Flame On: U.S. Incendiary Weapons, 1918-1945

By John W. Mountcastle

A concise history of the development and use of incendiary weapons--flamethrowers, incendiary bombs, napalm, and more--by the American military in the twentieth century, with a focus on World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9780811764919

Book preview

Reviews for Flame On

[setnahkt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Enlightening but not what I originally expected. Author John W. Mountcastle spends a lot of time discussing the internal US Army politics of incendiary weapons rather than details on how they work (which is probably just as well, since as near as I can tell flamethrowers aren’t regulated as weapons and detailed instructions might cause some interesting public incidents). Flame weapons go all the way back to Greek Fire, but the first portable flamethrower turned up in World War One. The weapon was pretty intimidating at first but was bulky, heavy, and cumbersome, and a man carrying a Flammenwerfer tended to attract a lot of rifle and machine gun fire from the other side. When WWI ended, the US Army had a few flamethrowers borrowed from the French or British, but none had ever been used in combat by US troops.In the German WWI army, flame troops were assigned to combat engineers – these were soldiers assigned to demolishing enemy fortifications, and similar duties. In the US Army, they went to chemical warfare troops. In the post WWI years, the US military entered a period of complacency; there were few promotion opportunities and senior officers developed what were essentially personal fiefs. So it was with the Chemical Warfare Service; General Amos Fries was focused on war gases and considered flame weapons ineffective. Thus all the foreign flamethrowers in the US inventory were scrapped, and all incendiary bombs were used in tests and not replaced. Mountcastle all but accuses General Fries of incompetence in neglecting flame weapon development, but also notes it was a time of very limited military budgets and Fries saw war gases as more effective weapons.This changed with the advent of WWII, when Americans were amazed at the effectiveness of German flamethrowers against Belgian and French fortifications. The US Army quicky put out request for flamethrowers, and the contract was awarded to a New York firm that made fire extinguishers – presumably under the belief that if they knew how to put out fires they probably also knew how to start them. The resulting E1 flamethrower was completely impractical; it was so big and heavy a soldier could barely walk while carrying it. The replacement E1R1 was a little better but was still heavy and complicated; one problem is most of the gasoline charge burned up in the air before reaching the target. Eventually these problems were ironed out and the M1 flamethrower became available in time for Pearl Harbor. This segues into another of Mountcastle’s points; flamethrowers were much more popular in the Pacific theater than in Europe. As mentioned, the Germans made a distinction between “combat engineers” and “construction engineers”; the US Army did not. Thus when flamethrowers were transferred from chemical warfare troops to engineers, most American engineering units were building or repairing bridges, roads, and railroads, and left their flamethrowers in the rear; if things like bunkers were encountered they were reduced with direct artillery fire or demolition charges. It was a different story in the Pacific; the US Marines were quite enthusiastic about flamethrowers, including long range tank-mounted ones.The situation was somewhat similar with incendiary bombs. In Europe, the USAAF doctrine was precision bombing with high explosives; the British were heavy users of incendiaries. In the Pacific, the US found that precision bombing just didn’t work against the Japanese; for one thing the B29s originally bombed from such a high altitude that air currents deflected bombs on the way down, and for another the Japanese very quickly diverted their military industries from large factories to small workshops indistinguishable for ordinary residential buildings. The US bomber forces in the Pacific quickly switched to low altitude incendiary raids that proved lethally effective against Japanese cities.A photograph section, including some grisly ones of Japanese flamethrower victims. Numerous endnotes and a large bibliography. Probably most interesting for the discussion of military politics between the wars.