BEFORE OPPENHEIMER'S GADGET: 8/8: 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
⏱️ 6 minutes
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BEFORE OPPENHEIMER'S GADGET: 8/8: 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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| 0:18.8 | I'm John that's with James Scott. His new book is Black Snow. Curtis LeMay, the |
| 0:29.0 | fire bombing of Tokyo in the road to the atomic bomb. The fire bombing of |
| 0:32.6 | Tokyo in March is unique in human history. The atomic bomb used over |
| 0:37.4 | Hiroshima and Nagasaki unique in human history. What after the war happens is we |
| 0:43.4 | know the Cold War and Curtis LeMay rises in ranking because his younger |
| 0:49.6 | man is 38-39 at the end of the war. Rise is through the 1950s. He becomes, I |
| 0:55.8 | don't know James, I didn't write this down. Is he an early commander of SAC |
| 1:00.1 | strategic air commander? Is he the first? Yeah, and under an under leMay, I mean, you see |
| 1:04.8 | strategic air man really become a much greater organization. He moves |
| 1:09.8 | it to Nebraska. He brings his war-winning team of guys over from World War |
| 1:14.8 | 2 and really gives it the gravitas and the in what I said, he has a lot of |
| 1:20.0 | credit for the success of strategic air command. Right. The big Boeing bombers, the B36, |
| 1:24.8 | the B47, the B52. These are LeMay's concepts and the end of the world from |
| 1:32.3 | LeMay's point of view. He rises to be chief of staff of the Air Force. I remember a |
| 1:37.7 | picture during the Cuban Missile Crisis of John Kennedy in his rocking chair and |
| 1:42.7 | his his truncheves the staff before him and there's the fat one, the chubby one, |
| 1:47.5 | sitting there staring back at Kennedy. He didn't get along with McNamara who |
| 1:52.4 | had been his subordinate. Why not? Yeah, you know, I mean, in part, I mean, quite |
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