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H-JAPAN February 27, 2005 Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 10:58:03 +0900 From: "M.G. Sheftall" <bucky@tokai.or.jp> Subject: Query re US Bombing of Japan in WW2 Brown-san, Frank cites Schaffer's "Wings of Judgment" and Kerr's "Flames over Tokyo" as his main sources for the fire raid passages in "Downfall". However, I must take the blame for the (as it now turns out, erroneous) claim of the March 9-10 Tokyo raid being the operational debut of napalm. As you suggest, I may have confused this with March 9-10 being the debut of the 20th AF's low-altitude, massed napalm tactics. My bad. According to official Air Force history website (http://www.airforcehistory.hq.af.mil/PopTopics/chrono1.htm), napalm was first used in combat by American P-38 pilots on July 17, 1944 during the Normandy breakout campaign. A little googling turned up some other informative sites: A detailed technical rundown on the development and deployment of the M-69 (the "canister" napalm bomblet you mention in your post): http://www.vectorsite.net/twbomb1.html Testimony from the 1967 International War Crimes Tribunal on the development of napalm and (lest we forget in all our discussion on tools and tactics) its horrific consequences for human physiology is available online at: http://www.vietnamese-american.org/b1.html and http://www.vietnamese-american.org/b2.html M.G. Sheftall Shizuoka University ------------------------------------------------------------------------ You can manage your H-Japan subscription at H-Net Subscription Management Page without requiring the use of LISTSERV commands by email. Change of address operations, digest requests and temporary mail suspensions can be handles by using this page. The link to this page is: http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/lists/manage.cgi
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