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.