Peter Stickney wrote:


No, actually - the bow wave of the boats would push the flaming oil
out of the way.


And to the sides, where it would still get you if there was a breeze;
the passing of the boat would also suck the fire in behind it.
These aren't five foot high flames, more like twenty-five foot high flames.

And the "Consuming all Oxygen" claim is, shall we
say, wildly exaggerated. How would the fire stay lit, after all?



It will go out if all the oxygen is expended- unfortunately the
upwelling column of rising heated air from the fire will suck in fresh
air from around the base of the fire....where the landing craft is, the
troops will find themselves surrounded by flames and trying to breathe
air heated to several hundred degrees and thick smoke.


Consider, if you will, that very early on, techniques for the survival
of unprotected (Unless you count a Kapok Life Jacket as protection)
survivors of torpedoed oil tankers were developed. Thet's certainly a
much worse situation. It might work for a castle moat.



But that's a case where you are in burning ship bunker fuel; fairly low
grade oil, that you can splash out of the way and that doesn't burn very
violently. And your head is close to the water where fresh air can
reach it as it's sucked toward the fire- the British system used
gasoline, not bunker fuel, and looking at the film of it rising out of
the water prior to ignition used hundreds if not thousands of gallons of
it.

Flame weapons, unless you've got some way to the fuel to stick to the
target, are wildly ineffective. Even when the fuel does stick
(Napalm, for example) It's really mostly effective against unprotected
personnel,


The guys crouching down in the landing craft aren't going to be
terribly protected. IIRC, the Germans did make a test of flame resistant
clothing at sometime during the war, and burnt a lot of troops to death
during it.
If you weren't expecting it, the physiological effect of suddenly seeing
the sea ahead of you go up in flames would have been severe.

Pat