I'm John Basser with James Scott, the author of the new book Black Snow, Curtis LeMay,

the Fire Bombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb.

Haywood Hansel is in place.

The 20th Air Force consists of two bomber commands the 20th

and the 21st. They're launching Thanksgiving, 1944 and early December to

Christmas 1944 are the early and early December to Christmas

1944 are the early launching of the B-29

Strategic bombing 25,000 feet pressurized cabin.

James the puzzle here is that you introduce that it doesn't work for a very simple thing.

Weather, how so, James?

Japan is a, you know, as an island nation out of the Pacific, it has notoriously cloudy, rainy weather.

And so some months, and of course if you're doing daylight precision bombing you need to see in order to be able to put your

bombs on target and in Japan in some months has as little as three days of clear weather. And the ability to predict those days is a near

impossibility. And so you've got this terrible weather for bombing. And then on top of

that, they discover that high up in the heavens ever Japan are these crazy

violent jet streams where winds blow as much as 230 miles per hour.

And these are like the winds that batter Mount Everest. And of course that the bad weather and

the jet streams just combine to completely wreck bomber accuracy. And so

those are two of the problems that Hansel faces. Another one that he has is this B-29 is a brand new plane.

And as you noted earlier, it's an incredibly expensive gamble that Arnold was taken.

It cost $3.7 billion to develop this plane. gamble that's

actually more than the atomic bomb and unlike the B17 which is sort of the dominant workhorse in the European theater, where America actually

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