Goodbye, Farewell and Amen

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:22
Speaker 2: It's July nineteen sixty one, an official ceremony at the White House. President Kennedy stands at the microphone. Dark sued white shirt, thin black tie. Next to him is a second man, shorter, wide through the chest, large square head, hair parted triumphantly just off the middle, a thicket of decorations on the left breast of his uniform.

00:00:47
Speaker 3: I want to express our great pleasure at the assumption of this responsibility by General.

00:00:55
Speaker 2: Le May Curtis Emerson LeMay.

00:00:59
Speaker 3: He was one of the or distinguished combat commanders in World War Two. He played a most instrumental role in developing who its present death. I pete as the great shield of the United States in the free world. So, General, you want to say that, speaking personally and also as president, that it's a great pleasure to welcome you as the new Chief of Staff the United States Air Force and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

00:01:33
Speaker 2: The old cliche says that history is written by the victors, and that line of Kennedy's he was one of the most distinguished combat commanders of World War II is exhibit A. Distinguished refers to the events of nineteen forty five when LeMay ordered a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths of half a million Japanese civilians. In a candid moment, LeMay once told one of his subordinates, if we lose this war, we'll be tried as war criminals, which is almost certainly true. But they didn't lose.

00:02:05
Speaker 4: They won.

00:02:07
Speaker 2: After the war, LeMay joined the Strite Air Command Sack, where he was responsible for most of America's nuclear arsenal at a time when war with the Soviet Union seemed imminent. Then in nineteen sixty one, he became head of the whole Air Force. Standing next to Kennedy on the podium.

00:02:26
Speaker 5: I surprised. I appreciate very much they're taking a time out from your busy schedule to participate them and this ceremony. I'm sure you realize that a number beyond services, I've become a Chief assaff as his service as the highest honor that can come to him.

00:02:45
Speaker 2: LeMay didn't get tried as a war criminal. He got promoted. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is and final installment in my miniseries about Curtis le May and the super weapon known as Napalm. I never intended to devote four episodes to this story. I was originally going to do just one. Then one episode became two, and two became three, and then I was at four because I kept expecting the story to come to some kind of appropriate resolution and it didn't. I mean, if you kill half a million civilians, something should happen, shouldn't it. And then in the middle of everything, I went to Tokyo for another reason entirely and decided to visit a little private museum off a side street, the only museum in the world dedicated entirely to the bombing campaign that burned Tokyo in nineteen forty five. And upstairs, in a plain room with linoleum floors that looks like a public school classroom, there's a long scroll on the wall, beautiful Japanese calligraphy that broke my heart.

00:04:22
Speaker 6: Sank.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: The clear eyed military rationale for the fire bombing of Tokyo goes something like this. The United States had no better option, nor did Japan. There was only one alternative to le Maay's long summer of burning down the cities of Japan. With napalm. That would have been a ground invasion of Japan by American troops that fall, and that would have been worse, far worse.

00:04:59
Speaker 7: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation at one of the your Japanese historians there stood up and said he said, in the end, he said, we must thank you Americans for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.

00:05:17
Speaker 2: This is the military historian Conrad Crane.

00:05:20
Speaker 7: That kind of took me aback, and then he explained, he said, we would have surrendered eventually anyway, but he said the impact of the massive firebombing campaign atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.

00:05:33
Speaker 2: No fire bombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don't surrender, and if they don't surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade and Japan gets carved up just like Germany and the Korean Peninsula eventually were.

00:05:47
Speaker 7: And the other thing that would have happened is there would have been millions of Japanese that would have starved to death in the winter because what happens is when by surrendering on August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed.

00:06:02
Speaker 2: Japan General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted the Jetjapanese Emperor's surrender.

00:06:10
Speaker 7: I mean, that's one of MacArthur's great successes, bringing in massive amount of foods to avoid starvation in the winter of nineteen forty five.

00:06:18
Speaker 2: Much later, in nineteen sixty four, the Japanese government accorded le May one of its highest honors, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, for his help rebuilding their air force after the war. There was a debate in the Japanese parliament about whether the award was a good idea, but none of it centered on his campaign to burn Japanese cities with napalm. The Japanese government had moved on. Everyone moved on. Remember Hoyt Hoddel from the second episode in this series. He's the MIT scientist Washington brought in to manage the bomb bakeoff. To find the very best possible fire bomb to use against the Japanese. Hoddle put together a committee of the biggest names in chemistry to create the world's greatest incendiary And after the war they scattered.

00:07:09
Speaker 8: Amazing how fast people wanted to get out. They were fed up on war.

00:07:17
Speaker 2: Fire was still Hoddle's passion, but not burning things down, not anymore. Now his passion became stopping things from burning down.

00:07:27
Speaker 8: I was so saturated with fire as a weapon of destruction. When I was asked to be on a peacetime fire research committee by the Army, I was happy to say yes.

00:07:47
Speaker 2: The mandate of the fire Research Committee was to prevent an unquoting large urban fires and forest fires. Hoddle ran that committee for eleven years until his retirement. And what about Louis Feezer. He was the winner of the bakeoff, the co inventor of napalm. He went back to Harvard and resumed his duties, trained the next generation of American chemists, wrote the definitive College Chemistry textbook with his wife. As for his fellow inventor, Eb Hirschberg, the wizard of the laboratory, Hirshburg went to work for the Shearing Corporation, a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey.

00:08:27
Speaker 9: My father was not a violent person, he's a pacifist. He didn't believe in war.

00:08:31
Speaker 7: Uh.

00:08:32
Speaker 9: I'm quite sure it is to be avoided.

00:08:35
Speaker 2: Robert Hirschberg, Eb's sun also a scientist. He would call his father every evening and they would talk about their day in the laboratory. What would your father have when he looked across his entire career, what would he have considered his finest accomplishment.

00:08:52
Speaker 9: Without doubt, I think it would be prednisone and prinis alone pregmozone.

00:08:57
Speaker 2: It's an anti inflammatory agent and amino suppressant, one of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. I don't know how to quantify how many lives have been saved by that drug, hundreds of thousands. It was a crucial part of the very first breakthrough in drug therapy for cancer, Amo Freireich's defeat of childhood leukemia in the nineteen sixties, a combination therapy using methachrekx eight six mp vin Christine and prednozone. Eb Hirschberg led the team that developed it was prednazone, Hirschberg's atonement for napalm. Like Hoyt Hoddle's work on the Fire Research Committee. Maybe, but no one seems to have discussed it or considered it. A few years ago, the historian Robert nir went searching for a definitive account of the birth of the world's most powerful incendiary.

00:09:54
Speaker 10: So I started looking, and it was with a kind of growing sense of disbelief that I discovered that actually there was no history of napalm. And the more research that I did on it, the more I discovered that actually, really it was true. There was no not even an article that was There was no like even a sort of academic journal article that was this is a comprehensive history of napalm.

00:10:17
Speaker 2: Robert Near would go to the Widner Research Library at Harvard, one of the great libraries in the world. He would see shelves of books on atomic weapons, the glamorous bomb, built a great expense by the smartest people in the world.

00:10:31
Speaker 10: But this particular weapon, there was no history background about it at all.

00:10:37
Speaker 2: He would end up writing that history himself. It's called Napalm, an American Biography. What's even stranger, of course, was that he was looking for a history of napalm in the Harvard library and didn't find anything. Because Harvard was where napalm was invented. Robert Neir took me to the place on campus where napalm was born.

00:10:59
Speaker 10: We think this is the converse laboratory right here, which is where they did the initial experiments in the basement window wells with Jeldenson.

00:11:09
Speaker 1: We're looking at them.

00:11:10
Speaker 2: I assumed there would be some indication of which of the labs along the basement hallway have belonged to Louis Feeser, But no. We peered in one window after another and had to guess. It's all very chemical lab here, like a zillion pipes and the ceiling. There don't really window wells on this side. No, so it is this side.

00:11:33
Speaker 10: Were close, assuming that it hasn't ever been, you know, dramatically changed. But I think we're quite close in the spiritual sense at least absolutely.

00:11:40
Speaker 8: Yeah.

00:11:44
Speaker 2: There are long lists of things. Harvard is eager to take credit for the transgenic mouse, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, the pacemaker defibrillators, all important, But on the weapon that played a decisive role in the biggest war of the twentieth century that burned close to half a million Japanese alive in the summer of nineteen forty five, it's not on the list. It's not even a plaque. And at Harvard, I'll point out, they'll put a name on anything. There are multiple buildings at Harvard named in honor of the Sackler family, whose drug company gave the world OxyContin. So it's not like Harvard is squeamish just about napalm. Napalm has simply disappeared. And that is the final of napalm's many crimes, because it didn't actually disappear. Quite the opposite. Five years after the end of the Second World War, after the surrender of Japan, the communist back government of North Korea invaded South Korea June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty. The United Nations condemned the invasion and responded with a show of force led by the United States. And what was the strategy adopted by the US Air Force in Korea. Basically the strategy pioneered by Curtis le May over Japan. Firebomb the North Koreans with napalm until they surrender.

00:13:19
Speaker 3: Napalm again, how does the living engines.

00:13:24
Speaker 2: This is a newsreel the Navy put out in the middle of the war called this is Korea, directed by the legendary John Ford.

00:13:32
Speaker 11: Fry them out, burn them out, cook them, fry them, burn them, cook them Korea in three sentences.

00:13:43
Speaker 2: If you go through oral history archives, you'll find countless interviews with pilots who remember what that bombing campaign was like.

00:13:51
Speaker 12: Oh, a lot of napalm dropped, which it was supposed to be top secret.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: The flight crews came up with the idea of strapping canisters of napalm to wooden pallets, then pushing them out the back of the airplane on rollers.

00:14:05
Speaker 12: And then the parachutes would open up the stone of descent to where you were trying to drop it.

00:14:12
Speaker 2: This is a pilot named Robert Billion, interviewed in nineteen ninety five for the Rutgers Oral History Archive.

00:14:19
Speaker 12: What they did. They went after personnel centers where they congregated the troops in North Korea when they come over, and they would let go with thirty six times fifty fifty gallon drops, and they figured they killed thousands North Korean not burning them, they suffocated them because it burned all the oxygen up in the mediate area.

00:14:43
Speaker 2: Napalm was engineered to burn down Japanese houses, which had allowed for the pretense that it was intended to destroy buildings, not people. In Korea. That pretense was dropped. It turned out napalm was very good at destroying people.

00:14:58
Speaker 13: The North Koreans were such vicious enemies and so brutal, but we took care of them, and power in that war was predominant.

00:15:13
Speaker 2: This is Bill Sinclair, Korean War pilot, interviewed in two thousand and four by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project. I will warn you the story he tells is not pleasant.

00:15:25
Speaker 13: I remember a particular mission when we caught a mixed Chinese and North Korean division in the open, and we just attacked them with napalm, and we killed hundreds and hundreds of Chinese and North Korean soldiers. I couldn't see how they could possibly stand in the midst of all this conflagration. I remember distinctly one soldier standing under a little tree, and around him was just devastation. Bodies everywhere.

00:16:06
Speaker 2: And here's an interview with a pilot named Leonard Lee Conia from the Korean War Legacy Foundation.

00:16:12
Speaker 4: But it worked, it worked well.

00:16:14
Speaker 14: The burning, yeah, yeah, it'll just hit and then it just spreads. Well, we were close enough that when we call it, you could feel the heat from the from the nap bomb and if you get too close. You don't have to be right in it, but if you get too close it burns the oxygen out of the air.

00:16:34
Speaker 15: You can't breathe.

00:16:38
Speaker 2: These stories go on and on. There's one so graphic I'm not going to play it for you. It's about a US pilot carrying a load of napalm who crashes before he can drop it on someone else, and his fellow airman run up to the crash site and can only watch as he burns to death. In the end, the Air Force in Korea ran out of targets. Literally, they had nothing left to bomb because they'd burned down and bombed out virtually everything that could be burned down a bombed out.

00:17:15
Speaker 7: The destruction on a North Korean the urban structure is massive.

00:17:21
Speaker 2: Historian Conrad Crane says the consequences of that bombing campaign were enormous.

00:17:26
Speaker 7: And in some extent that's I think a legacy we're dealing with today because part of the motivation for the North Korean pursuit of nuclear weapons is to have some kind of deterrent to make sure that never happens again.

00:17:38
Speaker 2: We've heard a lot in the West about how the North Koreans are duplicitous, distrustful, irrational, secretive. Not so much about how in three short years the United States reduced their country to an ash heap. But then again, we've never talked much about napalm and the Korean War. We've never talked much about the Korean War period. It was all pushed aside. In fact, the most significant monument of that war was probably a television show, the sitcom Mash. Mash ran for eleven seasons on CBS nineteen seventy two to nineteen eighty three. It was about a mobile medical unit on the front lines of the Korean War. If you're old enough, you'll remember the names of the characters, Hawkeye Pierce, Colonel Potter, Trapper, John Rader, O'Reilly hot Lips, Hulihan Clinger. It was one of the most remarkable television shows in history. Funny, dark, moving. So what does Mash have to say about napalm? I wondered very little, it turns out, with one exception. The most famous Smash episode of all, the series finale, February twenty eighth, nineteen eighty three, Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen, was watched by one hundred and six million Americans, the highest rated non sports television event in history.

00:19:07
Speaker 1: The night the last episode was shown, we watched it on a big screen at the studio, and then we went out to dinner to celebrate.

00:19:17
Speaker 2: I talked to Alan Alda about it. He played Hawkeye, the show's central character.

00:19:22
Speaker 1: And on the way to the restaurant, Loretta Stwood was in the car with me, and I said, Loretta, look, the streets are empty, and it suddenly dawned on us that a lot of people were probably home watching the show at that time. And what I read in the paper the next day was that in New York the waterworks were threatened because everybody went to the bathroom at the same time during the commercial break.

00:19:52
Speaker 2: The final episode runs two hours. It is beautiful and moving. I remember where I was when I watched it, packed into the basement TV room at my college in Toronto with what must have been one hundred other people. So after all those years, I went back and watched it again because I remembered that this was the episode that finally dealt with Napon. It comes just after the halfway point in the show, at the one hour and seven minute mark.

00:20:23
Speaker 9: Colonel look at that sunset.

00:20:27
Speaker 11: What a beautiful ending for a beautiful day.

00:20:31
Speaker 2: Corporal Clinger is looking up at the sky when Colonel Potter, the Mash unit's commanding officer, walks by.

00:20:38
Speaker 11: Yeah, it'd be a nice sunset of it were setting over there. What do you mean? Ever since I've been around, the sun's always set in the west. And what's that? What saw that same kind of glow in the yard end forest? Next day? There wasn't any forest left. You better get on the phone, die car. That fire is headed this way. We're headed out.

00:20:58
Speaker 2: Klinger runs back to the barracks. Potter stands and watches the sky. We see the fire start to rage, rabbits running for safety.

00:21:07
Speaker 11: It was started by incendiary bombs. It's coming straight at us.

00:21:10
Speaker 15: Butt out.

00:21:14
Speaker 10: All personnel but out.

00:21:18
Speaker 2: The mass Unit has to evacuate because of a nearby napalm attack. I asked Alan Alda about that plot point in the show. He directed the episode and was one of its writers.

00:21:29
Speaker 1: I had a.

00:21:31
Speaker 2: Very specific question with that episode, and that is when you have to evacuate the camp because of the fire. Yeah, from vincendier bombs. It's left unstated whose bombs they are.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: I got a call on a Saturday morning that a fire had raged through the canyon where we were shooting and the whole shed had burned down. So I put the phone down and calmly went about writing what we called the bugout. I think they called it a bug out in those days. When the mass unit had to move and we moved to another location, so I had to put a fire into the script to justify the move, but I forgot what the justification was was that a bomb had caused the fire.

00:22:25
Speaker 2: Scendiary bombs. Radar says, there's a fire on the way from incendiary bombs.

00:22:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you wonder which side they're from. Well, it kind of doesn't matter.

00:22:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's right, absolutely right. The great moral innovation of MASH was that it spoke out against war without taking sides. But all I could think about is that this show is what's left of America's memory of the Korean War. And when MASH finally comes around to mentioning napalm, the weapon that reduced North Korea to ashes, it gets history exactly backwards. It has Americans as Napalm's victims, not the Koreans, and the show doesn't mention where the napalm came from as if it could as easily have come from anywhere, when in truth it could only have come from the US Air Force dropping their Harvard engineered payloads from high in the sky. Later in the episode, Colonel Potter returns to the mash camp after it's been destroyed by napalm. The MASH unit is packing up, The doctors and nurses are all going home.

00:23:41
Speaker 16: It is now two PIM. In exactly eight hours, the Korean War will be officially over. It's a time for a summing up, and these are the most up to date figures we have. The cost of the war to the United States has been placed at twenty two billion dollars.

00:23:56
Speaker 15: Oh, look at me, I only get three hundred a month.

00:24:00
Speaker 2: Potter goes one last time to the place they had lived for so many years and wanders among the ashes. Wreckage is still smoking. Potter takes off his helmet and looks around in shock. He bends over, picks up a blackened bottle, stands up again.

00:24:21
Speaker 11: Okay, let's get to work.

00:24:26
Speaker 2: That's it, We're done, let's move on. I was one of millions of viewers who choked up at that moment, But if I were North Korean, I would have thrown a brick at the television. General Curtis LeMay disapproved of the way the Pentagon fought the war in Korea. He was in charge of the Strategic Air Command by that point, a step removed from day to day control of the war. But they were using his tactic and his warhorse to be twenty nine, along with his incendiary weapon of choice, napon. So he had opinions. He thought the whole business on the Korean Peninsula dragged on for far too long.

00:25:24
Speaker 15: Going in the war as a serious business, a serious decision. If you have a responsibility for doing it, you better buy God makes them careful evaluation before you come to the conclusion that war is the illness solution to your problems.

00:25:43
Speaker 2: This is le May in retirement, holding forth on how he thought the Korean War ought to have been handled.

00:25:49
Speaker 15: I once you come to bus solusion that you'd better be ready to go all the way. It's im moral not to use too much if you have the capability of winning, and winning rapidly because you saved life, property, destruction, suffering, and the quicker you're going to.

00:26:06
Speaker 2: End the war cold blooded, hyperrational very Curtis to May, and he thought the Pentagon botched it in Korea, dragged it out too long, didn't come in hard and fast enough.

00:26:19
Speaker 15: So we kind of slipped the note under the door under the Pentagon and said, look, why don't we well burned down four or five of those towns up in North Korea, and I mean, they'll stopped this nonsense, only mean business. And the answer came back under the door. This is too horrible. He knock off a bunch of women and children, non combatants.

00:26:41
Speaker 4: Too horrible.

00:26:43
Speaker 2: The Pentagon couldn't stomach it. Now there are one hundred ways to tell the story of the Korean War. This is the Curtis le May version. The military ignored his suggestion, and so what should have been an intense summer fire bombing campaign stretched out over many years.

00:27:00
Speaker 15: We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too, every one of them. Now, during all this time, and what we do kill off twenty percent of the Korean population through direct casualties of war, are indirect due to exposure, disease and malnutrition and so forth. Now, over a period of four and a half years, all of these highly moral people are willing to kill off twenty percent of the Korean population over this period of time. But it's immoral to kill off a few people to start with to save life, property and suffering. In the long run, that's im moral kill a few people to prevent that.

00:27:47
Speaker 2: Curtis the May on his high horse. If you spend enough time with le May, you start to see things his way. Yes, Japan was better off for being fire bummed. It spared them starvation in the Soviets. Yes, and maybe a summer of intense pain in Korea would have made more sense than dragging things out of a four years. There's a reason LeMay rose as far and fast as he did in the US military. He could be awfully persuasive when he needed to be. But then comes Vietnam, and what does LeMay want the Air Force to do? More napalm, more bombing.

00:28:25
Speaker 8: Military police contain the crowd, but clashes soon break out. Federal Marshall's arrest several who attempt to break through the protective line.

00:28:34
Speaker 2: There were anti war protests in the streets about the Air Force's use of napalm and Vietnam. From his laboratory at Harvard, the chemist Louis Feeser sent a horrified letter to President Nixon, it seems to me desirable. The co inventor of napalm wrote to try to promote an international agreement to outlaw further use of napalm or napalm type munitions. LeMay would have none of it. In his memoirs, published just before his retirement in nineteen sixty five, he wrote this about how to defeat North Vietnam. Quote. My solution to the problem would be to tell them, frankly, that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their regression, or we're going to bomb them back into the stone age. Le Maay was saying the same thing in the nineteen sixties about Vietnam that he did in the nineteen fifties about Korea and the nineteen forties about Japan. Heavy bombing could lead to unconditional surrender, and unconditional surrenders save lives in the long run, even though, of course, the great lesson of Vietnam was that bombing didn't work, that air power could not defeat a determined guerrilla force in an underdeveloped country. Le May was a problem solver, but he could not conceive of solutions that did not involve bombs and airplanes. Remember, what le May wrote about seeing his first airplane as a little boy in Ohio. Suddenly in the air above me appeared a flying machine. It came from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it. And then he goes on, children can muster enormous strength in ideal and idea, in all their effort to grasp the trophy they desire. And nobody was holding me back. No one was standing closed to say, Look, you're just a little child. That airplane is away up there in the air, and no matter how fast you run, you can't keep up with it. You can't reach high enough to seize it. Little Curtis ran across neighbors, backyards, vacant lots, down sidewalks, then it was gone. It's wonderful sound and force and the freakish illusion of the thing, a thing made of wood and metal piercing the air, that in fact satuation carried LeMay all the way from working class Columbus to the command of the US Air Force. But leaders need at a certain point to move beyond their infatuations. And the great tragedy of Curtis LeMay is that he could not.

00:31:27
Speaker 15: I hate this word strategy.

00:31:29
Speaker 2: That's le May in nineteen seventy one. By strategy, he meant, all of those things that you do when you're not dropping bombs from a plane.

00:31:38
Speaker 15: Sure you should do some planning, and you should do some thinking, lots.

00:31:44
Speaker 5: Of it.

00:31:47
Speaker 15: About what might happen when you get into war. But anyone who thinks that he can set down and with a few learned individuals plan a strategy for the country that's going to keep them all the trouble and win the wars as well as in Lexi, it's not going to happen, So don't defend on strategy and all depend on planking a lot.

00:32:15
Speaker 2: And then he says, instead of strategy, instead of thinking, what you really need is some hardware to back you up, a thing made of wood and metal piercing the air. I said way back in the first installment of this story that Curtis le May was a type, a prototype of the modern problem solver, the unshakable belief in technology, the narrowness of focus, the ironclad self confidence. You can find versions of le May everywhere these days, all equally well intentioned, all equally successful in their chosen field of battle, all equally applauded by the world around them. I applaud them too sometimes and profit from their victories as much as you do. It's just that I would have thought that the events of March ninth and tenth, nineteen forty five would have given us pause just a little. Curtis May died in nineteen ninety of a heart attack. He's buried in the US Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs, where he belongs alongside his fellow airmen.

00:33:42
Speaker 4: So it's an exact photo after Tokyo air raid.

00:33:45
Speaker 1: This is it.

00:33:46
Speaker 4: It's Asa, and so here it's a summita river, and so this area is a Hondo, and this area and so here it is Asa.

00:33:55
Speaker 2: In East Tokyo, on the edge of the Fukugawa District, there's a small museum. It's called the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. It's on a side street, two stories brick, looks like there should be a dentist office in it. You walk in and there's a little gift shop to the side, more like a few bookshelves, and what looks like a classroom with a bunch of folding chairs where an introductory video.

00:34:20
Speaker 3: Plays stops the str name Jeraskara.

00:34:28
Speaker 1: Tokyo are.

00:34:30
Speaker 2: The museum is the only permanent memorial that tells the story of the devastation of Tokyo on March ninth, nineteen forty five, one of the deadliest nights in human history. There's a scale model of a B twenty nine hanging from the ceiling and an M sixty nine bomb casing opened for display, and maps. Maps showing where the bombs fell and where people ran, and which way the winds blew and where the bodies were found.

00:34:59
Speaker 4: So many people escaped to the elementary school and Osamo High School.

00:35:06
Speaker 2: Our guide caru Ito, talked about one of the spots on a map. There was an elementary school in the heart of the area bomb that night, one of the only concrete buildings in the district. So people ran there because they thought they would be safer than in the wooden buildings on fire all around them.

00:35:24
Speaker 4: They escaped to the concrete the brooding, but so inside it was a birding, so they also carried the Pisa sheet.

00:35:33
Speaker 2: They were killed by the heat from the burning nape bomb. Outside. A concrete structure in the midst of a firestorm becomes an oven. Then Ito told us the story of one of the few survivors that night. He was a teacher at the school, and he had been manning the front gate, but so many people rushed in that he was knocked down, trampled. There were people on top of him. He heard screaming. He passed out. Then hours later came two.

00:36:06
Speaker 4: So he noticed many people so done into the cab on him, like like.

00:36:16
Speaker 2: The people who had trampled him had turned the carbon.

00:36:22
Speaker 4: People on him. So tye into the cab, so with our sheet and a fire and so only him.

00:36:34
Speaker 2: She survived under a mound of carbon.

00:36:50
Speaker 6: Thank you, Oh that was left to a brick. There's no greater suddenness.

00:36:57
Speaker 2: The teacher later became an artist. He made a scroll to memorialize what happened that night. It hangs on the wall of the Tokyo Raids Museum. You're hearing a recitation of it.

00:37:12
Speaker 6: The survivors who were despondent, you're able to find neither voice. What reason can one have to kill innocent people?

00:37:28
Speaker 2: If you are ever in Tokyo, you should go see the scroll. Even if you haven't made up your mind about everything you've just heard about the things done in the name of problem solving.

00:37:41
Speaker 6: So could I need t How could I have a wipe from my memoriness, the cries, the agony of men, women and children I had at that time.

00:38:08
Speaker 2: M Revision's history is produced by Meila Belle and Leeman Gestou, with Jacob Smith, Alouise Linton and Annaim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flon Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew Hedefane, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Maya k Nick, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel, and of course Jacob Weisberg. Special thanks also to our voice actor Yoshia Mao Jesse money Hunt for his help with Japanese translation, the Science History Institute, the Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Texas, Special Collections, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Air Force Academy, Oral History Project at the Oral History of Archives at Columbia University, McDermott Library at the US Air Force Academy, and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. Thank you for listening. I'm Malcolm Gaba.