I know napalm usage was quite common in wartime between WW2 and Vietnam, and I’m also very aware of just how damaging the substance was to the people affected. Internal damage, skin essentially melting, burning underwater (cue Phil Swift), etc. My question is, how were soldiers able to, for lack of a better word, safely use napalm without harming themselves as well as their targets?
In: Other
Sounds like you are actually describing white phosphorous in your post, napalm is basically just gasoline in jelled form, same precautions as gasoline.
>, burning underwater
I think you’re conflating napalm with white phosphorus. Napalm is little more than jellied gasoline, which can be smothered. White phosphorus, on the other hand, can produce its own oxygen, letting it burn underwater.
I have to ask… how do you think napalm was dispensed? “Soldiers” didn’t use it. It was dropped from airplanes.
One of the many sadistic cadences we would call while running around base in formation went like this “napalm napalm don’t be blue, sticks to women and children too”. Also, you can make napalm at home relatively easy by adding Styrofoam to gasoline. It melts on contact. To increase the viscosity (make it thicker), just keep adding more Styrofoam until its consistency is to your liking. This concludes today’s episode of Mr. Wizard’s World.
Basically the pilots would come down low, sometimes withing a few hundred feet. They would drop as close as possible usually withing 300 meters of the frontline. Many times they would fly over the spot to get a bearing and then fly the second pass where they would drop the ordnance. The pilots where well trained and determined to save their comrades
Napalm does not burn underwater, and you just avoid getting it on yourself while its on fire. It’s not very complicated.
That’s like asking how you can use a hose without getting wet.
Napalm was powerful but I think the main culprit of chemicals they were exposed to that left lasting health damage was Agent Orange. My grandfather had a grapefruit sized tumor in his lung when he died on the operating table from the surgeon accidently cutting an artery. That wasn’t his only health problem, either. He started to hunch over with arthritis in his neck and spine to the point it affected his height, and it didn’t look like normal aging stuff anyway. He was maybe in his 50s but his health was like 20-30 years older seeming. I don’t know more details because he died before I was born but his health spiraled from exposure to that stuff.
napalm was generally dropped from planes. It would harm friendly targets if it was dropped on them.
My uncle was literally the guy that sprayed the “defoliant” from the back of the helicopter in 1968. He died of cancer in 1973.
You ever see one of those little cans with the pink gel in them that you light to keep a serving tray warm?
Thats napalm and its fairly harmless until given oxygen and heated above its ingition point.
Latest Answers