Napalm

Product Description

Napalm incendiary gel that sticks to skin & burns to the bone came into the world on Valentine's Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. On March 9 1945 it created an inferno that killed over 87 500 people in Tokyo--more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It went on to incinerate sixty-four of Japan's largest cities. The Bomb got the press but napalm did the work. After World War II the incendiary held the line against communism in Greece & Korea--Napalm Day led the 1950 counter-attack from Inchon--and fought elsewhere under many flags. Americans generally applauded until the Vietnam War. Today napalm lives on as a pariah: a symbol of American cruelty & the misguided use of power according to anti-war protesters in the 1960s & popular culture from Apocalypse Now to the punk band Napalm Death & British street artist Banksy. Its use by Serbia in 1994 & by the United States in Iraq in 2003 drew condemnation. United Nations delegates judged deployment against concentrations of civilians a war crime in 1980. After thirty-one years America joined the global consensus in 2011. Robert Neer has written the first history of napalm from its inaugural test on the Harvard College soccer field to a Marine Corps plan to attack Japan with millions of bats armed with tiny napalm time bombs to the reflections of Phan Thi Kim Phuc a girl who knew firsthand about its power & its morality.