Bombs-Away LeMay

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Curtis Emerson LeMay, who for the better part of twenty five years dominated the greatest fighting force the world had ever known, had three nicknames, Old Iron Pants, the Demon, and bombs Away LeMay. He was not that category of leader who led by force of wit, charm and charisma. Nor was he some great thinker, the kind of leader whose appeal lies with carefully thought out manifestos and elaborate ideologies. Le Maay never took his cigar out of his mouth long enough to say anything. He belonged to a different category, the one that gets overlooked.

00:00:59
Speaker 1: Curtis LeMay. In my view, he was the greatest air commander in history.

00:01:03
Speaker 2: I'm talking to the military historian Conrad Crane. No historian writes about the Second World War out considering the legacy of LeMay.

00:01:11
Speaker 1: Everything he touched he transformed. He was a dynamic leader. He shared the difficulties of his airman. He was the best navigator of the Air Force I had it, was a great pilot, He could do mechanics stuff. He was the Air Force's ultimate problem solver. But he was one of those guys that you would if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn't ask a whole lot of questions.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: Harry was going to do it bombs away. LeMay was known as someone you get the job done. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is part three of my four part series about Curtis le May and the events of March nineteen forty five. This episode is about the role of people like Curtis le May in times of crisis. In the normal course of events, we are led by people of ideas and people of arristhma. But when things start to go badly, those people get pushed aside and the problem solver takes center stage. Only the problem solver doesn't play by the same moral rules. Let me give you an example of what it means to approach the world the way someone like Curtis LeMay did. It's not one of the signature stories in the LeMay legend. It happened long before he was famous, years before the Second World War. He would mention it sometimes in passing in some of the interviews he gave in retirement, but it's one of those stories that made me stop and say, oh, I think I understand him now. In nineteen thirty seven, with the threat of war in Europe growing, the Army's Air Corps wanted a chance to practice their bombing technique, real world practice, only with dummy bombs fifty pounders filled with water.

00:03:12
Speaker 3: I'mt me tell you the story of that. I mentioned that the Air Force has been battling to make a contribution to the fans of the country ever since I've done around, nobody paid much attention to it.

00:03:26
Speaker 2: This is an interview LeMay gave to the Air Force Academy in nineteen seventy one, a few years after leaving his post as Chief of Staff of the Air Force. When he was taking the post retirement victory lap, a famous generals take.

00:03:38
Speaker 3: We wanted an exercise, or we could drop bomb on a battleship.

00:03:42
Speaker 2: Find a battleship for the practice run. To work, the Air Corps needed the Navy to play along. Hide a battleship out on the seas, give out its coordinates at the last minute, and dare the bombers to find it. This was before sophisticated radar and navigation aids. To find a battleship, you had to see it with your eyes, then hit its narrow decks with a bomb from thousands of feet up, all the while flying at hundreds of miles an hour. The Navy was not enthusiastic.

00:04:14
Speaker 3: Finally, they agreed that they would have an exercise and it would be in August off the West coast. Now in August off the west coast, there's nothing but fog for a thousand miles out there, and they deliberately picked it for this time. I'm sure.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: How could you spot a battleship in one thousand miles of fog. To make matters worse, the Navy bent the rules. The agreement was to have the wargame run for twenty four hours from noon the first day until noon the next, but the Navy didn't give out the coordinates of its ship, the uss Utah, until late the first afternoon, and the cordinates they gave were wrong, off by sixty miles one thousand miles of fog. Late directions, fake directions a needle in a haystack would have been easier at ten minutes before. At the very last moment, le May found the ship and dropped his bombs. Now, of course he found the ship, there was nothing Li May could not do if he put his mind to it. That's not the point of the story. The point is what happened before he dropped his bombs. The Navy was certain they couldn't be found, so they took no precautions. The sailors were all over the decks going about their business. They were supposed to take cover in a bombing exercise. They didn't. So what did LeMay do? He bombed the Utah anyway, raining fifty pound water bombs down on the sailors.

00:05:48
Speaker 3: And the Navy was so sure that they weren't going to be found. I don't know if that bog die like it, but the men were all over the decks, everybody diving for the gang plank patches and way hard rumors that there are a few people part a little bit.

00:06:09
Speaker 2: Imagine how other types of leaders might have handled the decision to bomb after seeing sailors out in the deck. The thinker would have understood the moral dimensions of willingly harming one of your own in the course of a routine training exercise. The charismatic leader would have wondered, what will my own men think of me if they see that I am capable of such a casual act of brutality. But the problem solver. The problem was to find the Utah and bomb it, and so he bombs it.

00:06:40
Speaker 3: I'd rather have somebody who is real stupid. I did something and even it was wrong, alre he did something, and I have somebody who would vacilate and do nothing.

00:06:57
Speaker 2: You cannot do nothing in the world view of the problem solver, even if what you end up doing is horrifying. In his memoirs, LeMay says they were rumors for years that some sale got killed in the bombing exercise of nineteen thirty seven, and then he says, quote, I remember watching the first bomb, which smashed into the deck. It sent splintered pieces of wood flying in every direction. I hadn't realized that wood could frag like that. It was a learning opportunity. Who knew wood reacted that way? He files that fact away and goes on to the next problem. In the first years of the Second World War, the American fight against the Japanese was defined by a single fact. Japan was beyond the reach of the US Air Force. The American workhorse bomber was the B seventeen. It had a range of roughly two thousand miles. That's a thousand miles out and one thousand miles back. Now, look at a map of the world from say, January of nineteen forty four, and try and find an air base controlled by the Allies that is within one thousand miles of tow You can't. And if you can't reach Japan, how on earth are you going to defeat them? The solution comes in two parts.

00:08:21
Speaker 4: This is where it began, here in the exact geographic center of the United States, Grand Island, Nebraska.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: That voice sounds familiar, doesn't it. It's fron of Reagan. Long before he became president, Reagan narrated newsreels during the Second World War.

00:08:41
Speaker 4: The men were brought here from every corner of the country and a few corners outside the country.

00:08:48
Speaker 3: They were a.

00:08:49
Speaker 4: Hand picked American mixture of draftees and west pointers, of butchers, teachers and bankers, of your sons, husbands, and fathers.

00:09:00
Speaker 2: In the newsreel, we see soldiers arriving in barracks, handsome crisp uniforms, all gazing up at a magnificent and gleaming airplane.

00:09:11
Speaker 4: She was a B twenty nine, the superport designed to carry more destruction and carry it higher, faster, farther than any bomber ever built before. And to complete this mission, That's exactly what she was going to have to do.

00:09:31
Speaker 2: She The B twenty nine was one of the great achievements of the American war effort, an enormous bomber dedicated entirely to the fight against the Japanese. In the Wars specific theater, the B twenty nine's range fifty six hundred miles much better than its predecessor. So then came the second step. In the summer of nineteen forty four, in some of the most brutal fighting of the war, the Marines captured three tiny specks in the middle of the Western Pacific, the Mariana Islands, Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. Why were they captured because the Marianna is with thirteen hundred and forty two miles from Tokyo, straight shot across the ocean, put the B twenty nine together with the Marianas, and overnight the odds of beating Japan shifted.

00:10:23
Speaker 1: June of nineteen forty four is a arguably the most important month of the war. You have D Day and where we go ashore in northwest Europe, you have the invasion of the Marianas and the Pacific, the final breaking of the internal defense line of the Japanese, the fall of the Tojo government because of that. So all that stuff happens in that same month.

00:10:48
Speaker 2: Throughout the summer and fall of nineteen forty four, the Navy built massive bases on each of the captured islands of the Mariannas. The biggest base contained the largest airport in the world that was on tinian six runways, the equivalent of three Boulder dams with a concrete and when they were finished, the military again flying in brand new B twenty nine bombers, hundreds of them.

00:11:14
Speaker 4: Their final base was no longer a mystery. Four thousand miles farther west, with only one refueling stop on the way, lay the island of Saipan. Less than four months before, it had still been in the hands of the Japanese.

00:11:32
Speaker 2: To head up the newly created B twenty nine strike force known as the twenty first Bomber Command, the military brass brought in a high priest of the bomber mafia, a brilliant young general named Hayward Hansel. Hayward Hansel came from an aristocratic Southern military family. His great grandfather was a general in the Confederate Army, his grandfather a Confederate officer. Hansel's father had been an army surgeon who came to dinner in a white linen suit and a panama hat. Hansel himself was a skilled dancer, a poet, and an aficionado of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His favorite book was Don Quixote. He felt a connection with the knight tilting at windmills. He put flying first, Polo second, and family a distant third. Once the story goes early in his marriage, he heard a baby cry and turned to his wife, what's that sound. That's your son, she said. He liked to carry a swagger stick, like the English army officers did. As a child, he was nicknamed Possum because of the narrowness of his face. The name stuck. On his final mission as a pilot, a bombing run over Belgium, Hensel entertained his exhausted crew with a rendition of the popular music hall song The Man on the Flying Trapeze. This is the most famous version. Eddie canters, Oh.

00:13:03
Speaker 5: He floats through the air with the greatest evise, this daring young man, and I'm the flying trabbe.

00:13:11
Speaker 4: His actions are.

00:13:12
Speaker 2: Graceful, old girls, He does please, and my love was soolen away. Of all the bombing fundamentalists to come out of the Air Corps tactical school, Heyward Hansel was the truest believer the idealist airpower, intelligently and surgically deployed could bring any enemy to its knees well.

00:13:36
Speaker 5: The first operation against Japam was called San Antonio one. It was coordinated with the Joint Cheese of Staff strategy, which made the timing extremely important. As a matter of fact, we were going. We were in some danger of standin of falling on this operation.

00:13:52
Speaker 2: When Possum Hansel takes over in the Mariannas in nineteen forty four, he says to himself, what is the critical vulnerability of the Japanese war economy? What can my newbe twenty nine's attack. The answer to him is obvious. The Japanese air craft manufacturing plants, which are almost entirely concentrated in a few factories in and around Tokyo, in particular the Nakajima Aircraft Company known as Subru. Today Nakajima made at least a third of all Japanese combat aircraft engines. Hansel said, let's hit Nakajima, and we'll cripple the Japanese fighting force. The newsreel Ronald Reagan narrated, is all about that first attack by Hansel on Nakajima.

00:14:40
Speaker 4: Six hours later, through the clouds, they saw it, Fujiyama. Here comes some modern symbols, phosphorus, bombs and flag.

00:14:56
Speaker 2: The B twenty nine s traveled fifteen hundred miles from the Marianas, skimming over the ocean at several thousand feet. As they approached Japan, they climbed twenty five or thirty thousand feet out of harm's way. They turned at Mount Fuji, then came in from the west over Tokyo. Here, speaking over aerial shots of the city, Reagan lays it on thick.

00:15:21
Speaker 4: Within a radius of fifteen miles of the Imperial Palace lived seven million Japanese, a people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite, concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens and the cultivation of silkworms. But it isn't silkworms, and it isn't Imperial Palace. As these men are looking for in the suburbs of Tokyo is the huge Nakajima aircraft plant. Well, bud, what are you waiting for?

00:15:53
Speaker 2: Like I said? He dated on a little thick That first mission, San Antonio I was hugely symbolic proof that Japan could finally be reached. But was it a success as a military operation? After the war. Speaking to cadets at the Air Force Academy, Hansel tried to put a good face on things.

00:16:16
Speaker 5: The operation wasn't because had light by un permission help it. It did show that it could be done, and this was a very very Dunfeld issue.

00:16:28
Speaker 3: At the time.

00:16:29
Speaker 2: The operation wasn't as good as we would have liked, was to say the least, an understatement. None of the bombs dropped by Hansel's B twenty nine s actually hit the Nakajima plant, so Hansel tried again three days later, same thing. Hansel sent mission after mission. On one of his last attempts, he went back with seventy two B twenty nines. They missed the plant and hit a hospital. Heyward, Hansel couldn't solve the problem because the problem was much bigger than anyone at the time understood. Long after the war, one of Heywood Hansel's B twenty nine pilots, Lieutenant Ed Hyatt, was interviewed for a documentary by the BBC.

00:17:27
Speaker 6: After flying six hours, we climbed up to bombing altitude. We climbed up to thirty seven thousand feet and just as we broke out of the storm, there's Mount Fuji sitting right in front of us, and it's a gorgeous site.

00:17:39
Speaker 1: It really is.

00:17:41
Speaker 2: Hyatt tried to describe what went wrong on those first B twenty nine precision attacks on Tokyo. His bombardier, a man named Glenn, starts to make his calculations on their bomb site, lining up the Nakajima factory, but the telescope on the bomb site wouldn't line up.

00:17:58
Speaker 6: They turned around and he said, he said, I can't get this damn telescope on the target. And so we called a radar operator check our ground speed and see what our ground speed is. He came back and he says, we got one hundred and twenty five tailwind. He said, we're going about four hundred and eighty miles an hour. It's impossible, it can't be. There's no wins like that.

00:18:22
Speaker 2: No Air Force pilots had ever experienced what was now happening to the B twenty nine bombers over Japan. They expected winds a fraction of these speeds.

00:18:32
Speaker 6: We're going four hundred and eighty miles an hour when we should be going three hundred and forty miles an hour. I said, well, Glenn dropped the damn bombs. He dropped the bombs, and we were already twelve miles past the target because of that wind.

00:18:48
Speaker 2: They were bewildered, and back at base they couldn't explain what happened to their superiors from.

00:18:54
Speaker 6: The debriefed as they gave us a third degree, they said, no, there is no such thing. There can't be a win like that. You're a lion. You didn't make it over the target. You're just making this up.

00:19:07
Speaker 2: But one crew after another arrived back at the Marianas and told the exact same story.

00:19:12
Speaker 7: To tell you how powerful these winds were. A reconnaissance plane went up on time to take some pictures after a mission to see how effective they'd been, and the navigator called the pilot and told him they were going three miles an hour backwards. That was something you couldn't afford to do, because if you went from east to west, you were going to be a sitting duck for Japanese fighters or their flag.

00:19:37
Speaker 2: To solve that puzzle, Hensel turned to his team of meteorologists. They'd all been trained at the University of Chicago. Back then, in the days before a sophisticated radar, meteorologists were crucial to the success of bombing campaigns. If you were doing a daylight bombing run over a city, you had to see the target in order to line up the bomb site, and if the skies were too cloudy, that was impossible. So going or not going on a mission hinged on the weather forecast. But the tools available to meteorologists of that era were crude. The easiest thing to forget about the Second World War is that it was another technological era. It's half twentieth century and half nineteenth century. The chief tool of the meteorologists of that time were balloons weather balloons that would float up into the atmosphere, carrying little instrument kits that could record the wind, the temperature, and the humidity and transmit that information back to Earth. I asked John Lewis about those days he's a scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. He knew a number of the meteorologists who worked with the Air Force during the war. Are these balloons they can forgive me? It's a very naive question. Are they connected by a rope or are they just free floating?

00:20:54
Speaker 4: Oh?

00:20:55
Speaker 1: No, they're released.

00:20:56
Speaker 8: They eventually, as the pressure gets lower, as the balloon goes higher in the atmosphere, they expand, expand, expand. Kaboom, they explode and they fall to the ground with the instrument attached. And at that time they had a message on all the instrument packages, could you please return this to the University of Chicago in.

00:21:16
Speaker 2: The Pacific field of war. That technique wasn't going to work. So there they were, the meteorologists in the middle of the Pacific with one of the most important jobs in the whole outfit, figuring out when to send the bombers, and they're baffled. What's with these winds? On a theoretical level, Do they have a suspicion that there may be very very high winds at high altitudes at the Air Force? Or is it that they don't reach that conclusion until the pilots come back with their.

00:21:50
Speaker 8: They did not reach their conclusions until the pilots came back.

00:21:55
Speaker 2: What slowly became clear is that the pilots had stumbled on a previously unknown phenomenon in the upper atmosphere, what came to be known as the jet stream, a river of fast flowing air that circles the globe starting at around twenty thousand feet. Some scientists had theorized about the jet stream, but until the B twenty nine was built, almost no one had ever flown at altitudes high enough to experience those winds firsthand.

00:22:24
Speaker 8: This vast stream of air, very narrow, moves from north to south in both hemispheres. Basically, it is dividing the very cold air of the polar regions from the more warm mid latitude and equatorial air.

00:22:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, when you say very narrow, how narrow.

00:22:50
Speaker 8: I would say typically two hundred kilometers across something on that order. So that's the narrowness of it.

00:23:00
Speaker 2: And did it entirely encircle the Earth?

00:23:02
Speaker 8: It does?

00:23:05
Speaker 2: So what is the problem facing the pilots gathered on the man that in the winter of nineteen forty four and the early spring of nineteen forty five, this narrow hurricane force band of air known as a jet stream, happens to be directly over Japan, and that makes it impossible for Hansel to do any of the precision bombing that he had planned to do. If they fly across it, the plane will get blown sideways. If they fly into it, they'll be fighting to stay aloft and be easy targets for the Japanese. And if they fly with it, they'll be racing too fast to take proper aim. In the service of a conviction that bombing could bring Japan to its knees, Thousands of Marines had been killed in the fight to capture the Marianas. The construction of the three island air bases had been one of the most intensive engineering feats of the war. The B twenty nine was a three billion dollar project that's forty three billion in today's money. All of that investment in the air war against the Japanese by December of nineteen forty four had come up empty. Hansel and all the other brass and the Marianas were bewildered. When a true believer discovers that his God cannot save him, what's left nothing Heyward Hansel was finished in January of nineteen forty five, Hansel was relieved of his post as head of the twenty first bomber command. In his place was put the man you bring in when all else has failed, Curtis le May. Even decades later, possum Hansel would bristle when asked about the circumstances of his departure and the person who replaced him in the Pacific. He had taught le May at the Air Court Tactical School and was his commanding officer in Europe. Here's Hansel again at the Air Force Academy in nineteen sixty seven. He's just been asked a name who he felt were the finest officers of his generation.

00:25:11
Speaker 9: Among the people who I knew in my littleitary career, I would say the three hank standing ones, John Marshall, Joel Andrews and John Fradhn And they were outstanding for pretty much the same reason they were man okay, character, They were obviously intelligent man, but no a spersonal integrity and character.

00:25:37
Speaker 8: General O May was one of your group commanders.

00:25:39
Speaker 3: I not if you didn't put him in this.

00:25:41
Speaker 2: Last group, well exactly. Le May was not a patrician with a swagger stick. He did not read Savantes and sing musical theater to his crew at the end of long missions. He had no time for demonstrations of personal integrity and character. He had a problem to solve when he takes over the twenty first bombing command. When he first arrives in the Marianas, he does not have his eventual strategy worked out. His mind is still open.

00:26:21
Speaker 1: Yes, Zach, Yeah, that is correct.

00:26:23
Speaker 2: I'm talking again with the military historian Conrad Crane about Curtis the May after he takes over command from General Heyward Hansell in January of nineteen forty five. I'm really curious to sort of reconstruct his thought process, how he all the reasons why he arrives at the strategy finally arrives at So he begins by does he begin by doing exactly what Hansel had done?

00:26:47
Speaker 1: Well? He he walks in, and he looks around and sees the primitive nature of the facilities that said this won't do.

00:26:53
Speaker 2: Le May is not happy with the military's infrastructure on the Mariannas. It was all built by the Navy's construction Battalion, the Seabees. Le May has lost none of his disdain for the Navy, the people who cheated in the bombing exercise years before.

00:27:09
Speaker 1: He gets invited to have dinner with Admiral Nimtz, who also is headquartered in Marianna's And he goes over to Nimbus's place and he's in this ornate almost a palace, and he gets fed on the very formal naval style dinner with the tablecloths and being served and everything. So he invites the Admiral Nimmos to visit him for dinner in the next couple of days, and Admiral Nimmtz shows up for his dinner and they're sitting in a quancert hut on a couple of crates, eating sea rations. And at the end of the end of the meal, Nimmits looks at LeMay and says, I get your point. And then he started sending more construction materials to La May to help finish up the rest of the facilities.

00:27:52
Speaker 2: By the early spring of nineteen forty five, LeMay was ready. He starts out by trying his own version of the strategy taken by his predecessor. He decides to take out the Nakajima aircraft planned in Tokyo.

00:28:07
Speaker 1: His perception is is that he's still expected to do high altitude precision bombing, So he's going to do everything he can to make sure that I how Toude precision bombing is going to be more effective.

00:28:18
Speaker 2: Le May sends two missions against Nakajima in January, one in February another in early March. Hundreds of B twenty nine's making the long trek to Japan, and in the end the plant is still standing. He's run up against the same obstacle as Hensel did. How can I force a Japanese surrender from the air if I can't hit anything.

00:28:42
Speaker 1: But when he realizes he's fixed all those problems, there's nothing else he can tweak, you know, he says, Okay, I'm gott to try something different.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: Le May's first realization is that the jet stream is a powerful force. It can't be wished away, and it's making everything else impossible. The first principle of precision bombing doctrine is that the bomber should come in high, well above the range of enemy fire and anti aircraft guns. Le May throws it out the window. He decides to be twenty nine's will have to fly at lower altitudes under the jet.

00:29:19
Speaker 1: Stream and once he realizes he's going to have to go to lower altitude. Then that leads to a whole set of other conclusions from that.

00:29:28
Speaker 2: Next logical step. Precision bombing was supposed to be daylight bombing. You needed to see the target before you could line up the bomb site. But if le Maay's bombers came in low during the day, they would be sitting ducks for the Japanese air defenses. So he decides they have to come under cover of night.

00:29:48
Speaker 1: Once you realize you can't go to a high altitude anymore, it drives kind of the rest of his decision process.

00:29:54
Speaker 2: Jetstream means low, low means night, and the decision to switch to night raids means you can't do precision bombing anymore, because there's no way with the technology of the time that a bombing crew would be able to focus on any precise target if they couldn't see it. So just like that, Curtis le May doesn't about face. The man who came of age in the high church of precision bombing decides, at the most crucial juncture of his career to abandon his faith to bomb indiscriminately to become an area bomber and what weapon would he use for that task. He knew as well as anyone the reports from the Army testing grounds back in America, where perfect replicas of Japanese towns had been incinerated by Harvard's new wonder weapon. The whole plan is so radical that when le May sends a copy of it to Washington for the approval of his boss, General hap Arnold, he makes sure it arrives on a day when Arnold isn't in his office, so.

00:31:01
Speaker 1: He can get that initial raid off before Arnold really has a chance to look at it very much, because he realizes he's taken a risky es are very valuable. It's very risky. You're talking about going in at night, low altitude. He leaves most of the ammunition and gunners behind.

00:31:18
Speaker 2: Crucial fact, the only thing LeMay lets his pilots have to defend themselves is a tail gunner. All other guns are removed. He wants to save as much weight as possible for bombs. In the Air Force archives, it is possible to find interviews from long ago with pilots who remember the day when LeMay told them what was going to happen that night.

00:31:45
Speaker 10: And they were just a gasp in the audience because you never thought about doing anything high altitude flying.

00:31:51
Speaker 2: This is a B twenty nine navigator named David Braden.

00:31:55
Speaker 10: And you went out and the bottom of your aircraft have been painted black. So you do this is going to be a different thing. Most of the guys thought it was a susi admission.

00:32:08
Speaker 2: And Braden's commander, Curtis le May, know this was going to work. Of course he didn't, but remember his words, the credo of the man who gets things done. I'd rather have someone who was real stupid but did something than have someone who'd vacillate and do nothing. Curtis le May was going to do something. He was going to aery A Bob Tokyo under cover of night with napalm.

00:32:35
Speaker 3: I woke up one day and I'd been up there for about two months. I hadn't done anything much, yet I'd better do something.

00:32:45
Speaker 2: I wonder if this is why le May fascinated so many people in his day, because of his ability to make that sudden turn, to turn his back on who he was in the service of solving the problem. Curtis le May was a member of the Bombing Mafia, a graduate of the Air Corps Tactical School, a proponent of precision bombing progress unhindered by custom. Later in his career he would champion something called the B seventy bomber, an airplane so absurdly complicated, so ridiculously advanced, so preposterously expensive, and so deliciously and fantastically tricked out that the Air Force only built two prototypes, one of which crashed. The other has spent its entire life in the museum. Le May was in his heart always the little boy who ran after airplanes in the sky, and yet when he needed to, he could take all that, his entire identity, the modern, progressive, skilled war maker, and throw it out the window.

00:33:52
Speaker 1: May.

00:33:52
Speaker 10: Where did the idea for the low level fire attacks originate?

00:33:57
Speaker 6: Oh?

00:33:59
Speaker 4: Were?

00:33:59
Speaker 3: You had ideas flying back and forth a lot. It was my basic decision made it. Nobody said anything about night saintury vomit where he had to have some results and I had to produce him. If I didn't produce them, or made the long guess, get another.

00:34:14
Speaker 1: Commander in there.

00:34:16
Speaker 3: That's what happened to hansle You've got no results, I'd have them. That's the reason for it.

00:34:26
Speaker 2: On the night of March ninth, nineteen forty five, Curtis le May launched Operation Meetinghouse. He sent three hundred and thirty four B twenty nine's from the Marianas to Tokyo, loaded with as much napalm as they could carry. The target was not the Nakajima aircraft plant. That plan was over. The new target was a densely populated region of Tokyo straddling the Sumita River, a few miles east of the Imperial Palace Zone one. The first few bombers dropped flares, marking the target area for those that followed. Le Maay was sending in his bombers at five thousand feet incredibly low. That was so crazy that the Japanese were completely unprepared. The bombs fell from the B twenty nine in clusters. They were small steel pipes twenty inches long, weighing six pounds, packed with tnt in napalm, little baby bombs, each with a long silver gauze streamer at one end, so that if you looked in the sky that night in Tokyo, there would have been a moment of extraordinary beauty, thousands of these little silver daggers falling down to earth and then boom on impact. Thousands of small explosions, burning gloves of napalm thrown in every direction, All told by morning, one thousand, six hundred and sixty five tons of napalm dropped on Tokyo in one night. Circling high above Tokyo is the master bomber, LeMay's deputy, Tommy Power, choreographing the attack. Conrad Crane says that Power sat in his cockpit drawing pictures of everything he saw.

00:36:22
Speaker 1: He remarked, you know, the air was soul ful of and sented areas you could not have walked through them. By two thirty seven, the largest visual fire areas was about forty blocks long and fifteen wide. The smoke was up to twenty five thousand feet. When he draws his last sketch, which is about an hour after initial his first one, there's basically a score of separate areas from fifty to one thousand city blocks burning at the same time, and his last part last report says that the glow from the fires was visible one hundred and fifty miles away.

00:36:57
Speaker 2: The napom creates a firestorm, a conflagration hundreds of blocks long, a fire of such intensity and duration that it creates and sustains its own wind system. Everything burns sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire even reaches them. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following. Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour period than any time in the history of man. More than one hundred thousand people died that night.

00:37:40
Speaker 10: Frankly, when those cities were on fire, it looked like you're looking into the mouth of hell. I mean, you should not imagine a fire that big.

00:37:49
Speaker 2: Over the course of the spring and summer of nineteen forty five, LeMay went on to firebomb another sixty six Japanese cities. In the chaos of war. The dead were never counted. The final toll may be as high as half a million.

00:38:04
Speaker 1: They're about five thousand feet. They are pretty low. They are low enough that the ah, the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft. They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft.

00:38:22
Speaker 2: Two cities were spared, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They were left for another day and another Air Force command with a different idea of how to win a war.

00:38:37
Speaker 3: Thank you all.

00:38:41
Speaker 2: On August fifteenth, nineteen forty five, at twelve noon, the Emperor of Japan surrendered. The Air Force was asked to bring Japan to its knees from the air so that a ground invasion could be avoided. They succeeded. Next week The reckoning When you burn alive hundreds of thousands of civilians in the course of a military objective, What happens next? Revisionist History is produced by Mee La Belle and Lee Mingestou, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton and on An. I'm our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Garra, mastering by Flon Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin Crew, Hetephane Carly Migliore, Maya Knigg, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Blackwell.