Bomber Mafia. They believed that wars could
2:09
Speaker 2: be won entirely from the air, but bombers need bombs,
2:14
Speaker 2: and this episode is about the scientists who tempted the
2:17
Speaker 2: bomber Mafia with one of the most seductive and the
2:21
Speaker 2: most deadly weapons of the modern era. It is important
2:27
Speaker 2: not to confuse the chemists of World War II with
2:30
Speaker 2: the physicists. They belonged to different ecosystems. Robert Oppenheimer, who
2:36
Speaker 2: ran the Manhattan Project, was the archetypal physicist. Brilliant, handsome, charismatic, moody.
2:43
Speaker 2: Oppenheimer grew up in luxury in Manhattan, in an apartment
2:46
Speaker 2: with paintings by Picasso and van go He fell in
2:49
Speaker 2: love with beautiful communists. In the world of science. Oppenheimer
2:54
Speaker 2: was an aristocrat. He had no difficulty persuading the government
2:59
Speaker 2: to build him a massive, secluded research facility at Los Alamos,
3:03
Speaker 2: near his ranch in Santa Fe, where Oppenheimer and his
3:07
Speaker 2: fellow physicists could pursue the whole grail of the atomic bomb.
3:12
Speaker 2: The Manhattan Project cost two billion in nineteen forty dollars.
3:17
Speaker 2: The people who worked on it were quite literally the
3:19
Speaker 2: smartest people in the world. The operation was infiltrated by spies.
3:23
Speaker 2: Everyone was having affairs. Los Alamos was like a high
3:27
Speaker 2: IQ reality show. That was physics in the nineteen forties,
3:31
Speaker 2: the province of glamour and intrigue. The chemists were not
3:36
Speaker 2: like that. Hoyt Hottle and his obscure subcommittee weren't trying
3:41
Speaker 2: to split the atom or glimp some distant scientific horizon.
3:45
Speaker 2: They were interested in the oldest and most basic of
3:48
Speaker 2: all weapons of war. Fire. They talked about it, obsessed
3:52
Speaker 2: about it, dreamt about it.
3:55
Speaker 1: On the day of my arrival, I was scheduled to
4:00
Speaker 1: talk before the Zoroastrian Society.
4:05
Speaker 2: This is Hoddle in an interview near the end of
4:07
Speaker 2: his life with the Science History in Steady, talking about
4:10
Speaker 2: meeting his counterparts in England in the middle of the war.
4:13
Speaker 2: The Zoroastrian Society was an informal group of military men, professors,
4:17
Speaker 2: and mathematicians. They named themselves for an ancient Persian religion
4:21
Speaker 2: which had special rituals based on fire, and.
4:25
Speaker 1: The Zoroastrian society talked about how better to put out fires,
4:31
Speaker 1: or how to do this that or the other passed
4:35
Speaker 1: on the quality of bombs.
4:38
Speaker 2: This was Hoddle's kind of crowd. His personal specialty was flamethrowers, and.
4:43
Speaker 1: I thought it would be a good thing to get
4:45
Speaker 1: general motors into a tank mounted flame thrower with intermittent ejection.
4:54
Speaker 1: Intermittency permitted you you use a very much larger diameter nozzle.
5:00
Speaker 2: If you mounted a flamethrower on a tank. Well, that
5:03
Speaker 2: really grabbed his imagination. But the NDRC needed the country's
5:09
Speaker 2: scientists to think bigger. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor
5:14
Speaker 2: and controlled much of East Asia. The Germans were in
5:17
Speaker 2: command of Europe. America needed new weapons fast. Physicists were
5:23
Speaker 2: dispatched to New Mexico to split the atom and the
5:26
Speaker 2: chemists were asked to re examine the lethal qualities of
5:30
Speaker 2: thermal combustion.
5:32
Speaker 1: We needed to know more about encendry bombs.
5:38
Speaker 2: So Hoddle gathered his elite circle University presidents, Nobel Prize winners,
5:44
Speaker 2: Ivy League professors, all of them specialists in the particular
5:47
Speaker 2: consequences of combining oxygen, fuel, and heat. And he proposed
5:52
Speaker 2: a competition, a bakeoff. If you will, let us see
5:56
Speaker 2: who among us can build the finest weapon for burning
5:59
Speaker 2: things down. Let the best firebomb win. Hoyt Hoddle's bakeoff
6:09
Speaker 2: would eventually involve some of the biggest industrial companies in
6:11
Speaker 2: the country. But there was one dark horse, Louis Fezer.
6:16
Speaker 3: Some of the demonstrations of this film out standard frequently
6:20
Speaker 3: repeated operations, and I was showing a way with my
6:23
Speaker 3: own students.
6:24
Speaker 1: I supposed to kill them out.
6:26
Speaker 2: Fiser was born in Ohio in eighteen ninety nine. He
6:29
Speaker 2: majored in chemistry at Williams College, got his PhD from Harvard,
6:34
Speaker 2: postocs at Oxford and Frankfort. Fizer probably should have won
6:38
Speaker 2: a Nobel Prize for his work on vitamin K, but
6:40
Speaker 2: the war got in the way. His research assistant was
6:43
Speaker 2: his wife, the equally brilliant Mary Feesar. Women didn't get
6:47
Speaker 2: hired as chemistry professors in those days, but together the
6:51
Speaker 2: couple wrote one of the definitive chemistry textbooks co authors
6:55
Speaker 2: Fisa and Feeser. Louis was largely bald, a little heavy
6:59
Speaker 2: set mustache, always with a cigarette.
7:03
Speaker 4: Shall we go into the laboratie, don't forget your safety glasses.
7:08
Speaker 2: Louis Fieser was a man of imagination and whimsy. His
7:11
Speaker 2: scientific memoir, published in nineteen sixty four, begins with his
7:15
Speaker 2: wartime work, but then quickly turns to detailed descriptions of
7:18
Speaker 2: things like a pocket firebomb. He calls, in an inspired
7:22
Speaker 2: bit of brand awareness, the Harvard Candle, a chapter on
7:26
Speaker 2: attaching incendiaries to bats, an extended riff on how to
7:30
Speaker 2: ignite a one thousand gallon oil slick, and the Kudu Gras,
7:34
Speaker 2: a chapter on his Siamese cat sin Kai Pooh and
7:37
Speaker 2: his concept for a squirrel proof bird feeder. Feesar wasn't
7:43
Speaker 2: a physicist thinking big thoughts under the big skies of
7:46
Speaker 2: New Mexico. He didn't have security guards monitoring his every
7:50
Speaker 2: move like the physicists at Los Alamos, or review boards
7:54
Speaker 2: monitoring his progress, or anxious military men checking in every day.
7:59
Speaker 2: He just went to his basement laboratory and made stuff.
8:05
Speaker 2: We don't have many recordings of Feesar but in the
8:07
Speaker 2: Science History Archives there's an extended interview with a colleague
8:11
Speaker 2: of his, someone named William von Eggers during who taught
8:14
Speaker 2: chemistry for years at Yale and Harvard. It gives you
8:17
Speaker 2: a sense of this world of scientists with a license
8:21
Speaker 2: to be just a little mad.
8:24
Speaker 5: God, what was the compound we were after? Elliots trynaccro
8:29
Speaker 5: benzo nitrate.
8:32
Speaker 2: The interview goes on for hours, and it's weirdly riveting.
8:35
Speaker 2: Part of me just wanted to run the whole thing.
8:37
Speaker 2: Since it's so well you'll hear. Let me just play
8:41
Speaker 2: for you the part where von Eggers starts reminiscing about
8:44
Speaker 2: working in Feesers Laboratory at the very beginning of the war.
8:53
Speaker 5: Put it remember those having carryous tubes. So you put
8:59
Speaker 5: in about twenty or thirty grams of TNT. You poured
9:06
Speaker 5: a little access of bomb boaming Noel he sealed the
9:14
Speaker 5: dam to. You put it in a bomb and iron bomb,
9:19
Speaker 5: you know, with a wire after around the rains, so
9:28
Speaker 5: that in effect, if you put the uh, the heating
9:33
Speaker 5: to in that little space, then if it blew up
9:37
Speaker 5: the grassroom, hit this little part of the wall on
9:41
Speaker 5: the well, because half the tubes blew up.
9:47
Speaker 2: I understand that von Eggers was one of the great
9:50
Speaker 2: chemists of his generation. He published his first scientific paper
9:54
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty nine and his last in two thousand
9:57
Speaker 2: and eight, eight decades of work. In every picture I've
10:00
Speaker 2: ever seen of him, he's wearing a polka dotted bow tie.
10:03
Speaker 2: His great uncle was president of the Reichbank in Germany.
10:07
Speaker 2: I may one day devote an entire a revisionist history
10:10
Speaker 2: episode to him. How can you not love this guy
10:13
Speaker 2: a laboratory? Why he's like a thirteen year old kid
10:24
Speaker 2: with a chemistry set.
10:25
Speaker 5: Oh god, it was marvelous times.
10:29
Speaker 6: The Germans have a word to describe certain persons as
10:34
Speaker 6: cherish antst, which means having an animal like seriousness about them,
10:40
Speaker 6: and I must.
10:41
Speaker 5: Say that there was very little of that in those days.
10:50
Speaker 2: When Louis Feezer came down to Vonegger's lab with his
10:53
Speaker 2: ever present cigarettes, the grad students would play pranks on him.
10:57
Speaker 5: Louri would come in to talk to his people and.
11:03
Speaker 6: Would invariably throw his cigarettes still burning and for the
11:10
Speaker 6: saint and so the game was to try to guess
11:15
Speaker 6: when he was coming.
11:16
Speaker 1: Down, and then for ether.
11:22
Speaker 5: Alsunder would catch fire.
11:24
Speaker 2: In the hopes that it would catch fire. These were
11:29
Speaker 2: the scientists the government gathered during the war for the
11:32
Speaker 2: second Obscure Subcommittee of the NDERC, the basement chemists. They
11:39
Speaker 2: kept on meeting around the country, planning, scheming, tinkering, and
11:44
Speaker 2: one day May twenty eighth, nineteen forty one, at a
11:47
Speaker 2: National Defense Research Committee meeting in Chicago, Fizer hears about
11:51
Speaker 2: a curious instant that just happened at a DuPont chemical plant.
11:56
Speaker 2: A group in one of DuPont's paint factories had been
11:59
Speaker 2: working with something called divinyl acetylene. It's a hydrocarbon, an
12:03
Speaker 2: oil byproduct, and if you mix it with a pigment,
12:07
Speaker 2: the paint will dry into a tough, thick, adhesive film.
12:10
Speaker 2: But the film kept bursting into flame. That was obviously
12:14
Speaker 2: bad news for someone to make a better paint, but
12:17
Speaker 2: not for people thinking about how to make a better firebomb.
12:27
Speaker 2: When Louis Feeser was told of the strange fire at
12:30
Speaker 2: the DuPont paint factory, he offered to investigate. In his memoirs,
12:35
Speaker 2: he writes, I volunteered chiefly because I had available in
12:38
Speaker 2: my peace time research group a man ideally qualified to
12:42
Speaker 2: experiment with and evaluate a hazardous chemical doctor E. B.
12:47
Speaker 1: Hirschberg.
12:48
Speaker 2: Do you know how he got hooked up with.
12:52
Speaker 7: Feesar, Yes, versus FUM Boston area.
12:56
Speaker 2: That's Robert Hirschberg. His father, EBI Hirschberg was Feeser's research fellow.
13:01
Speaker 7: I think the very quick and short answer was there
13:05
Speaker 7: were limited places for employment for Jews and couldn't care
13:09
Speaker 7: less about religion. So that's the labby wound up in.
13:13
Speaker 2: Eb Hirschberg was, in Louis Feesar's words, a masterful experimentalist
13:19
Speaker 2: inorganic chemistry and also versed in engineering, in mechanical drawing,
13:24
Speaker 2: in carpentry, and in photography. Fiser goes on he was
13:28
Speaker 2: experienced in the handling of military explosives, fuses, poison gases,
13:33
Speaker 2: smoke pots, and grenades, and had invented a long list
13:37
Speaker 2: of devices, including the Hirschburg stir the Hirschburg stirring motor,
13:42
Speaker 2: and the Hirschburg melting point apparatus.
13:45
Speaker 7: In our basement we had diffuse bombs and things of
13:49
Speaker 7: that nature, and pictures of explosions that occurred, and some
13:54
Speaker 7: of the incendiary devices were in the desk jars.
13:58
Speaker 2: So what were the what these were just the devices
14:01
Speaker 2: that he and Fieser had been experimenting with during the forties.
14:05
Speaker 7: Yeah, they invented them that lab, and there are other people.
14:09
Speaker 7: They're things like Noe books that had incendiary devices in
14:15
Speaker 7: them that if you were captured and you wrote, you
14:18
Speaker 7: pull the pen out, you had half an hour to
14:21
Speaker 7: write everything down and what you wanted and get out
14:23
Speaker 7: of there before blew up and burned down the building.
14:26
Speaker 2: That's Ebie Hirschberg. So he and Louis Feeser go to Wilmington,
14:32
Speaker 2: Delaware to investigate the DuPont compound that makes paint catch
14:37
Speaker 2: on fire, divinyl acetylene. Then they come back to Harvard
14:41
Speaker 2: and start cooking up batches of it. They would put
14:44
Speaker 2: the batches in pans and place them in the window
14:47
Speaker 2: well of Feesar's basement lab. They noticed how the substance
14:51
Speaker 2: gradually changed from a liquid to thick, viscous gel. They
14:55
Speaker 2: poked the gel with sticks. Then they set fire to
14:57
Speaker 2: it and noticed, and I'm quoting here from Feesar's book,
15:01
Speaker 2: because this was the crucial insight. When a viscous gel burns,
15:05
Speaker 2: it does not become fluid, but retains its viscous, sticky consistency.
15:11
Speaker 2: The experience suggested the idea of a bomb that would
15:14
Speaker 2: scatter large burning globs of sticky gel. You dropped the bomb,
15:21
Speaker 2: and the gel scatters, and it doesn't just burn itself out.
15:25
Speaker 2: Big globs of gel fly in every direction, and those
15:28
Speaker 2: globs stick to whatever surface they land on and keep burning,
15:32
Speaker 2: and keep burning and keep burning. Hirschbrug and Feezer now
15:37
Speaker 2: had to find a way to test this new concept
15:40
Speaker 2: of incendiary gels. So they built a little two foot
15:43
Speaker 2: tall wooden structure in the lab and compared how well
15:47
Speaker 2: different gel formulations did in burning it down. Divinyl acettlene
15:51
Speaker 2: was good, but a gel made of rubber and benzene
15:54
Speaker 2: was better, and gasoline was even better than benzene. They
15:58
Speaker 2: tried amber colored smoke sheet rubber, pale crape rubber, rubber,
16:02
Speaker 2: latex vulcanized rubber. They made a prototype and took it
16:06
Speaker 2: with them in a suitcase on the train to Washington,
16:09
Speaker 2: giving it to the Porta de Caerry, who said it
16:11
Speaker 2: feels heavy enough to be a bomb. Next, they tried
16:15
Speaker 2: aluminum napthanate, a sticky black tar made by a chemical
16:20
Speaker 2: company out of Elizabeth, New Jersey. The tar didn't mix
16:23
Speaker 2: well with gasoline, but they solved the problem by mixing
16:26
Speaker 2: in something else called aluminum palmitate. Gasoline mixed with aluminum
16:32
Speaker 2: napthanate plus aluminum palmitate napom.
16:40
Speaker 8: So if you want an effective incendiary, something that is
16:43
Speaker 8: sticky is much more effective than something that is not sticky,
16:47
Speaker 8: because it actually adheres to whatever it is transferring its
16:51
Speaker 8: radiation energy into. And that's why napalm is so effective.
16:56
Speaker 2: That's Robert Neer, author of Napalm an American Biography.
17:00
Speaker 8: If the gelled material is too soft or too weak,
17:06
Speaker 8: then it won't actually deliver a large amount of radiation
17:10
Speaker 8: to whatever it's sticking to. You can think of a
17:13
Speaker 8: Molotov cocktail that's filled up with gasoline, exploding and delivering gasoline.
17:17
Speaker 8: It can burn somebody or something quite terribly, but the
17:20
Speaker 8: fire will go out relatively quickly, whereas, by contrast, if
17:24
Speaker 8: napalm is thrown on something, it will stick to it.
17:27
Speaker 8: A gel that was too loose would produce what they
17:31
Speaker 8: described dismissively as apple sauce. In other words, it wasn't
17:35
Speaker 8: thick enough or solid enough in its globules to adhere
17:38
Speaker 8: to something, and something that was just right would form
17:41
Speaker 8: quite large sized chunks. So it had to be a
17:44
Speaker 8: balance in between too thick and too thin and just right.
17:48
Speaker 8: And that's what they ultimately hit upon with napalm.
17:52
Speaker 2: I met Robert near at Harvard and asked him to
17:54
Speaker 2: take me on what he calls his napalm tour of
17:56
Speaker 2: the campus. The Is this the soccer field?
18:00
Speaker 8: Yeah, this is o'hii field. It's named after one of
18:03
Speaker 8: the greatest Harvard soccer players ever. And it's the soccer
18:09
Speaker 8: field now. And it also was used as a soccer
18:11
Speaker 8: field in the nineteen forties.
18:14
Speaker 2: The Harvard soccer field right behind the Business School is
18:17
Speaker 2: across the river from the main campus. Eb Hirschberg had
18:21
Speaker 2: figured out a plan to turn their new gel into
18:23
Speaker 2: a bomb. He suggested inserting a stick of TNT with
18:28
Speaker 2: a layer of white phosphorus wrapped around it in the
18:30
Speaker 2: middle of a canister of napalm. Phosphorus burns at a
18:34
Speaker 2: very high temperature, so the TNT would go off, driving
18:38
Speaker 2: the burning phosphorus into the napalm gel, igniting it and
18:43
Speaker 2: sending globs of it in every direction. For a bomb case,
18:46
Speaker 2: they used a shell that had originally been designed to
18:49
Speaker 2: hold mustard gas. Herschbergen and Fezer come to test here
18:55
Speaker 2: when what year do you remember, forty to forty three?
18:58
Speaker 8: It was on Independence Day nineteen forty two. So they
19:03
Speaker 8: finalized the formulation for the geldincendiary on Valentine's Day, February
19:08
Speaker 8: fourteenth of nineteen forty And then they figured out the
19:12
Speaker 8: white phosphorus burster ignition system and got the bombshells from
19:19
Speaker 8: the military and built their prototypes, and as I had mentioned,
19:23
Speaker 8: dug this lagoon into the field.
19:26
Speaker 2: In the middle of this field the big how big
19:28
Speaker 2: was the lagoon?
19:29
Speaker 8: The lagoon was I believe about one hundred feet in diameter.
19:34
Speaker 8: It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn't want
19:37
Speaker 8: anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large
19:40
Speaker 8: Napon bomb in a canister that they were going to
19:43
Speaker 8: explode in the center. So they put the bomb right
19:47
Speaker 8: in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled
19:50
Speaker 8: up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department.
19:53
Speaker 2: The birth of Napon baptized in eight inches of water
19:58
Speaker 2: in the middle of Harvard's soccer pitch. When he was
20:01
Speaker 2: doing his research, Robert Near spotted a little detail in
20:05
Speaker 2: the photos from that day.
20:06
Speaker 8: So in the initial pictures of the test, there are
20:09
Speaker 8: people dressed in whites, playing on the tennis courts, which
20:13
Speaker 8: are still just right over there. You can see the
20:15
Speaker 8: tennis courts, And then after the bomb goes off, you
20:19
Speaker 8: see that the tennis courts are abandoned. So maybe they
20:23
Speaker 8: told everybody that they were about to test this napalm bomb,
20:25
Speaker 8: or maybe they just let them keep playing tennis and
20:28
Speaker 8: then tested and everybody ran away. I don't know, but
20:31
Speaker 8: I mean nobody was injured in these tests. After the
20:34
Speaker 8: bomb was exploded, they made a very careful catalog of
20:38
Speaker 8: the distribution and size of the extinguished globules of napalm,
20:42
Speaker 8: because that was part of determining the most effective consistency
20:46
Speaker 8: of the gel.
20:47
Speaker 2: And how does the gel explode past the Now it's
20:53
Speaker 2: all contained within the limit.
20:54
Speaker 8: Oh see, there's no disaster.
20:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, they know. In other words, they have some idea
20:58
Speaker 2: about how far the gel's going to fly.
21:00
Speaker 8: These are genius engineers and incredibly skilled people, and so
21:05
Speaker 8: they know how far things will fly based on the
21:09
Speaker 8: out of explosive that they put inside the device. And
21:12
Speaker 8: they're right.
21:15
Speaker 2: This was the firebomb that Fiser and Hirschberg entered in
21:18
Speaker 2: the National Defense Research Committee. Bakoff up against some of
21:22
Speaker 2: the biggest chemical companies of the day. Standard Oil had
21:25
Speaker 2: a sodium soap nicknamed Apple Sauce, Kodak had a prototype
21:29
Speaker 2: made out of ground up newsprint, Fiser and Hirschberg had Napon, and.
21:35
Speaker 1: The fourth one showed that Lupont had a methyl methacral
21:40
Speaker 1: thickened gel.
21:42
Speaker 2: Hoyt Hoddle organized it all. The Army sent generals to
21:47
Speaker 2: monitor the proceedings. The Bakoff testers slammed the explosives with
21:52
Speaker 2: something hard. They tested the explosives in the attics of houses.
21:56
Speaker 2: They flew them at high altitudes, in the bombing bays
21:59
Speaker 2: of plains, resting in beds of dry ice. Test after test,
22:04
Speaker 2: how well did the ingredients disperse, how hot did they burn?
22:08
Speaker 2: And what one After months and months of this, NAPAN
22:13
Speaker 2: created at Harvard University, perfected in the soccer fields along
22:17
Speaker 2: the meandering Charles River. The philosophy taught at the Air
22:28
Speaker 2: Corps Tactical School was based on precision and elegance. Fly
22:33
Speaker 2: high use some kind of sophisticated aiming device to perfectly
22:36
Speaker 2: line up the target. Disable a city by surgically destroying
22:41
Speaker 2: its water supply, or its power plants, or its bridges
22:45
Speaker 2: with one beautifully choreographed attack. When Curtis le May arrived
22:52
Speaker 2: in Europe, he made his flight crews spend their spare
22:55
Speaker 2: time studying the targets they were supposed to bomb. No
22:58
Speaker 2: one had done that before. Most commanders just gave their
23:01
Speaker 2: flight crews their orders and let them go. But to
23:05
Speaker 2: the bomber mafia, that was crazy. How could you hit
23:08
Speaker 2: some think precisely that you'd never seen before.
23:12
Speaker 9: Any crew could hit a target if he could see
23:14
Speaker 9: it and had an opportunity to hit it. But there's
23:19
Speaker 9: a lot of difference between bombing circles in the desert
23:22
Speaker 9: and bombing a northeast corner of a factory building in
23:25
Speaker 9: the midst of an industrial build up, of industrial haze
23:28
Speaker 9: and bad weather and poor visibility and so forth.
23:32
Speaker 2: The May made his crews pour over maps memorize plan.
23:37
Speaker 9: At least they became familiar with the geography the prominent landmarks,
23:44
Speaker 9: so that if they saw anything through a hole in
23:47
Speaker 9: the clouds, they can immediately translate it to the map
23:50
Speaker 9: and knew where they were.
23:51
Speaker 2: This is what the bomber mafia meant by precision bombing.
23:55
Speaker 2: It relied on skill and preparation. But there was another
24:01
Speaker 2: school of bombing area bombing. It had to see goal
24:05
Speaker 2: break the morale of the enemy. But the area bombers said,
24:09
Speaker 2: why bother trying to hit an aqueduct from thirty thousand feet?
24:13
Speaker 2: Why not just bomb everything in sight? Carpet bomb much easier.
24:18
Speaker 4: Can we turn to Dresden? What nineteen forty four to
24:22
Speaker 4: forty five was it the bombing of Dress?
24:25
Speaker 5: Yes?
24:25
Speaker 9: Yes.
24:29
Speaker 2: The great proponent of area bombing was the head of
24:32
Speaker 2: the Royal Air Force's bomber Command, Arthur Harris, known as
24:36
Speaker 2: Bomber Harris to the British press and Butcher Harris to
24:39
Speaker 2: his men. Once the story goes, Harris was stopped for
24:43
Speaker 2: speeding during the war. The policeman said, you could kill
24:47
Speaker 2: innocent people driving like that. Harris replied, young man, I
24:51
Speaker 2: kill thousands of people every night. Harris was interviewed by
24:56
Speaker 2: the British Forces Broadcasting Service in nineteen seventy seven.
25:00
Speaker 4: Well, of course, pree per apt to say, all poor
25:05
Speaker 4: dressed in a lovely city, certainly in producing beautiful little
25:12
Speaker 4: China shepherdesses with finny skirts. As a matter of fact,
25:17
Speaker 4: it was the last viable governing center of Germany.
25:21
Speaker 2: Dresden was one of the signature atrocities of the Second
25:24
Speaker 2: World War. An entire city reduced to rubble in one
25:28
Speaker 2: night by Harris's pilots.
25:30
Speaker 4: How do you answer criticisms that you did bomb civilian
25:34
Speaker 4: populations and kill civilian populations rather than members of the
25:39
Speaker 4: armed forces. What we were doing, we weren't aiming particularly
25:43
Speaker 4: at the civilian population. We were aiming at the production
25:48
Speaker 4: of everything that made it possible for the German armies
25:52
Speaker 4: to continue the war. That was the whole idea of
25:57
Speaker 4: the bombing offensive, including as I said, it's the destruction
26:03
Speaker 4: of the facilities for building submarines and the armor and
26:09
Speaker 4: industries throughout Germany and the people who worked in them.
26:14
Speaker 4: They're all active soldiers. To my mind, people who worked
26:19
Speaker 4: in the production of m munitions must expect it to
26:23
Speaker 4: be treated as active soldiers. Otherwise were they would raw
26:28
Speaker 4: the line.
26:29
Speaker 2: That statement they were all active soldiers, to my mind,
26:34
Speaker 2: went to the heart of the difference between the precision
26:36
Speaker 2: bombers and the area bombers. The precision bombers said, you
26:42
Speaker 2: limit yourself to only the most critical targets, the aqueducts
26:46
Speaker 2: and the power plants and the bridges, because civilians should
26:50
Speaker 2: not be primary targets of any bombing campaign. The area
26:54
Speaker 2: bombers said there is no such thing as a civilian
26:57
Speaker 2: in time of war, which meant the bomber could bomb
27:01
Speaker 2: whatever he wanted. Air Marshall Harris liked his pilots to
27:05
Speaker 2: fly in at night because they didn't particularly need to
27:08
Speaker 2: see see their targets, did they. Plus, flying in at
27:12
Speaker 2: night was safer since it was harder for the enemy
27:14
Speaker 2: to shoot down your planes. And Harris loved incendiary bombs.
27:20
Speaker 2: To his mind, they made so much more sense. You
27:23
Speaker 2: drop explosives on a factory and with luck you blow
27:26
Speaker 2: up the factory. You drop incendiaries on the same factory,
27:30
Speaker 2: and with luck, the fire burns down the whole neighborhood.
27:35
Speaker 2: Support for area bombing was strongest among the British, but
27:40
Speaker 2: right from the start of the war it had its
27:42
Speaker 2: proponents on the US side as well, people who didn't
27:46
Speaker 2: buy the elaborate theories of the bomber mafia, especially when
27:50
Speaker 2: it came to the question of how to fight Japan.
27:55
Speaker 3: This is an example of the war supplies that are
27:57
Speaker 3: being sent to General MacArthur.
27:59
Speaker 1: Look at the bombs to be hurled upon the Jacks.
28:01
Speaker 3: An air force motorized equipment of every sort.
28:05
Speaker 5: Lines upon lines of.
28:07
Speaker 2: Veg Let me read to you from an essay published
28:09
Speaker 2: in Harper's Magazine by two American analysts a few months
28:13
Speaker 2: after Pearl Harbor. When it comes time to attack Japan,
28:17
Speaker 2: the authors argue, there's a really easy way to do it. Fire.
28:22
Speaker 2: Osaka is their case study. Look, they argue, Osaka streets
28:25
Speaker 2: are really narrow. Narrow streets means that fire can jump
28:29
Speaker 2: easily from one side of the street to the other. Plus,
28:32
Speaker 2: Japanese cities aren't built of bricks and mortar like Western cities.
28:36
Speaker 2: Japanese houses were tinderboxes. The article goes on, after some
28:42
Speaker 2: considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in
28:46
Speaker 2: the twenty five square mile area that is the central
28:49
Speaker 2: section of Osaka is eighty percent, as opposed to fifteen
28:54
Speaker 2: percent for London. Eighty percent. That's almost everything. They lay
29:02
Speaker 2: out the strategy over thousands of cold blooded words, and
29:06
Speaker 2: then at the very end, almost as an offer, thought right,
29:10
Speaker 2: the suffering in some areas would be terrible to contemplate.
29:17
Speaker 2: The bomber mafia read that last line and said, that's
29:20
Speaker 2: the point. That's why area bombing is unthinkable. But the
29:24
Speaker 2: chemists read everything else and thought, oh, what an opportunity,
29:30
Speaker 2: Let's just burn it all down.
29:33
Speaker 1: These generals don't believe what scionists do. They only believe
29:37
Speaker 1: what they think they can envisualize. Well, we've got to
29:42
Speaker 1: build a Japanese village and the German village.
29:47
Speaker 2: Hoyt Hoddle needed to prove beyond the shadow of a
29:51
Speaker 2: doubt that Fizer and Hirschberg's nap bomb, the winner of
29:54
Speaker 2: his bake off, could burn down a Japanese city. He
29:58
Speaker 2: chose to do it at Dugway, the Army's eight hundred
30:01
Speaker 2: thousand acre test facility in the middle of the Utah Desert. There,
30:06
Speaker 2: Hoddle's team would build a Japanese city, a perfect replica,
30:11
Speaker 2: and a German one too, for comparison purposes.
30:15
Speaker 1: It's amazing the enormity of the effort that went in
30:20
Speaker 1: the building those things.
30:22
Speaker 2: They brought in top level architects for the German village,
30:26
Speaker 2: Eric Mendelssohn, a brilliant German Jewish architect who had designed
30:30
Speaker 2: some of the most beautiful Art Deco and Art Modern
30:33
Speaker 2: buildings of the nineteen twenties and thirties. For the Japanese village.
30:37
Speaker 2: Hoddle conscripted Antonin Raymond, who lived in Japan for years
30:41
Speaker 2: and to this day is probably Japan's most celebrated Western architect.
30:46
Speaker 1: We decided that the two inch thick rice straw mat
30:51
Speaker 1: that characterized the Japanese home that Takami were important because
30:58
Speaker 1: they were the major resistance to the bomb passage through
31:03
Speaker 1: one floor after another. So we had to have Tatami's.
31:09
Speaker 2: They built twenty four different Japanese residences, twelve complexes with
31:14
Speaker 2: two units each with shoji Japanese sliding partition doors and
31:19
Speaker 2: perfect replicas of Japanese outdoor shutters.
31:23
Speaker 1: And Raymond wanted the cabinet work on making these things
31:29
Speaker 1: under his eye in New Jersey. Now Here we wanted
31:34
Speaker 1: to build a place in Utah. The wood was in
31:37
Speaker 1: the Pacific, the cabinet work was to be in New Jersey.
31:42
Speaker 1: And these are absurdities.
31:44
Speaker 2: As for the architect Anton and Raymond, he would say
31:48
Speaker 2: almost nothing about that time. In his autobiography, a gorgeous,
31:53
Speaker 2: massive coffee table sized book, there is just one line
31:56
Speaker 2: hinting at what it must have felt like to have
31:59
Speaker 2: devoted his career to creating Japanese buildings and then being
32:03
Speaker 2: asked by his country for help to burn them down.
32:06
Speaker 2: He wrote, it was an easy task for me and
32:11
Speaker 2: my wife to be instrumental in devising means of defeating Japan.
32:17
Speaker 2: But Hoddle and his project manager, Slim Myers, were perfectionists.
32:23
Speaker 1: Said damn it, we've got to be absolutely right. These
32:27
Speaker 1: generals are not going to stop us because we didn't
32:30
Speaker 1: have something that was really characteristic. We've got to be right.
32:37
Speaker 2: In the summer of nineteen forty three, Hoddle's model villages
32:41
Speaker 2: were ready for the Air Force bombers. One plane after
32:45
Speaker 2: another dropped their bombs, and after each round, the teams
32:48
Speaker 2: on the ground rebuilt whatever was damaged. They compared British
32:52
Speaker 2: thermite bombs, which were the incendiaries favored by bomber Harris
32:56
Speaker 2: in his night raids on Germany, with Hirschberg and Feeser's
33:00
Speaker 2: nap bomb, which now went by the name M sixty nine.
33:05
Speaker 4: Hoyt.
33:05
Speaker 2: Hoddle and his team stood by keeping score.
33:09
Speaker 1: Early decided that we couldn't wait for the fire truck.
33:13
Speaker 1: We had to rush out to take care of fires,
33:18
Speaker 1: and fact we had to rush out before all of
33:21
Speaker 1: the bombs had dropped.
33:25
Speaker 2: The whole point was to analyze the damage, there were
33:28
Speaker 2: three categories of destructiveness A uncontrollable within six minutes, B
33:34
Speaker 2: destructive if unattended, and C non destructive. Napon was the
33:40
Speaker 2: hands down winner, sixty eight percent success rate in category
33:44
Speaker 2: A on Japanese houses. In other words, it caused uncontrollable fires.
33:50
Speaker 2: By contrast, British thermite ran a poor, distant second with napalm.
33:56
Speaker 2: The US had built itself a super weapon.
34:00
Speaker 3: A main component of the M sixty nine bomb a
34:03
Speaker 3: cheese cloth sock containing specially processed jellied gasoline. When ignited,
34:07
Speaker 3: the gel filling becomes a clinging, fiery mass, spreading more
34:10
Speaker 3: than the yard in diameter.
34:13
Speaker 2: The lethal power of napalm was now an empirical fact,
34:16
Speaker 2: and the question of what to do about Japan was
34:19
Speaker 2: no longer in the realm of abstract argument, which presented
34:23
Speaker 2: the bomber mafia's ideology with a temptation of biblical proportions.
34:29
Speaker 3: It burns at approximately one thousand degrees fahrenheit for eight
34:32
Speaker 3: to ten minutes.
34:34
Speaker 2: Did the precision bombers stay true to the purity of
34:38
Speaker 2: their dogma or did they succumb to the destructiveness of napalm?
34:44
Speaker 3: Four air drops. The M sixty nine is assembled in
34:46
Speaker 3: groups of thirty eight. The E twenty three adapter is
34:50
Speaker 3: used in forming five hundred pound aimable clusters carried by
34:53
Speaker 3: planes equipped to handle this size bob.
34:56
Speaker 2: What did Satan say to Jesus during his forty day
34:59
Speaker 2: ordeal in the wilderness? The devil took him to a
35:03
Speaker 2: very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of
35:05
Speaker 2: the world and their splendor. All this I will give you,
35:09
Speaker 2: he said, if you will bow down and worship me.
35:14
Speaker 3: The clusters are given high and low altitude tests at
35:17
Speaker 3: Edgewood Arsenal with a B twenty five loading the five
35:19
Speaker 3: hundred pounders.
35:24
Speaker 2: All the Bomber Mafia had to do was bow down
35:28
Speaker 2: and worship the chemists and all of Japan would be theirs.
35:33
Speaker 3: The cluster is released and opened, and the individual bombs
35:36
Speaker 3: with Gorez Dreamer's trailing dropped toward the target.
36:01
Speaker 2: In the next episode of Revisionist History, Part three of
36:05
Speaker 2: the Curtis the May Story, Curtis the May attackts Japan.
36:16
Speaker 2: Revisionist History is produced by Mee La Belle and Lee
36:19
Speaker 2: Mingestou with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton and anna'm Our editor
36:24
Speaker 2: is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by
36:29
Speaker 2: Flon Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to
36:33
Speaker 2: the Pushkin Crew, Hede Fane, Carl Migliore, Maya Knig, Maggie Taylor,
36:38
Speaker 2: Jason Gambrel and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.