Curtis LeMay, the Fire Bombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb.

James Scott, the historian, is the author and he's here to help us understand

Curtis LeMay's success.

We begin, however, with Curtis Lamay's biography.

James, you have introduced me to the possibility that Lamay is extremely admirable.

He's by his bootstraps. He's a poor kid who's given a bad break in life and he doesn't let him push him down.

Where does he come from? What do we make of his, what you have to say is self-invention.

Exactly. I mean he comes from this hard-scrabble childhood.

I mean his father was kind of a drifty near-do well who up routes the family repeatedly as he sort of goes from one, you know, manual labor job to the next. They moved from Ohio to Montana to California. His mother cleans houses to help make ends meet.

LeMay and his siblings are just kind of left to fend for themselves.

So he learns from a very young age

that he can really only depend on himself in life.

I mean, none of his teachers, his parents, nobody really shows much of an interest in him.

And so he very quickly becomes self-reliable, so much so that he literally puts himself through

college in Ohio State by working all night in a steel mill.

And so he's literally up all night working a steel mill and then going to class during the day.

I mean he's just a tireless dogged worker.

He studies engineering at Ohio State and he has a problem solving mindset. I mean he really sets out to

tackle things like equations and so he he brings that early on to the war in Europe where he goes over and he really helps design better

bomber formations to help improve the defenses of the B17.

He also tackles the problem of German anti-aircraft fire.

And he realizes that, you know, it takes the Germans a lot longer to figure out where in the skies bombers are in order to be able to cite them and that they can fly longer, straighter bombing runs and get more bombs on target.

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