Incendiary bombs improvised

In order to meet the technical portion of his functions, Copthorne had set up a Technical Advisory Board to maintain scientific liaison with the British, the Australians, and within the U.S. forces, and to advise the laboratories. Also, several of Copthorne s subordinates had begun munitions testing. Two of them, Capt. Richard H. Cone and Lt. James W. Parker were killed in an air accident while carrying out experiments to determine whether incendiary bombs could be improvised from training bombs, using gasoline thickened with crude rubber as a filling. ... 

By the summer of 1S>42 the first shipments of incendiary bomb clusters were beginning to fill the new facilities. As the carloads arrived, the 100-pound clusters were manhandled into the igloos from the railroad docks via trucks and roller conveyors arid stacked inside by hand, as many as twelve to a stack. This procedure, time consuming and laborious as it was, remained without much change for more than a year until the use of fork-lift trucks and pallets became general. A number of devices had by then been improvised for handling 100-pound and 500-pound clusters. 

In 1916 the British introduced a new means of projecting gas, the 4-inch Stokes mortar, developed from the 3-inch version of this weapon, which had been the standard mortar in the British Army. Because of their inability to manufacture gas shells, the British first used the mortar to fire improvised smokes and incendiaries. The Stokes gas shell, or bomb, as the British called it, contained six pounds of agent as compared to three pounds for the British 4.5-inch heavy howitzer shell. 

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