BEFORE OPPENHEIMER'S GADGET: 4/8: 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
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🗓️ 30 July 2023
⏱️ 8 minutes
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BEFORE OPPENHEIMER'S GADGET: 4/8: 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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| 0:00.0 | At TFL, we're making journeys safer for everyone, and that includes improving safety on London's roads. |
| 0:07.4 | That's why we and London boroughs are lowering more speed limits to 20 miles per hour, |
| 0:12.3 | because 20 miles per hour roads have already reduced collisions resulting in deaths or |
| 0:16.8 | serious injuries by 24%. That is how we're making journeys in London safer and brighter for everyone. |
| 0:24.8 | Such TFL improvement plan to the Mayor of London and TFL every journey matters. |
| 0:30.0 | And James Scott is the author, Curtis Lemay, is not satisfied and believes he will also be fired |
| 0:36.1 | as Hansewaz by Hap Arnold, because the strategic bombing is not improving. The B-29s are not in any |
| 0:44.0 | way surprising the Japanese, the Japanese are demonstrating that though they're blockaded, |
| 0:49.6 | though they're losing, they're going to fight to the last, they will not surrender. |
| 0:54.0 | What is to be done? Lemay, I picture him lying in his quanson hunt, looking at the ceiling. |
| 1:00.2 | Do we know exactly what it was or is it him pondering Dresden and the news from Dresden? Did that do |
| 1:08.1 | it, James? No, actually Lemay probably begins even earlier than that, because Lemay had looked at |
| 1:14.4 | the results of the July 1943 fire bomb at Hamburg, which was actually more destructive than Dresden. |
| 1:20.4 | Everybody knows of Dresden today. And for Hamburg, 45 was Dresden, so it's about this period. |
| 1:26.3 | Yes, Dresden is February 45 at Hamburg burns in the summer of 43, and Lemay was in Europe then, |
| 1:32.6 | and he studied the after-action results of that. So he knew what fire could do to a city. |
| 1:38.9 | And you're right, Lemay spent much of his time thinking at night. In fact, if you read his personal |
| 1:43.5 | letters home, he's always writing about his lack of sleep, because he's literally up all night |
| 1:48.3 | thinking, trying to figure out how to do this, and said that, that's when he kind of comes to the |
| 1:53.6 | realization that what Hansel was doing, high altitude daylight precision bombing, it's simply |
| 1:59.5 | not going to work. And if he's going to attack, successfully attack, Japanese cities, |
| 2:04.8 | he's going to have to have a radical rethinking of American strategy. And he ultimately settles on a |
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