Napalm: An American Biography

Napalm was invented on Valentine’s Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. It created an inferno that killed over 87,500 people in Tokyo―more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki―and went on to incinerate 64 Japanese cities. The Bomb got the press, but napalm did the work. Neer offers the first history.