Chapter 7: "If You, Then, Will Worship Me..." PDF

# Chapter 7: "If You, Then, Will Worship Me..." ## Haywood Hansell’s Temptation * Haywood Hansell's temptation requires a detour, just for this chapter, away from airplanes and bombing runs and high winds over Japan to a meeting. A secret meeting, early in the war, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. * T...

# Chapter 7: "If You, Then, Will Worship Me..." ## Haywood Hansell’s Temptation * Haywood Hansell's temptation requires a detour, just for this chapter, away from airplanes and bombing runs and high winds over Japan to a meeting. A secret meeting, early in the war, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. * The president of MIT was there, along with, among others, a Nobel Prize winner, the president of the Standard Oil Development Company, and two professors - Louis Fieser of Harvard and Hoyt Hottel from MIT - a giant in his field who would later become the group's chairman and spiritual leader. * The meeting was held at the behest of what would become the National Defense Research Committee. ### The National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) * The NDRC was the government group charged with developing new weapons for the American military. * Its most famous effort was, of course, the Manhattan Project, the multibillion-dollar operation out of Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb. * But the scale of the war effort was such that the NDRC had many other projects under way as well. * Americans, off in corners, working on schemes shrouded in darkness. Missions launched that no one heard about. Ideas being pursued in one place that contradicted ideas being pursued in another place. * During the war years, the right hand of the United States government did not always know what the left hand was doing. * And one of those shadowy left-handed projects was Hoyt Hottel’s subcommittee. ### Hoyt Hottel and his Subcommittee * Unlike the geniuses down at Los Alamos, the men weren't physicists. * Their job was not to find better ways to blow things up. * They were chemists. * Specialists in the particular consequences of combining oxygen, fuel, and heat. * Their job was to find better ways to burn things down. * As Hoyt Hottel recalled after the war, "Come '39, A lot of people thought that a war was something we'd be in sooner or later, and our state of preparedness was poor… We needed to know more about incendiary bombs." * Hottel’s group of chemists and industry officials and Nobelists began to meet whenever they could. * Their work started with a strange incident that happened at a DuPont chemical plant in Delaware. * A group there had been working with something called divinylacetylene. * It’s a hydrocarbon-an oil by-product-and if you mix it with a pigment, the paint will dry into a tough, thick adhesive film. * But the film kept bursting into flames. * For the fire obsessives on the NDRC chemistry committee however, that was fascinating. ## Louis Fieser and the Harvard Candle * Around the table, one man raised his hand. "'I'll look into that.'" It was the Harvard chemistry professor, Louis Fieser. * Fieser was born in Ohio in 1899. He majored in chemistry at Williams College, got his PhD from Harvard, and earned postdoc fellowships at Oxford and Frankfurt. * Before the war, he was the first to synthesize vitamin K. His research assistant was his wife, the equally brilliant Mary Fieser. * Women didn’t get hired as chemistry professors in those days, but together, the couple wrote one of the definitive chemistry textbooks of the twentieth century. * Louis was largely bald and a little heavyset. He sported a mustache and was always with a cigarette. * Louis Fieser was also a man of imagination and whimsy. His scientific memoir, published in 1964, begins with his wartime work, but then quickly turns to detailed descriptions of things such as a pocket firebomb that he called, in an inspired bit of brand awareness, the Harvard Candle. ### The Harvard Candle * His memoir includes extended description of the "Harvard Candle." * There is a chapter about attaching incendiary devices to bats. * There is an extended riff on how to ignite a thousand-gallon oil slick. * Detailed plans for a squirrel-proof bird feeder. * And, the coup de grâce, a chapter about one of his many cats, a Siamese called Syn Kai Pooh. ### William von Eggers Doering * The Science History Institute archives include an interview with William von Eggers Doering, who taught chemistry for years at Yale and Harvard. * The interview goes on for hours-and it’s weirdly riveting. * It gives you a glimpse into a world of scientists who had license to be just a little mad. * Doering remembers working in Fieser’s laboratory at the very beginning of the war: > God, what was the compound we were after? Oh, yes, trinitrobenzyl nitrate [laughter]… Listen to this: you put it-do you remember those heavy Carius tubes? They were for some sort of an analysis where you digested something with nitric acid at high temperature. So these were eighth-inch-thick tubes, about an inch in diameter and a couple of feet long. So you put in about twenty or thirty grams of TNT, you poured [in] a little excess of bromine, no solvent. You sealed the damn tube, put it in a bomb-an iron bomb-you know, with a wire wrapped around it to raise the temperature [laughter]…So that in effect, if you put the heating tube in that little space, then if it blew up, the glass would hit this little part of the wall [laughter] on the left and the other on the right. Well, of course, half the tubes blew up! [laughter] * Understand that Doering was one of the great chemists of his generation. He published his first scientific paper in 1939 and his last in 2008-eight decades of work. * In every picture I’ve seen of him, he’s wearing a polka-dot bow tie. * But in this interview, he’s like a thirteen-year-old kid with a chemistry set: > The laboratory would be filthy with bromine, and you wondered when the TNT was going to detonate! [laughter]…Oh, God, it was marvelous times! The Germans have a word to describe certain persons as tierisch ernst, which means having an animal-like seriousness about them. I must say there was very little of that [laughter] in those days! [laughter] * When Louis Fieser came down to the lab, smoking his ever-present cigarette, the grad students would play pranks on him: > Louis would come in to talk to his people and would invariably throw his cigarettes, still burning, into the sink. And so the game was to try to guess when he was coming down and then pour ether in [laughter] the sink in the hope that it would catch fire. [laughter] * In the hope that it would catch fire! Fire was not just of intellectual interest to the people in Fieser’s basement lab. It was also an obsession, a fixation. So when Hoyt Hottel told the subcommittee that something in one of DuPont’s paint mixes would spontaneously burst into flames, who instantly raised his hand? Fieser, of course. "'I’ll look into that'". ## E.B. Hershberg * To help him with his investigation, Fieser immediately turned to another member of his basement coterie. * In his memoirs, he writes, "I volunteered chiefly because I had available in my peacetime research group a man ideally qualified to experiment with and evaluate a hazardous chemical. Dr. E. B. Hershberg." * I spoke to E. B. Hershberg’s son Robert Hershberg and asked him how his father first connected with Fieser. * Robert replied: “First, he’s from the Boston area, [and] I think the very quick and short answer was there were limited places for employment for Jews, and Fieser couldn’t care less about religion. So that’s the lab he wound up in.” * E. B. Hershberg was, in Louis Fieser's words, "a masterful experimentalist in organic chemistry… also versed in engineering, in mechanical drawing, in carpentry…and in photography… Furthermore Hershberg…was experienced in the handling of military explosives, fuses, poison gases, smoke pots, and grenades" and had invented a long list of devices, including "the Hershberg stirrer, the Hershberg stirring motor, and the Hershberg melting point apparatus.” ### Robert Hershberg’s Recollection * As Robert recalled: > In our basement we had defused bombs and things of that nature, and [I have] pictures of explosions that occurred. And some of the incendiary devices were in the desk drawers… There were things like notebooks that had incendiary devices in them, that if you were captured, you pulled the pen out, [and] you had half an hour to write everything down and what you wanted and get out of there before it blew up and burned down the building. * That was E. B. Hershberg. ## Louis Fieser's Experiment in Delaware * So Louis Fieser went to Delaware to investigate the DuPont compound that made paint catch on fire: divinylacetylene. * After he returned to Harvard, he and Hershberg started cooking up batches of it. * They would put the batches in pans and place them on the windowsill of Fieser’s basement lab. * They noticed that the substance gradually changed from a liquid to a thick, viscous gel. * They poked the gel with sticks. * Then they set fire to it and noticed—and I’m quoting here from Fieser’s book, because this was the crucial insight—"that when a viscous gel burns it does not become fluid but retains its viscous, sticky consistency. The experience suggested the idea of a bomb that would scatter large burning globs of sticky gel.” * You drop the bomb and the gel scatters. * It doesn’t just burn itself out. * Big globs of gel fly in every direction, and those globs stick to whatever surface they land on - and keep burning and burning and burning. ## Hershberg and Fieser's New Incendiary Gel * Hershberg and Fieser now had to find a way to test this new concept of incendiary gels. * So they built a little two-foot-tall wooden structure in the lab and compared how well various gel formulations did in burning it down. * Divinylacetylene was good. * But a gel made of rubber and benzene was better. * And gasoline was even better than benzene. * They tried amber-colored smoked sheet rubber. * Pale crepe rubber. * Rubber latex. * Vulcanized rubber. * They made a prototype and took it with them in a suitcase on the train to Maryland, giving it to the porter to carry. * The porter said, “It feels heavy enough to be a bomb.” * Next they tried aluminum naphthenate, a sticky black tar made by a chemical company out of Elizabeth, New Jersey. * The tar didn’t mix well with gasoline. * But they solved the problem by mixing in something else called aluminum palmitate. ## The Birth of Napalm * Gasoline mixed with aluminum naphthenate plus aluminum palmitate. * Napalm. * Robert Neer, author of _Napalm: An American Biography_, told me why napalm is so effective: > If you want an effective incendiary, something that is sticky is much more effective than something that is not sticky, because it actually adheres to whatever it is transferring its radiation energy into. And that’s why napalm is so effective. If the jelled material is too soft or too weak, then it won’t actually deliver a very large amount of radiation to whatever it’s sticking to. You can think of a Molotov cocktail that’s filled up with gasoline, exploding and delivering gasoline. It can burn somebody or something quite terribly, but the fire will go out relatively quickly. Whereas by contrast, if napalm is thrown on something, it will stick to it. * A gel that was too loose would produce what they described dismissively as applesauce. In other words, it wasn’t thick enough or solid enough in its globules to adhere to something. And something that was just right would form quite large-size chunks. It had to be a balance between too thick and too thin and just right. And that’s what they ultimately hit upon with napalm. * Neer and I visited the Harvard soccer field, right behind the business school, which is across the river from the main campus. It’s where Hershberg and Fieser tested napalm in 1942. Hershberg had figured out how to turn their new gel into a bomb: by inserting a stick of TNT with a layer of white phosphorus wrapped around it in the middle of a canister of napalm. * Phosphorus burns at a very high temperature, so the TNT would go off, driving the burning phosphorus into the napalm gel, igniting it, and sending globs of it in every direction. * For a bomb case, they used a shell that had originally been designed to hold mustard gas. * Robert Neer described the scene: > It was on Independence Day, 1942. They had finalized the formulation for the gel incendiary on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And then they figured out the white-phosphorus-burster ignition system and got the bomb shells from the military and built their prototypes. > They dug a lagoon into the field. The lagoon was, I believe, about a hundred feet in diameter. It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large napalm bomb in a canister that they were going to explode in the center. So they put the bomb right in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department. * The birth of napalm. Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard's soccer pitch. ## Napalm’s Utility > There was never any question what napalm was for. It was intended to be used against Japan. * A few months after Pearl Harbor, two American analysts published an essay in Harper’s Magazine. When it comes time to retaliate against Japan, the authors argued, there’s a really easy way to do it: > * Fire. > * Osaka was their case study. > * Osaka’s streets are very narrow. > * Narrow streets means that fire can jump easily from one side to the other. > * And the city didn’t have a lot of parks that could act as firebreaks. > * Plus, unlike Western cities, Japanese cities weren’t built of bricks and mortar. * The beams, joists, and floor-boards of houses were all wooden. Ceilings were made of heavy paper soaked in fish oil. Walls were made of wood or thin stucco. Inside were tatami-straw mats. * Japanese houses were tinderboxes. > As the analysts wrote, “After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in the twenty-five-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80 percent, as opposed to 15 percent for London.” * Eighty percent—that’s almost the whole city. * The people writing the article weren’t military officers or White House policy makers. * The idea that you might destroy 80 percent of one of your enemy’s cities—burn it to the ground—was heretical. * William Sherman, the general who led the Union Army on its final devastating course through the South after the Civil War, famously burned down Atlanta. * But not all of Atlanta. * The business and industrial districts. * Not civilians in their homes. * In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical: * Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? * Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? * A gradual process of rationalization began to take hold. * Army War College historian Tami Biddle explains: > Regarding Japan, we still told ourselves, Well, there’s lots of industry in cities, which is what the British had told themselves when they switched over to area bombing. > If you are a morally guided person, and you want to be able to sleep at night and reconcile what you’re doing with your own principles, you’ve got to find language and concepts to tell yourself that what you’re doing is okay… The decision at that point was Okay, gloves come off. We have to do whatever we can do to bring this nation down. * Hoyt Hottel heard those whispers, those rationalizations. * Did he read that Harper’s essay? * He must have. * The NDRC told him to investigate the utility of incendiaries as weapons of war, and so he decided-good scientist that he was-to put this new weapon, napalm, to the test. * He set up one of the most elaborate experiments of the war: an incendiary demonstration test at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s eight-hundred-thousand-acre test facility in the middle of the Utah desert. ## Dugway Proving Ground * As Hottel recalled, "These generals don't believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things." * They built two sets of perfect replicas of enemy houses on the sands of the Utah desert. * Hottel brought in top-level architects. * For the German village, he called on Erich Mendelsohn, a brilliant German Jewish architect who had designed some of the most beautiful art deco and art moderne buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. * For the Japanese village, Hottel conscripted Antonin Raymond, who had lived in Japan for years and to this day is probably Japan’s most celebrated Western-born architect. * Hottel recalled how much care went into the replica villages: “We decided that the two-inch-thick rice-straw mats that characterized the Japanese home, the tatami, were important because they were the major resistance to the bomb passage through one floor after another. So we had to have tatami.” > It was on Independence Day, 1942. They had finalized the formulation for the gel incendiary on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And then they figured out the white-phosphorus-burster ignition system and got the bomb shells from the military and built their prototypes. > They dug a lagoon into the field. The lagoon was, I believe, about a hundred feet in diameter. It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large napalm bomb in a canister that they were going to explode in the center. So they put the bomb right in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department. * The birth of napalm. * Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard’s soccer pitch. ## Napalm's Effectiveness > There was never any question what napalm was for. It was intended to be used against Japan. * A few months after Pearl Harbor, two American analysts published an essay in Harper’s Magazine. * When it comes time to retaliate against Japan, the authors argued, there’s a really easy way to do it: Fire. Osaka was their case study. * Osaka’s streets are very narrow. * Narrow streets means that fire can jump easily from one side to the other. * And the city didn’t have a lot of parks that could act as firebreaks. * Plus, unlike Western cities, Japanese cities weren’t built of bricks and mortar. * The beams, joists, and floor-boards of houses were all wooden. * Ceilings were made of heavy paper soaked in fish oil. * Walls were made of wood or thin stucco. * Inside were tatami-straw mats. * Japanese houses were tinderboxes. * As the analysts wrote, “After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in the twenty-five-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80 percent, as opposed to 15 percent for London.” * Eighty percent—that’s almost the whole city. * The people writing the article weren’t military officers or White House policy makers. * The idea that you might destroy 80 percent of one of your enemy’s cities—burn it to the ground—was heretical. * William Sherman, the general who led the Union Army on its final devastating course through the South after the Civil War, famously burned down Atlanta. * But not all of Atlanta. * The business and industrial districts. * Not civilians in their homes. * In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical: * Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? * Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? * A gradual process of rationalization began to take hold. ## Tami Biddle’s Explanation * Army War College historian Tami Biddle explains: > Regarding Japan, we still told ourselves, Well, there’s lots of industry in cities, which is what the British had told themselves when they switched over to area bombing. > If you are a morally guided person, and you want to be able to sleep at night and reconcile what you’re doing with your own principles, you’ve got to find language and concepts to tell yourself that what you’re doing is okay… The decision at that point was Okay, gloves come off. We have to do whatever we can do to bring this nation down. * Hoyt Hottel heard those whispers, those rationalizations. * Did he read that Harper’s essay? * He must have. * The NDRC told him to investigate the utility of incendiaries as weapons of war, and so he decided-good scientist that he was-to put this new weapon, napalm, to the test. * He set up one of the most elaborate experiments of the war: an incendiary demonstration test at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s eight-hundred-thousand-acre test facility in the middle of the Utah desert. ## Hottel's Experiment * As Hottel recalled, "These generals don't believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things." * They built two sets of perfect replicas of enemy houses on the sands of the Utah desert. * Hottel brought in top-level architects. * For the German village, he called on Erich Mendelsohn, a brilliant German Jewish architect who had designed some of the most beautiful art deco and art moderne buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. * For the Japanese village, Hottel conscripted Antonin Raymond, who had lived in Japan for years and to this day is probably Japan’s most celebrated Western-born architect. * Hottel recalled how much care went into the replica villages: “We decided that the two-inch-thick rice-straw mats that characterized the Japanese home, the tatami, were important because they were the major resistance to the bomb passage through one floor after another. So we had to have tatami.” * It was on Independence Day, 1942. They had finalized the formulation for the gel incendiary on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And then they figured out the white-phosphorus-burster ignition system and got the bomb shells from the military and built their prototypes. * They dug a lagoon into the field. The lagoon was, I believe, about a hundred feet in diameter. It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large napalm bomb in a canister that they were going to explode in the center. So they put the bomb right in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department. * The birth of napalm. * Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard’s soccer pitch. ## The Effectiveness of Napalm * There was never any question what napalm was for. It was intended to be used against Japan. * A few months after Pearl Harbor, two American analysts published an essay in Harper’s Magazine. * When it comes time to retaliate against Japan, the authors argued, there’s a really easy way to do it: Fire. Osaka was their case study. * Osaka’s streets are very narrow. * Narrow streets means that fire can jump easily from one side to the other. * And the city didn’t have a lot of parks that could act as firebreaks. * Plus, unlike Western cities, Japanese cities weren’t built of bricks and mortar. * The beams, joists, and floor-boards of houses were all wooden. * Ceilings were made of heavy paper soaked in fish oil. * Walls were made of wood or thin stucco. * Inside were tatami-straw mats. * Japanese houses were tinderboxes. * As the analysts wrote, “After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in the twenty-five-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80 percent, as opposed to 15 percent for London.” * Eighty percent—that’s almost the whole city. * The people writing the article weren’t military officers or White House policy makers. * The idea that you might destroy 80 percent of one of your enemy’s cities—burn it to the ground—was heretical. * William Sherman, the general who led the Union Army on its final devastating course through the South after the Civil War, famously burned down Atlanta. * But not all of Atlanta. * The business and industrial districts. * Not civilians in their homes. * In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical: * Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? * Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? ## Tami Biddle Explains * Army War College historian Tami Biddle explains: > Regarding Japan, we still told ourselves, Well, there’s lots of industry in cities, which is what the British had told themselves when they switched over to area bombing. > If you are a morally guided person, and you want to be able to sleep at night and reconcile what you’re doing with your own principles, you’ve got to find language and concepts to tell yourself that what you’re doing is okay… The decision at that point was Okay, gloves come off. We have to do whatever we can do to bring this nation down. * Hoyt Hottel heard those whispers those rationalizations. * Did he read that Harper’s essay? * He must have. * The NDRC told him to investigate the utility of incendiaries as weapons of war, and so he decided-good scientist that he was-to put this new weapon, napalm, to the test. * He set up one of the most elaborate experiments of the war: an incendiary demonstration test at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s eight-hundred-thousand-acre test facility in the middle of the Utah desert. ## Hottel’s Experiment * As Hottel recalled, "These generals don't believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things." * They built two sets of perfect replicas of enemy houses on the sands of the Utah desert. * Hottel brought in top-level architects. * For the German village, he called on Erich Mendelsohn, a brilliant German Jewish architect who had designed some of the most beautiful art deco and art moderne buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. * For the Japanese village, Hottel conscripted Antonin Raymond, who had lived in Japan for years and to this day is probably Japan’s most celebrated Western-born architect. * Hottel recalled how much care went into the replica villages: “We decided that the two-inch-thick rice-straw mats that characterized the Japanese home, the tatami, were important because they were the major resistance to the bomb passage through one floor after another. So we had to have tatami.” * It was on Independence Day, 1942. They had finalized the formulation for the gel incendiary on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And then they figured out the white-phosphorus-burster ignition system and got the bomb shells from the military and built their prototypes. * They dug a lagoon into the field. The lagoon was, I believe, about a hundred feet in diameter. It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large napalm bomb in a canister that they were going to explode in the center. So they put the bomb right in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department. * The birth of napalm. * Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard’s soccer pitch. ## The Effectiveness of Napalm * There was never any question what napalm was for. It was intended to be used against Japan. * A few months after Pearl Harbor, two American analysts published an essay in Harper’s Magazine. * When it comes time to retaliate against Japan, the authors argued, there’s a really easy way to do it: Fire. Osaka was their case study. * Osaka’s streets are very narrow. * Narrow streets means that fire can jump easily from one side to the other. * And the city didn’t have a lot of parks that could act as firebreaks. * Plus, unlike Western cities, Japanese cities weren’t built of bricks and mortar. * The beams, joists, and floor-boards of houses were all wooden. * Ceilings were made of heavy paper soaked in fish oil. * Walls were made of wood or thin stucco. * Inside were tatami-straw mats. * Japanese houses were tinderboxes. * As the analysts wrote, “After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in the twenty-five-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80 percent, as opposed to 15 percent for London.” * Eighty percent—that’s almost the whole city. * The people writing the article weren’t military officers or White House policy makers. * The idea that you might destroy 80 percent of one of your enemy’s cities—burn it to the ground—was heretical. * William Sherman, the general who led the Union Army on its final devastating course through the South after the Civil War, famously burned down Atlanta. * But not all of Atlanta. * The business and industrial districts. * Not civilians in their homes. * In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical: * Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? * Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? ## Tami Biddle Explains * Army War College historian Tami Biddle explains: > Regarding Japan, we still told ourselves, Well, there’s lots of industry in cities, which is what the British had told themselves when they switched over to area bombing. > If you are a morally guided person, and you want to be able to sleep at night and reconcile what you’re doing with your own principles, you’ve got to find language and concepts to tell yourself that what you’re doing is okay… The decision at that point was Okay, gloves come off. We have to do whatever we can do to bring this nation down. * Hoyt Hottel heard those whispers, those rationalizations. * Did he read that Harper’s essay? * He must have. * The NDRC told him to investigate the utility of incendiaries as weapons of war, and so he decided - good scientist that he was - to put this new weapon, napalm, to the test. * He set up one of the most elaborate experiments of the war: an incendiary demonstration test at Dugway Proving Ground, the Army’s eight-hundred-thousand-acre test facility in the middle of the Utah desert. ## Hottel's Experiment * As Hottel recalled, "These generals don't believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things." * They built two sets of perfect replicas of enemy houses on the sands of the Utah desert. * Hottel brought in top-level architects. * For the German village, he called on Erich Mendelsohn, a brilliant German Jewish architect who had designed some of the most beautiful art deco and art moderne buildings of the 1920s and 1930s. * For the Japanese village, Hottel conscripted Antonin Raymond, who had lived in Japan for years and to this day is probably Japan’s most celebrated Western-born architect. * Hottel recalled how much care went into the replica villages: “We decided that the two-inch-thick rice-straw mats that characterized the Japanese home, the tatami, were important because they were the major resistance to the bomb passage through one floor after another. So we had to have tatami.” * It was on Independence Day, 1942. They had finalized the formulation for the gel incendiary on Valentine’s Day, February 14. And then they figured out the white-phosphorus-burster ignition system and got the bomb shells from the military and built their prototypes. * They dug a lagoon into the field. The lagoon was, I believe, about a hundred feet in diameter. It was quite a substantial lagoon because they didn’t want anybody to get hurt. And they had this pretty large napalm bomb in a canister that they were going to explode in the center. So they put the bomb right in the center of this lagoon, which had been filled up with water by some trucks from the Cambridge Fire Department. * The birth of napalm. * Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard’s soccer pitch.