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