BEFORE OPPENHEIMER'S GADGET: 3/8: Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 July 2023
⏱️ 14 minutes
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BEFORE OPPENHEIMER'S GADGET: 3/8: Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Snow-Curtis-Firebombing-Atomic/dp/1324002999/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1X64JYW3Z1OT9&keywords=BLACK+SNOW+JAMES+SCOTT&qid=1674137497&s=books&sprefix=black+snow+james+scott%2Cstripbooks%2C61&sr=1-1
Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed
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| 0:20.0 | Curtis Lemay, the firebombing of Tokyo and the road to the Atomic Bomb. |
| 0:24.0 | James Scott, the historian, is the author and he's here to help us understand Curtis Lemay's success. |
| 0:31.0 | We begin, however, with Curtis Lemay's biography. |
| 0:34.0 | James, you have introduced me to the possibility that Lemay is extremely admirable. He's by his bootstraps. |
| 0:42.0 | He's a poor kid who's given a bad break in life and he doesn't let him push him down. |
| 0:48.0 | Where does he come from? What do we make of his? |
| 0:52.0 | What you have to say is self invention. |
| 0:55.0 | Exactly. I mean, he comes from this hard-scrabble childhood. |
| 0:59.0 | I mean, his father was kind of a drifty, near-do-well who uproots the family repeatedly as he sort of goes from one, you know, manual labor job to the next. |
| 1:09.0 | They move from Ohio to Montana to California. |
| 1:12.0 | His mother cleans houses to help make ends meet. |
| 1:16.0 | Lemay and his siblings are just kind of left defend for themselves. |
| 1:19.0 | So he learns from a very young age that he can really only depend on himself and wife. |
| 1:25.0 | I mean, none of his teachers, his parents, nobody really shows much of an interest in him. |
| 1:30.0 | So he very quickly becomes self-reliable. |
| 1:33.0 | So much so that he literally puts himself through college in Ohio State by working all night in a steel mill. |
| 1:41.0 | And so he's literally up on my work in a steel mill and then going to class during the day. |
| 1:46.0 | I mean, he's just a tireless dog at a worker. |
| 1:49.0 | He studies engineering at Ohio State and he has a problem solving mindset. |
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