July 17, 1944
US P-38 fighter bombers dropped napalm bombs on a German Army fuel depot near St. Lo in Normandy, France, one of the earliest uses of napalm. Napalm, a mixture of gasoline and a thickening agent, stubbornly sticks to anything it comes in contact with, greatly increasing its lethality against humans and effectiveness in catching things on fire. Named for the thickening agents first used, naphthenic and palmitic acids, it was developed on a government contract by Harvard University in 1942. Napalm sticks to human skin, with no practical method for removal of the burning substance. On January 21, 2009, President Barack Obama’s first full day in office, he signed on behalf of the US (finally!) the 1980 United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), which bans the use of napalm.
