As viewed from America, credit for ending World War II in the Pacific regularly goes to the two atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6^th and 9^th, 1945. With justification, Russians are more likely to emphasize the importance of the Soviet Union as it declared war against Japan on August 8^th and began to flood 1.6 million troops into Japanese-occupied Manchuria. These and other events were certainly important, but neither did as much to degrade Japan’s will and ability to continue the war as did America’s 6-pound M69 incendiary bombs. The final use of these and other incendiary munitions came later in the war than most people realize. It was not until August 14—just one day before Emperor Hirohito publicly announced Japan’s unconditional surrender—that American B-29s conducted their last incendiary attacks.

Eighty years ago, in April 1945, a detachment of one officer and seven enlisted men from the 757th Chemical Depot Company were finally given the forward assignment they wanted. Their orders sent them from their Company’s base at Hickam Field in Hawaii to the Mariana Islands to assist in the firebombing attacks then being conducted on Japanese cities. Although personnel of the 757th had experience and expertise with both toxic chemical bombs and the most sophisticated of America’s incendiary bombs, this mission was planned to help fill a critical shortage of standard incendiary bombs with the quick delivery of low-tech barrel bombs.

Eighty years ago, on March 5, 1945, Lt. Col. Wyss from U.S. Chemical Warfare Headquarters in Calcutta visited Ondal Advanced Chemical Park in West Bengal, India. The purpose of his visit was to reassess the stockpile of toxic chemical bombs then being maintained at Ondal by the 771st Chemical Depot Company (Aviation). Immediately after Wyss’s visit, the soldiers of the 771st began a major project to dispose of tens of thousands of chemical bombs that were judged to be either unneeded or unusable.