I’ve recently learned that the bombs used for the most deadliest bombing raid in history were made here in South Jersey, in a secret munitions plant in the middle of the pine barrens outside Mays Landing.
While we typically think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the defining horrors of World War 2 bombing, the March 9, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo is generally thought to have been more deadly. As this article writes, “Three hundred B29 bombers dropped nearly 500,000 cylinders of napalm and petroleum jelly on the most densely populated areas of Tokyo.” The bombs killed an estimated 100,000 people according to Wikipedia, though the roundness of that number hints at the fact that death tolls for city-obliterating bombings are all guesswork.
There are some well-known ruins of early twentieth-century munition plants in South Jersey. The most well-known is the World-War-I-era Bethlehem Loading plant in Estell Manor, which is located in what is now one of the loveliest parks in the county, amidst nature trails and beautiful views of rivers and tidal marshes. The ruins are cool and in this bucolic setting, it’s easy to forget that their products resulted in thousands of deaths.
The Tokyo napalm was made elsewhere, though, at the National Fireworks plant northwest of Mays Landing. I’ve only just learned of it via Reddit and haven’t gone back there. From pictures the ruins look unremarkable (and right now is the height of tick season so I’m not trudging back there). The plant produced M69 napalm cluster bombs, built not to explode but to set cities aflame. From the book Twilight of the Gods:
The workhorse of the firebombing raids was the M69 napalm incendiary submunition, clustered in a 500-pound E46 cylindrical finned bomb. Nearly all had been produced at a remote and secret plant in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, about 15 miles inland from Atlantic City. Each M69 submunition or “bomblet” was essentially a cheesecloth sock filled with jellied gasoline, inserted into a lead pipe. Thirty-eight M69s were clustered together in an E46, bound by a strap that burst open on a timed fuse. The clusters were timed to open at 2,000 feet above the ground. Three-foot cotton gauze streamers trailed behind each bomblet, causing them to disperse over an area with a diameter of about 1,000 feet. On impact with the ground, a second fuse detonated and an ejection charge fired globules of flaming napalm to a radius of about 100 feet. Whatever these globules hit-walls, roofs, human skin- they adhered and burned at a temperature of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to ten minutes, long enough to start raging fires in the teeming, close-built wood and paper neighborhoods at the heart of all Japanese cities.”
While Hiroshima and Nagasaki are rightly remembered for ushering into the nuclear age — a single modern weapon could kill millions—the Tokyo bombing seems to have been deadlier and it certainly set a precedent, that it was acceptable to destroy entire cities full of civilians for military goals.
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