HOW DOES THE FIRBOMBING OF TOKYO'S POOREST NEIGHBORSHOOD WIN A WAR? 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
🗓️ 17 February 2025
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1945 TOKYO
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.
Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight “precision” bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.
Drawing on first-person interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English, Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account, and his most important and compelling work to date.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Curtis LeMay, the fire bombing of Tokyo and the road to the atomic bomb. James Scott, the historian, is the author, |
| 0:06.9 | and he's here to help us understand Curtis LeMay's success. We begin, however, with Curtis LeMay's biography. |
| 0:14.7 | James, you have introduced me to the possibility that LeMay is extremely admirable. |
| 0:22.1 | He's by his bootstraps. |
| 0:27.3 | He's a poor kid who's given a bad break in life and he doesn't let him push him down. |
| 0:28.9 | Where does he come from? |
| 0:34.5 | What do we make of his, what you'd have to say is self-invention? |
| 0:35.5 | Exactly. |
| 0:39.1 | I mean, he comes from this hard-scrabble childhood. I mean, |
| 0:45.2 | 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. They move from Ohio to Montana to California. |
| 0:52.0 | You know, his mother cleans houses to help make ends meet. |
| 0:56.1 | LeMay and his siblings are just kind of left to fend for themselves. |
| 0:58.9 | So he learns from a very young age that he can really only depend on himself in life. |
| 1:04.5 | I mean, none of his teachers, his parents, nobody really shows much of an interest in him. |
| 1:09.4 | And so he very quickly becomes self-reliable, |
| 1:12.7 | so much so that he literally puts himself through college in Ohio State by working all night |
| 1:18.9 | in a steel mill. And so he's literally up all night working a steel mill and then going to class |
| 1:24.8 | during the day. I mean, he's just a tireless dogged worker. |
| 1:28.9 | He studies engineering at Ohio State, and he has a problem-solving mindset. I mean, he really |
| 1:35.7 | sets out to tackle things like equations. And so 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 B-17s. |
| 1:56.0 | He also tackles the problem of German anti-aircraft fire. |
| 1:59.2 | He realizes that it takes the Germans |
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