looked like a magnesium rod with tail fins. Each consisted of a thick-walled casing of magnesium with a core of thermite. The thermite ignited the magnesium, which burned so intensely it could not be extinguished with water. Water only made it burn more fiercely, because the hot magnesium took oxygen from the water, which, of course, is a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Air raid wardens were encouraged to cover the burning bombs with sand or else spray them with a fine spray of water to make them burn themselves out more quickly without spread-ing the fire. The longer the bomb burned, the more likely it was to cause a bigger fire. Thermite and magnesium burned hot enough to melt any metal and pulverize several inches of concrete.
When the British began bombing German cities, they turned thermite against its former users and added some refinements. One was a bomb that parachuted to Earth. When it landed, the tail blew off, then it forcibly ejected seven thermite bombs over a period of 10 minutes while thermite in its nose burned where it landed.
Artillery use a variety of incendiary shells. Some contain thermite, some white phosphorus, some other chemicals. Small arms also shoot incendiary ammunition. Tracer bullets are incendiaries, so were what the British called
“Buckingham bullets,” which had small amount of white phosphorus or an explosive in the nose. One high- tech incendiary is depleted uranium solid shot, widely used by U.S. forces against armor. DU, as it’s called, gives off sparks when it strikes something hard, such as armor plate. The sparks have an extremely high temperature, which makes them likely to ignite anything inflammable, such as gasoline vapor in the interior of a tank (see Chapter 49).
Fire has been a weapon of war for long before Greek fire, probably for as long as there has been war, but it never gained the importance it did in World War II with the advent of thermite and napalm aerial bombs.
Chapter 45
Jumping and Coasting Into War: The Parachute and the Glider
The Belgian government was resolved that 1914 would not be repeated.
Overlooking the Albert Canal, a little north of Liege, the Belgians built Fort Eben-Emael. Eben-Emael incorporated all of the technology used in the famous French Maginot Line. It had armored rotating gun cupolas whose low, curved shape made a direct hit impossible, and that could be lowered beneath the surface of the Earth. These cupolas mounted five 60 mm, 16 75 mm, and two 120 mm guns — all quick-firers. The fort was surrounded by an antitank wall and barbed wire. It had armored positions for searchlights, grenade throwers and many, many machine guns. Everything was underground, protected by a thick-ness of reinforced concrete that would have defied Big Bertha. Some 700 trained soldiers made up its garrison.
At 5:20 a.m.,on May 10, 1940, seven gliders landed on the top of Eben-Emael. The Belgian stronghold had practically no antiaircraft defenses. Out of the gliders climbed 55 Germans equipped with flamethrowers and shaped demolition charges as well as the usual infantry arms. They used the shaped charges to blast the cupolas and other armored positions or they burned the defenders out of them with flamethrowers. They tossed explosive charges down the air vents. The defenders fought from tunnel to tunnel when the Germans entered the underground fortress. Some of them even managed to fire on the regular German troops who were trying to cross the canal. The Germans got across, however, and when they brought up reinforcements the next day, the garrison surrendered. The garrison commander shot himself.
While glider troops were attacking Eben-Emael, paratroopers dropped into Holland and seized bridges, making the vaunted Dutch water-defenses useless.
Even earlier, during the German invasion of Norway, a long narrow country broken up by fjords and mountains, the Germans dropped paratroops to seize key airfields. They were quickly reinforced by troops arriving on transport planes.
These attacks of troops from the sky seemed to many at that time like something from a science-fiction tale. For years, there had been reports of paratroopers of the Soviet Union’s Red Army and how they would change warfare.
But the publications that printed these stories also had articles on how the Japanese-owned fishing boats in Los Angeles Harbor would cover that immense body of water with oil and ignite it, roasting everyone in the Pacific Fleet. Then came the Soviet Union’s fumbling effort against Finland in the Winter War of 1939–1940. No paratroopers appeared, and the Red Army’s campaign was distinguished mostly by its ineptitude. The paratroop threat seemed on a par with the martian threat.
The aerial component of the Blitzkrieg was a shock, but worse was to come.
On May 20, 1941, the remnants of the British force that had been driven out of Greece were holed up on Crete with some 10,200 Greek allies. Soon after dawn, the defenders saw an enormous fleet of aircraft. Suddenly, parachutes blossomed behind the planes, thousands upon thousands of parachutes. Behind the parachutes came planes towing gliders that held artillery, more heavy equipment and more soldiers. On May 26th, Major General Bernard Freyberg of New Zealand, commander of the Allied forces on Crete, radioed his commander, General Archibald Wavell, that Crete could not hold out. On June 1, the Royal Navy evacuated 18,000 men. Some 12,000 of the British force had been captured, and 2,000 had been killed. The British and Americans put new emphasis on developing airborne divisions of their own.
The Allies used their paratroopers for the first time in the invasion of Sicily in 1943. The airborne troops avoided the main German mistake on Crete: dropping directly on enemy troops, something that caused them extraordinarily heavy losses. They landed away from enemy troop concentrations, then attacked outposts, bridges, road intersections, and made it almost impossible for Axis forces to reach the beaches being attacked from the sea.
D day, June 6, 1945, saw the greatest parachute and glider assault in history — one that will probably still be the greatest in history a thousand years from now. Four divisions, two American and two British, parachuted onto Normandy in the dead of the night. It was hardly a flawless operation. Most of the paratroopers landed at a distance from their intended drop zones, and wind scattered them so far that many did not return to their own units for 24 hours.
That wasn’t all bad. The troopers were scattered so widely that the Germans were utterly surprised to find enemy troops among them. The paratroopers took advantage of that surprise and captured many of the Germans’ rear installations. The landings greatly disrupted attempts to reinforce the German troops being attacked on the beaches.
One of the big factors in the success of the airborne assault was that much of Normandy, except for the front-line troops on the beaches, was defended by second-line troops with third-line equipment. Some of the German units were equipped with French tanks left over from the First World War and with under-powered artillery from the same war. Antiaircraft guns were in short supply. A mass jump, such as those on Normandy with troops wearing static-line parachutes, requires transport planes to fly in a fairly dense formation at a rather low altitude and continue on course until the last trooper has jumped.
And that is the answer to an antiaircraft gunners’ prayer. Before conditions that permit that kind of jump occur again, troops may be wearing antigravity boots or rocket belts. The glider forces did not have the luck of the Germans at Eben-Emael. Landing at night in a land of hedgerows and swamps, many of them crashed, and large numbers of troops were killed or suffered disabling injuries.
The German invasion of Crete had breathed new life into the concept of airborne operations, but enthusiasts overlooked a few facts. First, German losses at first were so great that General Karl Student, chief of the Luftwaffe’s airborne troops, thought his men had lost the battle on the first day of the invasion. They dropped directly on the airfields, and the defenders began killing them before they touched the ground. The slaughter was especially heavy at airfields held by New Zealand troops. German General Erwin Rommel said the New Zealanders were the best troops he fought in his North African campaigns.
Most of them were farmers, and they had been using rifles since childhood.
