Science of Fire Bombing

When Nazi planes dropped fire bombs on London last summer, they restored an age-old weapon to use after centuries of neglect. Last week a leading expert on this ancient weapon revealed that the Nazis were clumsy and amateurish incendiarists at best. Tall, dressy Colonel Joaquin Enrique Zanetti, Professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, is the No. 1 U. S. pyrotechnician. Last week he published a concise handbook of arson: Fire from the Air--the ABC of Incendiaries (Columbia University Press; 50-c-).

The Byzantine Empire held off the Saracens for generations with Greek fire --a mixture of pitch, sulfur, quicklime and naphtha squirted from siphon-like devices. Gunpowder outmoded Greek fire in the 14th Century, and the steel warships of the 19th Century outmoded the red-hot cannonballs which often ignited wooden frigates.

The airplane brought incendiarism back to its own. Ludendorff's memoirs reveal that German aviation was ready to destroy London and Paris in 1918 with newly invented magnesium-thermite bombs. But the German Army's situation was then so desperate that the high command felt such horror would win them only harsher peace terms. Magnesium-thermite bombs, now raining on British cities, were first used extensively in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936. But, says Zanetti, no new incendiary types have been invented since 1918, nor are new types very likely to appear. Other pyrofacts:

> Unique in military history has been the development of defensive methods before offensive: fire chiefs and underwriters are far more skillful than military arsonists.

> A good incendiary should carry its own oxidizing compounds so that it can leave the oxygen of the air for the fire it is setting.

> Phosphorous bombs are ideal when dropped on flimsy, kindling-built Chungking. But on a well-built European or U. S. city they are fireworks.

> Aim of flying arsonists should be to start one huge, uncontrollable fire, not many small isolated ones. Slums are an ideal target, must be eliminated for defense if not for humanitarian reasons.

> Today the Germans and British stupidly drop demolition bombs among incendiaries, helping to put out their own fires, for demolishing buildings is an old and effective means of controlling fires.

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