What kind of planes dropped napalm in vietnam

The opprobrium attached to napalm also derives from the intense fear that the weapon provokes not only to those who are exposed to it, but to those who observe its effects. Napalm burns to the bone but does not cause bleeding: persons hit by napalm die most often because of internal hemorrhage, suffocation or intense burns. The same type of effects can be observed in people exposed to chemical or biological agents.

Yet, several authors who studied chemical weapons believe that these weapons which kill without causing bleeding would create an intense fear for they would blur the founding anthropological barriers of our societies between women who bleed from the inside and men who bleeds outside For the same reasons as with chemical weapons, napalm is an anti-chivalric weapon: bravery, engagement and heroism cannot save the combatant.

Several testimonies of soldiers, but also of military historians tend to support this argument. Men begged to be shot. The repeated use of napalm to terrorize civilian populations in Vietnam, shed light on the dual necessity to reinforce the legal rules which frame this destructive weapon and to condemn the United Sates for the terrible violence in Vietnam.

The emergence of incendiary weapons on international consciousness was the result of their use in Vietnam War. Secretary General U Thant was alerted to the problematic aspect of napalm during the Teheran Conference which investigated the need for additional humanitarian international conventions to prohibit certain means of warfare that threatened civilians and the environment. He was also deeply concerned with the situation in Vietnam and wanted to limit the terrible exactions committed by the United States inter alia, the use of agent orange 38 , the massacre of civilians and the deployment of napalm.

For reasons which are no doubt clear to all of you, the UN has still not been able to play the role that I feel it should in contributing towards a solution of this problem. In the past the UN repeatedly was criticized for not dealing actively with the war in Vietnam.

As you are aware, I have recently taken the step of presenting a memorandum to the President of the Security Council. On 22 September , the UN General Assembly met for the Conference of the Committee of Disarmament, whose goal was to discuss how the existing rules framing the use of conventional weapons i. These discussions eventually led to the creation in of a new convention called the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons CCCW , Napalm was one of the main topics on the agenda.

Yet it provided a good overview of the trajectory of napalm utilization and the technical characteristics of the weapon. First, they questioned the nature of the legal constraints imposed on napalm: should napalm be banned from the battlefield or should the conditions of its use be redefined more precisely?

Second, they disagreed on the target of the legal constraint: should napalm or the broader category of incendiary weapons be the object of legal constraints? If napalm is explicitly mentioned, the legal treaty might be regarded as too restrictive, and therefore not very constraining the state can find a weapon with a different name but with very similar effects.

On the other hand, the lack of consensus on the definition of incendiary weapon i. Discussions continued with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which organized the preliminary conferences of Lucerne September and Lugarno January These two conferences helped to produce additional documentary basis on the effects and the legal issues raised by napalm.

It reiterates the principle of distinction, that is the prohibition, in all circumstances, of attacking the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects with incendiary weapons. It forbids the use of incendiary weapons on the ground when directed against military objectives not clearly separated from civilians.

It also reiterates the necessity to take all feasible precautions when incendiary weapons are deployed from the ground or through air delivery to limit the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoid incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects. Finally the Protocol prohibits the use of incendiary weapons against forests or other kinds of plants — except if such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objective.

In sum, Protocol III does not deem the use of napalm as always illegal: yet, it warns of it use against civilians or close to civilians areas. Today, states are parties to the Convention.

While this reservation reiterates the principle of all feasible precaution, it also extends the right of the US to use incendiary weapons as the latter remain less destructive than many other weapons in the arsenal, such as thermite bombings or small nuclear weapons. This article offers new perspective on the shift in US military doctrine and practice of bombing and the subsequent decrease in napalm utilization: napalm was framed after the Vietnam War as an inhumane means of warfare by activists, as a problematic weapon with regard to the laws of war by the United Nations and, finally, as a non-strategic weapon by the US military.

The proposed approach of this article, which emphasizes normative aspects commonly overlooked when it comes to understanding practices of war i. More generally, it shows that the historiography of bombing can be enriched by the historiography of the weapons deployed.

While he sips the brew, a yellow forklift truck trundles up with armaments, and the ground crew hurriedly rearms the Phantom with an awesome array of weaponry— iron bombs, rockets and napalm canisters. Normally, the entire operation takes only 20 minutes.

The beer never gets warm before the pilot climbs back into his Phantom to take off on another sortie. In the United States withdrew its last troops. South Vietnam, despite the assistance of perhaps , tons of napalm dropped on its behalf, surrendered on April 30, Napalm, and with it America, had lost its first war.

British commenters, as during the Korean War, voiced the first objections to American incendiary bombs. From 3, feet, in safety…you see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground.

The poor devils are burnt alive, the flames go over them like water. They are wet through with fire. Silence descended on napalm in Vietnam for almost a decade. Then, on April 8, , as the United States expanded its use of the gel, Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell delivered a blistering critique in a letter to the New York Times.

Its use has certainly killed innocent people—as other weapons have done in all wars. American advisors have opposed its employment, on both moral and practical grounds, against all except clearly identified military targets. Journalists struggled. To others, the gel was counterproductive. How can one expect the countryside not to rally to the insurgents in such circumstances? Impartiality, indeed, was difficult given the grievous injuries inflicted by the gel. They labeled critics naive.

The next day, 3, Marines landed to defend a U. By the end of the year, President Johnson had dedicated almost , U. Objections and praise alternated as American commitments expanded. British parliamentarians compared napalm to poison gas weapons. On the other hand, year-old U. When it is time for her to sleep her family puts a blanket over her head. This was the uncertain context when the Stanford Committee for Peace in Vietnam, a group of about two dozen Stanford University students and faculty, bolstered by a few residents from nearby towns, began to meet.

Both the US and Israeli governments have ruled the attack a tragic case of mistaken identity, but many survivors remain unconvinced. The Israeli forces attacked the ship with napalm, with canon fire, and with torpedoes. They did everything they could to blow up the ship; firing, for example, five torpedoes at the ship, one of which blew a forty-foot hole into the ship.

This was followed by shots at the life rafts of people trying to escape the ship. In Angola, the Portuguese military used defoliants and napalm, mined trails, and poisoned water holes as tactics to counter their adversaries.

By , the Biafrans had reassessed the resolve of their Nigerian opponent. The verdict was that the unrestrained aerial attacks on undefended hospitals and markets, especially with napalm, and the tightening blockade were further evidence of the Federal desire to commit genocide, i.

One of the first operations completed in the area was a clean-sweep action over the only existing mountains in the region, the Andorinhas Mountains, which do not have natural cover.

After being bombarded with napalm by the Air Force, the mountains were the object of a vigorous search and encirclement mission conducted by a large force. The results were dismal because the guerrillas were never there. In the Arab-Israeli war, Moshe Dayan was nearly injured when an Egyptian helicopter dropped a napalm barrel near him at Adan's command post on the east bank. They were used to combat British helicopters and shot down two.

In early November , Serbs from within Croatia launched missile and air strikes on the Bihac pocket. Bosnian Serbs and the rebel Muslim forces attacked the Bihac pocket from Croatia. During an attack on November 18, these forces used napalm and cluster bombs, which the Security Council noted was "in clear violation of Bihac's status as a safe area. Napalm was used during the Persian Gulf War. They were delivered primarily by the AV-8 Harriers from relatively low altitudes.

During Operation Desert Storm MKs were used to ignite the Iraqis oil-filled fire trenches, which were part of barriers constructed in southern Kuwait. The massive defeat of the Iraqi military machine tempted the Iraqi Kurds to revolt against the Baghdad regime. Encouraged by American radio broadcasts to rise up against their 'dictator', the Kurds of northern Iraq rebelled against a nominally defeated and certainly weakened Saddam Hussein in March of Shortly after the war ended, Kurdish rebels attacked disorganized Iraqi units and seized control of several towns in northern Iraq.

From the town of Rania, this sedition spread quickly through the Kurdish north. Fear of being drawn into an Iraqi civil war and possible diplomatic repercussions precluded President Bush from committing US forces to support the Kurds. Within days Iraqi forces recovered and launched a ruthless counteroffensive including napalm and chemical attacks from helicopters. They quickly reclaimed lost territory and crushed the rebellion. In late , Turkey launched attacks on Kurdish villages in Northern Iraq.

Later on in the war, the US bombers began to drop napalm bombs, which proved to be far more destructive than the flamethrowers. A napalm bomb could leave an area of 2, square yards engulfed in unquenchable fire. This resulted in many civilian casualties. One of the most iconic photographs taken during the Vietnam War depicted children fleeing from a napalm strike, terrified.

The little girl from the photograph, Kim Phuc stated later:. Among the US public, napalm became the symbol of all that was abhorrent about the war in Vietnam. The Vietnam war was the first conflict to be widely broadcast on television, though it was well known that the weapon had been used in the Pacific and in Korea, its effects had never before been seen so directly by the public.

A number of countries did not sign this protocol which entered the canon of international law in