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Re: Napalm



I'd second that VMF-311 F9F's at least carried napalm, but without being able to prove the negative, USN F9F's and F2H's might never have, didn't commonly anyway. Don't recall seeing in ordnance expenditure tables for air groups, plus napalm canister expenditure even by AD's and F4U's usually a small fraction of bomb expenditure. USN did close support sometimes but usually interdiction where bridges and rail lines were the default targets and large and small bombs considered appropriate weapons respectively.
 
According to "Involuntary" by Anderson about the 731st BS, B-26 night intruders stopped carrying napalm due to separation problems on the napalm-capable pylons, would sometimes take off the external fuel tanks next to them when dropped.
 
Joe
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2002 6:14 PM
Subject: Re: Napalm

Sandy,

Right, forgot the F-80s which carried a great deal of the brunt of ground attack for some time. Thompson is the one who states that the F-84s never carried out napalm raids.

Most of the Panther missions I looked at talked about problems with bombs and not napalm and the mission expenditures list didn't seem to show it either. VMF-311 is the Corps, so them I would EXPECT to be different! 8-)

Cookie Sewell
AMPS

PS John -- one pylon, one tank of napalm maximum. As I noted previously some planes had more pylons than they could use to carry napalm, like the Corsair (up to 13 of which they could only carry napalm on 2.)