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Napalm in US Bombing Doctrine and Practice, 1942-1975
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
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If the doctrine of strategic bombing has been the object of much attention in the military history and international relations literature (Biddle 2002, Pape 2011), few studies have focused on the means deployed to achieve the bombings. Yet, these means are crucial to understand three decisive aspects of the doctrine and practice of strategic bombing: (1) how they have been defined; (2) how they have changed; and (3) how they have been perceived and used by different actors (militaries, international institutions and public opinion) over time (3). This article highlights these issues through the analysis of napalm utilization by the US military. It demonstrates that the massive use of this weapon, from its creation in 1942 to the Vietnam War, is at the core of a shift in the doctrine and practice of American strategic bombing. The article demonstrates that analysis of the weapons deployed for ‘strategic bombing’ enriches the historiography – and the understanding - of the doctrine and practice of strategic bombing itself.
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Notes
1 This is explained in NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography. Cambridge; MA and London; England: Harvard University Press, 2013. p195, Robert Neer quotes the interesting reference to Louis Fieser made in the Harvard official Gazette of 1977 “Louis Fieser was a distinguished researcher whose career included work on antimalarial agents, cortisone and vitamin K-1”.
2 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography. p195.
3 This definition of attrition strategy is drawn from the International Encyclopedia of the First World War. It echoes the definition of the Jominian culture of annihilation as defined by Kahl, which holds ‘the application of direct and overwhelming force to destroy the enemy and achieve victory’: it implies that politics reasserts itself only after the complete destruction of the adversary on the battlefield; it is a capital-intensive approach that relies on the use of overwhelming firepower; a disdain for unconventional skills and tactics in KAHL, Colin H. “In the Crossfire or the Crosshairs?” International Security 32, no.1, Summer 2007:7-46.
4 Martin Cook explains how the US military tried to draw lessons from the Vietnam War even leading some to resign. See for example the testimony of General Harold K. Johnson who declared to the President “You have refused to tell the country they cannot fight a war without mobilization; you have required me to send men into battle with little hope of their ultimate victory; and you have forced us in the military to violate almost every one of the principles of war in Vietnam.” See COOK, Martin. “Revolt of the Generals: A Case Study in Professional Ethics” Parameters, Spring, 2008
5 The development of Unarmed Aerial Vehicles or the promotion of new rules of engagement asking for rigorous actions to avoid hurting civilians. Yugoslavia War in the 1990s is an example of conflict during which the US (and NATO) applied this strategy.
6 rev. ed. New York: Meridian, 1991.
7 STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE, Incendiary Weapons, A SIPRI Monograph. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1975.
8 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography. Cambridge; MA and London; England: Harvard University Press, 2013. p195. See here.
9 STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE. Incendiary Weapons. A SIPRI Monograph. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1975.
10 See CHASSIN, Lionel Max. Aviation Indochine. Amiot-Dumont, 1954.
11 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography.
12 See STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE. Incendiary Weapons.
13 Interview with General Robineau, 19/05/2014.
14 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography.
15 See STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE. Incendiary Weapons.
16 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography.
17 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography. This is equivalent to the overall quantity of napalm procured by the US from 1964 to 1973
18 Many chemists agree that the new distribution of elements constituting napalm is essentially identical to the distribution of the previous generation of napalm. They consider the effects, such as the capacity to ignite, identical and even superior to the previous type of napalm. As a weapon is categorized depending on its effects, I consider MK77 comparable to napalm. I will elaborate on this point below.
19 In response to a report by Al-Jazeera on December, 14, 2001 that blamed the US for using napalm during the battle of Tora Bora, General Tommy Franks replied “We're not using the old napalm in Tora Bora”.
20 In this context, the very status of combatant is also extremely hard to define.
21 The practice of renaming a weapon in order to avoid the opprobrium attached to it has been studied by several authors interested in taboos attached to weapon. See Price, Richard M. The Chemical Weapons Taboo. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Paperbacks, 2007 and Tannenwald, Nina. The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and the Non-Use of Nuclear Weapons. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
22 The two strategies are not necessarily exclusive: both can be used depending on the timing of the war, whether war is at its beginning or at its final days. For example, during WWII, certain US Commanders favored a ‘precision bombing strategy’ at the beginning of the conflict, and the Joint Chief of Staff repeatedly ordered commanders to avoid massively bombing civilian areas. This changed in the final years of the conflict wherein the attrition strategy was widely used in aerial attack. See BIDDLE, Tami Davis. Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-45. Princeton Studies in International History and Politics. Princeton N.J: Princeton University Press, 2002
23 Certain military strategists even advocated targeting incendiary weapons against poor neighborhoods of big cities: because the buildings were close to each other and because they housed a high density of population (especially a population which directly contributed to the war effort by working in factories), they were ‘ideal targets’ for the annihilation strategy.
24 See LEMAY, Curtis. Mission with LeMay: My Story. Doubleday, 1965.
25 The specific odor of napalm was memorably recalled in Apocalypse Now, a movie directed by Francis Ford Coppola (1979), through the very famous monologue “I love the smell of napalm in the morning(…) it sounds like victory, like the war is going to end.”
26 See LEMAY, Curtis. Mission with LeMay: My Story.
27 See also CRAWFORD, Neta C., Accountability for killing: Moral responsibility for Collateral Damage in America's Post 9/11 Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
28 See EVANGELISTA, Matthew. “Introduction, The American Way of Bombing.” In The American Way of Bombing: Changing Ethical and Legal Norms, from Flying Fortresses to Drones, edited by SHUE, Henry, and EVANGELISTA, Matthew. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2014.
29 See HARIMAN, Robert, LUCAITES. John Louis, 2007. No caption needed: iconic photographs, public culture, and liberal democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
30 In fact, Plummer was not responsible for the attack, and the US Army knew it. See HAGOPIAN, Patrick. The Vietnam War in American Memory: Veterans, Memorials, and the Politics of Healing. 1. paperback printing. Amherst, Mass: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 2011.
31 See CHONG, Denise. The Girl in the Picture: The Kim Phuc Story. New York: Penguin, 2001.
32 The picture ‘Meeting at the Wall’ can be seen in NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography.
33 This definition inspired by Pierre Bourdieu is given in O'NEILL, Barry, Honors, Symbols and War, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
34 See also PRICE, Richard M., The Chemical Weapons Taboo, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 2007
35 The historian Audoin-Rouzeau notably quotes anthropologist Françoise Héritier who agrees with the fact that the fundamental distinction between men and women, which justifies the exclusion of women from the battlefield, is the fact that they already bleed from the inside in AUDOUIN-ROUZEAU, Stéphane, ‘Mourir par les Gaz: Une Transgression Anthropologique?‘ in Gaz!gaz!gaz!: la guerre chimique, 1914-1918, ed. by HISTORIAL DE LA GRANDE GUERRE (MUSEUM), LEPICK, Olivier, AUDOUIN-ROUZEAU, 1914-1918. Péronne; Milan: Historial de la grande guerre; 5 continents, 2010.
37 See the development of chemical weapons as an anti-heroic weapon in my dissertation, GUILLAUME, Marine, Fighting justly in the XXth Century, 2015
38 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography.
39 The agent orange is an herbicide and a defoliant used as a means of warfare, notably by the United States during the Vietnam War
40 See UN archive SG/SM/1964/ORG/714.
41 See UNITED NATIONS GROUP OF CONSULTANT EXPERTS ON NAPALM AND OTHER INCENDIARY WEAPONS, ROLF BJÖRNERSTEDT, United Nations Secretary General. 1973. Napalm and other incendiary weapons and all aspects of their possible use: report of the Secretary General, Number 16. United Nations.
42 See NEER, Robert M. Napalm An American Biography.
43 The CCCW was originally built open 3 Protocols: Protocol I on Non-Detectable Fragments; Protocol II on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby Traps and Other Devices; and finally Protocol III on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapon. Today, the CCCW contains 5 Protocols (the Protocol IV on Blinding laser weapons entered in force on 1998 and the Protocol V on Explosive remnants of war entered in force on 2006).
44 The definition of incendiary weapon seems to be framed so as napalm fits entirely with the category: it excludes many weapons (such as munitions in which the incendiary effects is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons) yet used in the battlefield
45 See for example ELLIS, John, The Social History of the Machine Gun, John Hopkins paperbacks ed. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986;, See PERRIN, Noel, Giving up the Gun: Japan's Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1988. See also the extensive work of Graham Spinardi on nuclear weapon and social perceptions.
46 A whole literature studying the concept of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ or ‘moral entrepreneurs’ studies this question. See for example PRICE, Richard, “Revering the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines”, International Organization, 52, no3, Summer 1998: 613-44; EVANGELISTA, Matthew, Unarmed Forces; The transnational Movement to End the Cold War, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002; BUSBY, Joshua W., Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, Cambridge Studies in International Relations 116, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010
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