WHAT PEARL HARBOR WROUGHT 1192 DAYS LATER: 2/8: 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
🗓️ 9 December 2024
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
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.
OCTOBER 1941 PEARL HARBOR
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Dascher with James Scott, the author of the new book Black Snow, Curtis LeMay, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb. |
| 0:09.8 | Haywood Hansel is in place. The 20th Air Force consists of two bomber commands, the 20th and the 21st. |
| 0:16.7 | They're launching Thanksgiving, 1944, and early December to Christmas, 1944, are the early launching of the B-29, Strategic Bombing, 25,000 feet, pressurized cabin. |
| 0:32.6 | James, the puzzle here is that you introduce that it doesn't work for a very simple thing. Weather. How so, James? |
| 0:41.6 | Japan is a, you know, as an island nation out of the Pacific, it has notoriously cloudy, rainy |
| 0:48.1 | 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. |
| 0:58.1 | And then Japan in some months has as little as three days of clear weather. |
| 1:02.6 | And the ability to predict those days is a near impossibility. |
| 1:06.8 | And so you've got this terrible weather for bombing. |
| 1:10.2 | 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. |
| 1:19.9 | I mean, those are like the winds that batter Mount Everest. |
| 1:22.5 | And of course, the bad weather and the jet streams just combined to completely wreck bomber accuracy. |
| 1:29.3 | And so those are two of the problems that Hansel faces. |
| 1:32.3 | Another one that he has is the B-29 is a brand new plane. |
| 1:36.3 | And as you noted earlier, it's an incredibly expensive gamble that Arnold has taken. |
| 1:41.3 | It costs $3.7 billion to develop this plane. That's actually more than the atomic bomb. |
| 1:48.0 | And unlike the B-17, which is sort of the dominant workhorse in the European theater, |
| 1:54.0 | where America actually had benefited from fact that the B-17 had been around for several years before the war began. So we had |
| 2:02.0 | time to work out all the kinks of the B-17s that by the time the war begins, we've got a reliable |
| 2:06.5 | platform. The B-29 rolls out of the first factories in 1944 and goes straight into combat. |
| 2:13.5 | And so, of course, with any new technology, particularly something as sophisticated as the B-29, |
| 2:18.2 | it's got lots of glitches. |
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