S8 Ep821: Fearing he will be fired for lack of results, LeMay develops a radical, "perilous" plan for low-altitude night bombing without seeking prior approval from his superiors in Washington. He decides to drop the B-29s' altitude from 30,000 feet to just 5,000 f
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John Batchelor
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🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
Fearing he will be fired for lack of results, LeMay develops a radical, "perilous" plan for low-altitude night bombing without seeking prior approval from his superiors in Washington. He decides to drop the B-29s' altitude from 30,000 feet to just 5,000 feet, roughly a mile above the target, to get beneath the jet streams and clouds. To prepare his skeptical aircrews, he forces them to fly training missions as low as 50 feet, a mental game designed to make the 5,000-foot raid feel safer by comparison. LeMay knows that Tokyo's traditional architecture—mostly wood and paper—makes the city a "wood pile" vulnerable to fire. While the Japanese remain confident in their primitive neighborhood fire associations armed with sand and buckets, LeMay possesses detailed intelligence on the city's population density and flammability. He finally informs General Norstad of the "dramatic change in tactics" only on the morning the operation is scheduled to launch. 4/8
1945 LEMAY
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | James Scott is the author. Curtis LeMay is not satisfied and believes he will also be fired, as Hansel was, by Hap Arnold, because the strategic bombing is not improving. |
| 0:11.7 | The B-29s are not in any way surprising the Japanese. The Japanese are demonstrating that though they're blockaded, though they're losing, they're going to fight to the last. |
| 0:22.6 | They will not surrender. What is to be done? |
| 0:25.5 | LeMay, I picture him lying in his Quentin Hunt, looking at the ceiling. |
| 0:30.1 | Do we know exactly what it was, or is it him pondering Dresden and the news from Dresden? |
| 0:37.7 | Did that do it, James? |
| 0:39.5 | You know, actually, Lame, it probably begins even earlier than that because Lamee had looked at the results of the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, which was actually more destructive than Dresden. |
| 0:50.4 | Everybody knows of Dresden today. |
| 0:52.3 | In February 45 was Dresden, so it's about this period. |
| 0:56.0 | Yes, so Dresden is February 45. |
| 0:58.0 | Hamburg burns in the summer of 43, and Lame was in Europe then, and he studied the after-action |
| 1:04.0 | results of that. |
| 1:05.0 | So he knew what fire could do to a city. |
| 1:08.0 | And you're right, Lame spent much of his time thinking at night. |
| 1:11.6 | In fact, if you read his personal letters home, he's always writing about his lack of sleep, |
| 1:16.8 | because he's literally up all night thinking, trying to figure out how to do this. And so that |
| 1:21.6 | that's when he kind of comes to the realization that what Hansel was doing, high altitude, |
| 1:27.3 | daylight precision bombing, |
| 1:28.6 | it's simply not going to work. |
| 1:30.9 | And if he's going to attack, successfully attack Japanese cities, he's going to have to have |
| 1:35.8 | to have a radical rethinking of American strategy. |
| 1:39.4 | And he ultimately settles on a plan that is, you know, it's so perilous, it's so morally fraught that he |
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