Curtis LeMay, the firebombing 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 LeMay's biography.

James, you have introduced me to the possibility that LeMay 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'd 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 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.

You know, 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 brings that early on to the war in Europe, where he goes over and he really helps

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