Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method
The first test of napalm was held on July 4, 1942, at Harvard U.
In an iconic 1972 photograph from the Vietnam War, a naked 9-year-old girl runs screaming from a bombing, her skin burning from the napalm attack on her village. The image helped rally opposition to the weapon’s use in Vietnam and beyond.
Yet, with all napalm’s notoriety, Robert M. Neer’s Napalm: An American Biography, forthcoming from Harvard University Press, is marketed as the first history of the incendiary gel. It demonstrates that napalm has had far more severe an effect, and far more curious a life, than is commonly known.
Napalm, in raining hellfire on Vietnamese villagers, brought the United States infamy but not victory, Neer writes. And yet few historians have asked how it emerged and became so terrifying a weapon.
“The most striking thing about my whole project, for me, was the silence, as I came to call it,” says Neer, by phone from New York. So little has been written about napalm that “basically the best public source of information at the moment is Wikipedia, I would say, which is really quite amazing.”
Neer had no doubt that napalm’s story was worth telling. The author, a lawyer and core lecturer in history at Columbia University, writes that the explosive, embraced by U.S. commanders as a means to stop German and Japanese war efforts dead in their tracks, was “born a hero but lives a pariah. Its invention is a chronicle of scientific discovery as old as Yankee ingenuity and as modern as the military-academic complex.”
Napalm’s history began at Harvard University, where it owed its creation to Louis Fieser, a brilliant organic chemist who had been entrusted with a secret war-research project. The first demonstration took place on a soccer field near Harvard Stadium, on July 4, 1942. Using such tools as a meat grinder from a Harvard dining hall, Fieser developed a method of exploding thickened petroleum into 2,100-degree “burning gobs of sticky gel,” as he put it.
The weapon was later tested on life-sized replicas of German and Japanese houses, and shaved white Cheshire pigs. Fieser and his colleagues even tried to develop a method of arming Mexican free-tailed bats with small amounts, putting the animals into clustered containers, flying them over Japanese cities at night, and then parachuting them down into warm air, where the bats would awaken, wiggle free, and explode inside houses. Ultimately the effort failed; the bats just wouldn’t cooperate, and many died even before their release. In one instance, armed bats blew up a test facility. After many millions of dollars of expense, the project was called off: “uncertainties involved in the behavior of the animal,” one observer reported.
Throughout their development of napalm, Neer says, Harvard scientists steered around any discussion of its morality.
The use of incendiary weapons dates back to ancient times: flaming arrows, fiery mud poured over city walls onto attackers, foxes set alight and driven into fields of crops, increasingly lethal flamethrowers. In 1937, German planes devastated the Basque town of Guernica with incendiary bombs.
In 1945, the U.S. military used napalm, recently perfected and far more sophisticated and lethal than earlier incendiary devices, to kill about 90,000 citizens of Tokyo and to incinerate 64 other Japanese cities. Neer notes that Gen. Curtis LeMay, who directed the incineration of Tokyo and the atomic-bomb attacks later that year, wrote after the war that his forces had “scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.”
The United States gave Greece napalm so it could bomb Communist positions in 1948, and American forces used it during the Korean War. Many other deployments followed before its infamous use in Vietnam.
Harvard’s role resulted from an innovation in weapons development. In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up the National Defense Research Committee to coordinate collaborations among military, industrial, and academic personnel. It was, says Neer, the beginning of the military-industrial-academic “complex,” providing many thousands of scientists with virtually unlimited funds for the atomic bomb and other projects.
Louis Fieser’s boss and, earlier, instructor at Harvard was by then the university’s president, James B. Conant, who nurtured Harvard’s prominent role in the new approach. He described it as “the beginning of a revolution” that would transform the relationship of the university to the federal government.
Conant had the stomach for napalm’s effects. Late in his career, he mused that he did not see “why tearing a man’s guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin,” and that civilian casualties were “not only a necessary consequence of bombing, but one might almost say an objective.”
Neer believes that the paucity of scholarly analysis of napalm may be due to its fading as a continuing or immediate threat to the West, particularly by comparison with nuclear weapons. That diminished danger was cited in 1980, when United Nations delegates nonetheless outlawed napalm’s deployment against civilians as part of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. The need for such an agreement became apparent when Serbian forces used napalm in 1994, as did the United States in Iraq in 2003, according to Neer. (The U.S. military’s denials of that use depend on ignoring the generic definition of napalm as any kind of “thickened incendiary,” he says.) U.S. officials did not sign the U.N.'s napalm provision until 2009.
Neer considers the U.N. agreement an optimistic sign: “A global consensus has been produced that even the mighty United States, after decades of trying to avoid the issue, has finally, at least to some degree, accepted.” he says. “The consensus of the world is that napalm should not be used against concentrations of civilians.”
When Neer took napalm as his subject, primary sources, including military, industrial, and scientific documents, proved easy to find. They included Fieser’s memoir, The Scientific Method: A Personal Account of Unusual Projects in War and in Peace (1964), out of print but available in research libraries. Neer’s biggest challenge, he says, was to frame his analysis and narrative because so little scholarly interpretation of the history existed.
The subject appealed to him in part because he felt a personal connection to the events: The lab where Fieser did his first experiments with napalm, near Harvard Square, “was a block away from the lab where my mom worked as a biochemist at Harvard Medical School,” he says. “I literally grew up going to the library a block away.”
He also knew, of course, that napalm figured commonly in movies, songs, and other works of popular culture, particularly in video games, as an emblem of destructive power. In the minds of creators of such works, as in the experience of napalm’s millions of targets, the weapon had become “a worldwide synonym for American brutality.”