Napalm is an incendiary mixture of a gelling agent and a volatile petrochemical. The name is a portmanteau of two of the constituents of the original thickening and gelling agents: coprecipitated aluminium salts of naphthenic acid and palmitic acid. A team led by chemist Louis Fieser originally developed napalm for the US Chemical Warfare Service in 1942 in a secret laboratory at Harvard University. Of immediate first interest was its viability as an incendiary device to be used in fire bombing campaigns during World War II; its potential to be coherently projected into a solid stream that would carry for distance resulted in widespread adoption in infantry and tank/boat mounted flamethrowers as well.
The bombing of Tokyo was a series of air raids on Japan launched by the United States Army Air Forces during the Pacific Theatre of World War II in 1944–1945, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Firebombing is a bombing technique designed to damage a target, generally an urban area, through the use of fire, caused by incendiary devices, rather than from the blast effect of large bombs. In popular usage, any act in which an incendiary device is used to initiate a fire is often described as a "firebombing".
Incendiary weapons, incendiary devices, incendiary munitions, or incendiary bombs are weapons designed to start fires. They may destroy structures or sensitive equipment using fire, and sometimes operate as anti-personnel weaponry. Incendiaries utilize materials such as napalm, thermite, magnesium powder, chlorine trifluoride, or white phosphorus. Though colloquially often called "bombs", they are not explosives but in fact operate to slow the process of chemical reactions and use ignition rather than detonation to start or maintain the reaction. Napalm, for example, is petroleum especially thickened with certain chemicals into a gel to slow, but not stop, combustion, releasing energy over a longer time than an explosive device. In the case of napalm, the gel adheres to surfaces and resists suppression.
The Butterfly Bomb was a German 2-kilogram (4.4 lb) anti-personnel submunition used by the Luftwaffe during the Second World War. It was so named because the thin cylindrical metal outer shell which hinged open when the bomblet deployed gave it the superficial appearance of a large butterfly. The design was very distinctive and easy to recognise. SD 2 bomblets were not dropped individually, but were packed into containers holding between 6 and 108 submunitions e.g. the AB 23 SD 2 and AB 250-3 submunition dispensers. The SD 2 submunitions were released after the container was released from the aircraft and had burst open. Because SD 2s were always dropped in groups the discovery of one unexploded SD 2 was a reliable indication that others had been dropped nearby. This bomb type was one of the first cluster bombs ever used in combat and it proved to be a highly effective weapon. The bomb containers that carried the SD 2 bomblets and released them in the air were nicknamed the "Devil's Eggs" by Luftwaffe air and ground crew.
The bombing of Kobe on March 16 and 17, 1945, was part of the strategic bombing air raids on Japan campaign waged by the United States against military and civilian targets and population centers during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War. The city would be bombed again in later months.
During the Pacific War, Allied forces conducted air raids on Japan from 1942 to 1945, causing extensive destruction to the country's cities and killing between 241,000 and 900,000 people. During the first years of the Pacific War these attacks were limited to the Doolittle Raid in April 1942 and small-scale raids on military positions in the Kuril Islands from mid-1943. Strategic bombing raids began in June 1944 and continued until the end of the war in August 1945. Allied naval and land-based tactical air units also attacked Japan during 1945.
An aerial bomb is a type of explosive or incendiary weapon intended to travel through the air on a predictable trajectory. Engineers usually develop such bombs to be dropped from an aircraft.
The M33 cluster bomb, also known as the (M33) Brucella cluster bomb, was a U.S. biological cluster bomb developed in the early 1950s and deployed in 1952. It was the first standardized biological weapon in the U.S. arsenal.
Operation Big Itch was a U.S. entomological warfare field test using uninfected fleas to determine their coverage and survivability as a vector for biological agents. The tests were conducted at Dugway Proving Ground in 1954.
The E14 munition was a cardboard sub-munition developed by the United States biological weapons program as an anti-crop weapon. In a series of field tests in 1955, the E14 was loaded with fleas and air-dropped.
The bombing of Shizuoka on June 19, 1945, was part of the strategic bombing campaign waged by the United States against military and civilian targets and population centers during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War in 1945.
Japanese Village was the nickname for a range of houses constructed in 1943 by the U.S. Army in the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, roughly 100 kilometers (62 mi) southwest of Salt Lake City.
The bombing of Aomori on July 28, 1945, was part of the strategic bombing air raids on Japan waged by the United States against military and civilian targets and population centers during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War.
The bombing of Chiba was part of the strategic bombing air raids on Japan campaign waged by the United States of America against military and civilian targets and population centers during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War, and included two separate air raids in 1945. The second, and larger, air raid of July 6, 1945 is also referred to as the “Tanabata Air Raid”, as it occurred on the night of a traditional festival.
The bombing of Kōfu was part of the air raids on Japan strategic bombing campaign waged by the United States against military and civilian targets and population centers of the Empire of Japan during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War in 1945.
On the night of 9/10 March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) conducted a devastating firebombing raid on Tokyo, the Japanese capital city. This attack was code-named Operation Meetinghouse by the USAAF and is known as the Tokyo Great Air Raid in Japan. Bombs dropped from 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers burned out much of eastern Tokyo. More than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people were killed, mostly civilians, and one million were left homeless, making it the most destructive single air attack in human history. The Japanese air and civil defenses proved largely inadequate; 14 American aircraft and 96 airmen were lost.
The bombing of Fukui on July 19, 1945, was part of the strategic bombing air raids on Japan campaign waged by the United States against military and civilian targets and population centers during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War.
The Bombing of Gifu on July 9, 1945 was part of the air raids on Japan campaign waged by the United States of America against military and civilian targets and population centers during the Japan home islands campaign in the closing stages of the Pacific War.
