Napalm: Something New in the Arsenal
Early in 1944, Army Air Corps personnel at Eglin Air Force base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida invented a new weapon. It was a “fire bomb,” first used in combat during the Tinian campaign. The ingredients were diesel oil, gasoline, and a metallic salt from the naptha used in the manufacture of soap. Mixed with petroleum fuels, the salt created an incendiary jelly that clung to any surface and burned with an extremely hot flame. The concoction was called “napalm.” It could be dropped in wing or belly tanks attached to the underside of an aircraft and was fired by an igniter on contact with the ground.
On 19 July, five days before the Tinian landing. Lieutenant Commander Louis W. Wang, USN, arrived at Saipan carrying a small supply of the “napalm” powder and a film made at Eglin demonstrating the potency of the bomb. It showed P-47s making low-level drops after diving from 2,000 feet.
The demonstration film so impressed Admiral Harry Hill and Major General Harry Schmidt that Hill immediately radioed Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii, requesting 8,599 pounds of the powder. They also ordered trial raids on Tinian by P-47 pilots of the Army’s 318th Air Group, using powder and detonators already on hand. These trials were not particularly impressive. Their purpose was to burn off wooded areas that had previously resisted white phosphorous and thermite. The “napalm” scorched the trees but left the foliage only partially burned. One problem was the wood itself—a virtually indestructible type of ironwood. Another was the napalm mixture. Wang had brought with him the wrong formula. “We tried using Jap aviation gasoline,” according to Colonel Lewis M. Sanders, commander of the fighter group, “but that gave too much fire effect. Then we tried Jap motor gas and oil, with the napalm powder, and it was quite successful.”
The P-47 pilots were uncomfortable with napalm missions. They dropped their tanks at extremely low altitudes—50 feet in some cases—and were highly vulnerable to ground fire. They were also unimpressed with the efficiency of these “fire bombs”; much of their incendiary effect was wasted in excessive upward flash. Napalm also had a very short burning time—less than two minutes.
Nevertheless, 147 “fire bombs” were used during the Tinian operation, 91 of them containing the napalm mixture. They were most effective in clearing cane fields. As Major General Clifton B. Cates, the 4th Division commander, later recalled: “The first morning they put it down, I went up to the front line and those planes came in over our heads it seemed to me like about a hundred feet in the air ... [They] let go their napalm bombs right over our heads ... maybe two or three hundred yards in front of us. It was a very devastating thing and particularly to the morale of the Japanese.... I didn’t feel too comfortable sitting up there ... I figured that some of them might drop short.”
Each bomb cleared an area approximately 75 by 200 feet and, in some cases, left behind the charred bodies of Japanese troops. The Marines were impressed. Infantry commanders sought napalm for their flamethrower tanks. It was used widely in 1944 in support of ground troops in the Philippines. On one operation on Luzon, 238 fighters saturated an area with napalm: “The usually stoic [Japanese],” an Air Force historian recorded, “seemingly lost all caution and fled into the open, [becoming] easy targets for other forms of attack.”
Napalm was used effectively in the fire bombing of Japanese cities. It was also used in preinvasion efforts to soften up the defenses of Iwo Jima. Beginning on 31 January 1945, Liberator bombers of the Seventh Air Force began 16 days of daytime sorties against the island in which 602 tons of bombs were dropped and 1,111 drums of napalm were used in an unproductive effort to burn off camouflage from defensive positions and gun emplacements. A Marine intelligence officer is quoted in the official Air Force history of operations over Iwo Jima as saying that “the chief effect of the long bombardment of Iwo was to cause the enemy to build more elaborate underground defenses.”
The Landing
The assault plan assigned White Beach 1 to the 24th Marines and White Beach Two to the 25th. In the vanguard for the 24th was Company E of the 2d Battalion—200 men commanded by Captain Jack F. Ross, Jr. Company A of the 1st Battalion, commanded by Captain Irving Schechter, followed and by 0820 the entire 2d Battalion, commanded by Major Frank A. Garretson, was ashore.
Almost simultaneously, two battalions of the 25th Marines loaded into 16 LVTs landed in columns of companies on White Beach 2. The 2d Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Lewis C. Hudson, Jr., was on the right; the 3d Battalion (Lieutenant Colonel Chambers) was on the left.
The units of the 24th, loaded into 24 LVTs, crossed the line of departure—3,000 yards offshore—at 0717. Ahead of them, 30 LCIs (landing craft, infantry) and a company of the 2d Armored Amphibian Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Reed M. Fawell, Jr., raked the beaches with barrage rockets and automatic cannon fire. On the 26-minute run to the beach, the troop-laden LVTs took scattered and ineffectual rifle and machine gun fire.
At White 1, members of a small Japanese beach detachment, holed up in caves and crevices, resisted the landing with intense small arms fire. But they were silenced quickly by Company E gunners.
Within an hour, the entire 1st and 2d Battalions of the 24th were ashore on White 1, preparing to move inland. The 2d Battalion encountered sporadic artillery, mortar, and small arms fire during the first 200 yards of its advance. After that, Garretson later said, the battalion had a “cake walk” for the rest of the day gaining 1,400 yards and reaching its O-1 line objective by 1600. He occupied the western edge of Airfield No. 3 and cut the main road linking Airfield No. 1 with the east coast and southern Tinian. Only occasional small arms fire was encountered before the battalion dug in for the night.
PLANS FOR LANDING
On Garretson’s left, the 1st Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Otto Lessing, was slowed by heavy fires from cave positions and patches of heavy vegetation. Flamethrower tanks were sent up against these positions, but the Japanese held on. As a result, Lessing pulled up late in the afternoon 400 yards short of his objective. This left a gap between his perimeter and Garretson’s. To fill it, the regiment’s 3d Battalion, waiting in reserve at the beach, was called up.
Almost simultaneously, the 25th ran into problems. The beach and surrounding area had been methodically seeded with mines which neither UDT teams nor offshore gunners had been able to destroy. It took six hours to clear them out and in the process three LVTs and a jeep were blown up. The beach defenses also included a sprinkling of booby traps which had to be dealt with—watches and cases of beer, for example, all wired to explode in the hands of careless souvenir hunters.
Behind the beach, troops from Ogata’s 50th Regiment put up a vigorous defense with mortars, anti-tank and anti-boat guns, and other automatic weapons emplaced in pillboxes, caves, fortified ravines, and field entrenchments. Two 47mm guns in particular kept the Marines back on their heels. They finally bypassed these troublesome positions. Later waves took them out, leaving 50 dead Japanese in the gunpits.
The 3d Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chambers, later remembered a lot of confusion on the beach, “the confusion you [always] get when you land, of getting the organization together again.” One of his company commanders, for example, was killed a half-hour after landing and it took a while to get a replacement on scene and up to speed. Then there was the problem of the mines and a problem with artillery fire from the Japanese command post on Mount Lasso, two-and-a-half miles away.
By late afternoon, Chambers’ battalion had reached its objective 1,500 yards inland in the center of the line and had tied in on its left flank with Garretson of the 24th. The other battalions of the 25th came up short of their O-1 line, creating before sundown a crescent-shaped beachhead 3,000 yards wide at the shoreline and bulging inland to a maximum depth of 1,500 yards.
The day’s greatest confusion surrounded the landing of the 23d Marines. The regiment had been held on LSTs (landing ships, tank) in division reserve during the landing of the 24th and 25th. At 0730, the troops were ordered below to board LVTs parked cheek to jowl on the tank decks. Their engines were running, spewing forth carbon monoxide. Experience had shown that troops cooped up under these conditions for more than 30 minutes would develop severe headaches, become nauseous, and begin vomiting.
To avoid that problem and in the absence of a launch order, the regimental commander, Colonel Louis R. Jones, soon unloaded his men and sent them topside. They returned to the tank decks at 1030 when an order to load and launch finally was received. The regiment debarked and eventually got ashore beginning at 1400 despite an incredible series of communication breakdowns in which Jones at crucial times was out of touch with the division and his battalions.
In addition to botched radio communications, Jones was stuck in an LVT with a bad engine; it took him seven hours to get ashore with his staff, leading to a division complaint about the tardiness of his regiment. The division noted that “fortunately no serious harm was done by [the] delay,” but at the end of the operation Jones left the division. He was promoted to brigadier general and assigned as assistant division commander of the 1st Marine Division for the Okinawa landings.
A similar muck-up occurred involving the 2d Marine Division. After the feint at Tinian Town, the division sailed north and lay offshore of the White Beaches through the day. At 1515, the landing force commander, Major General Harry Schmidt, ordered a battalion from the 8th Marines to land at White Beach to back up the 24th Marines. Schmidt wanted the battalion ashore at 1600. Because of communication and transport confusion the deadline was missed. It was 2000 when the unit entered in its log “... dug in in assigned position.”
TINIAN
24–26 JULY 1944
On the other hand, the big things had gone well in the morning and afternoon. By the standards of Tarawa and Saipan, casualties were light—15 dead, 225 wounded. The body count for the Japanese was 438. Despite drizzling rain, narrow beaches, and undiscovered mines, 15,600 troops were put ashore along with great quantities of materiel and equipment that included four battalions of artillery, two dozen half-tracks mounting 75mm guns, and 48 medium and 15 flame-throwing tanks which found the Tinian terrain hospitable for tank operations. The tanks had gotten into action early that morning, leading the 24th in tank-infantry attacks. They also had come to the aid of the 23d Marines as that regiment moved inland to take over the division’s right flank. The beachhead itself was of respectable size, despite the failure of some units to reach their first-day objectives. It extended inland nearly a mile and embraced defensible territory. On the whole, it had not been a bad day’s work.
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