James M. Scott’s Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, The Bomb Blast in Tokyo and The Road to the Atomic Bomb come only when deliberate targeting of civilians during war has once again become a major problem for Americans. For the past six months, hardly a day has gone by without nightly television broadcasting horrifying images of Russian rockets and artillery attacks on Ukrainian citizens at work and in their homes.
Black Snow tells us with insight and detail what entered the American mind more than 75 years ago when they decided to target Japanese citizens during the Second World War. The bombing of Tokyo occurred at a time when America and the Allies were clearly winning the war and were not in danger of their homeland being bombed. The United States had various options for ending the war against Japan.
James Scott, a gifted writer of non-fiction, is well suited to recount the final months of America’s air war against Japan. In his 2015 book, Target TokyoScott tells the story of Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 raid on Tokyo, which took place just months after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and long before the United States built up military power in the Pacific. .
His new book continues the previous story. The central character in Black Snow General Curtis LeMay, who waged an air war to convince the Japanese to surrender unconditionally or face doom. “If the Japanese still existed,” LeMay declared in 1945, “I now promise that they have nothing more to look forward to than the total destruction of their cities.”
Major General Curtis Lemay, anti-Japanese bomber commander, stands in front of a group of B-29 bombers at a base in the Mariana Islands in 1944.
CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images
Scott began his history with LeMay’s predecessor in the air war against Japan, Brigadier General Haywood Hansell, Jr., an advocate of precision daytime bombing as a strategy to destroy industry. industry of Japan. The problem for Hansell was that precision bombing during the day didn’t work. In November 1944, Hansell’s 21st Bomber Command was assigned nine priority targets and not a single target was destroyed. Its main target, an aircraft factory on the outskirts of Tokyo, suffered only 4% damage.
For Hap Arnold, the Army Air Forces Commander, who has pushed the government to invest billions of dollars in massive B-29 bombers, will lead the assault on Japan, with meager results. Hansell’s is unacceptable. Arnold was not willing to give Hansell any longer, especially given that in the first year of production, it took 30,000 hours to build a single B-29. Arnold quickly replaced Hansell with General LeMay, who on 9 January 1945 arrived in Guam to begin a new era in Pacific air warfare.
What to expect from LeMay, then 38 years old, was made clear by Brigadier General Lauris Norstad, Arnold’s chief of staff. “What General Arnold wanted was the greatest number of bombs that could be dropped on our priority targets in any given period of time,” Norstad told LeMay. “If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired.” Norstad went on to say that failure would mean an invasion of Japan with an estimated loss of 500,000 troops or more.
Norstad doesn’t have to worry about LeMay having an ethical problem targeting civilians. “You have to kill people,” he believes, “and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.” LeMay knew what his bombing of Japan would be like if the US lost the battle. “If we lose,” LeMay confided to an aide, “we will be tried as war criminals.”
Ruins of Tokyo after Allied bombing on the night of 9 and 10 March 1945. During the air raid, 279 aircraft launched 1665 tons of incendiary projectiles into the city.
Photo 12 / Universal Image Group via Getty Images
LeMay’s opportunity to combine his tactics on a large scale came on the night of 9-10 March 1945, during an attack on Tokyo. The results were vindicated for LeMay. The raid burned 15.8 square miles of Tokyo. One in four buildings in Tokyo disappeared, and the number of people was even higher. The attack left 105,000 people dead, 40,918 others injured, and 1 million homeless at an aircraft loss cost of just 4.3%.
For the Japanese on the ground, LeMay’s success was, as Scott notes, a nightmare – a world where black snow had become a new phenomenon. The fires caused by incendiary bombs consumed everything in their path, from factory workers to teachers and housewives. The dead not only littered, but also blocked rivers and canals. Dead bodies crowded the standing bridges.
LeMay wasn’t at all flustered when he thought about what he’d done to ordinary Japanese citizens. “I believe that everyone under my command on the bases on this island participated in this single operation,” he declared. But the Japanese did not give in after the bombing in March. Their surrender would not come until September 2 after the atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Russia entered the war.
Major General Curtis LeMay, Chief of Staff of the USASTAF, watches the bomb that destroyed Japanese cities with a C-54 while flying a low-altitude test over the Tokyo and Nagoya area on September 7, 1945.
Bettmann / Contributor
As Scott points out in a book that always raises ethical questions, what LeMay did was make the path to atomic war easier. If the level of destruction he visited over a city is tolerable when done by hundreds of planes, what is the difference, except the magnitude, if the same amount of damage is done by an airplane carrying an atomic bomb?
“LeMay is not alone in thinking that the damage America inflicts on ordinary Japanese is the only practical option for saving more American lives.“
Years later, one of LeMay’s pilots would write about his constant guilt about the “terrible pain and suffering” he helped cause, but LeMay was not bitten by his conscience. so broken. “We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and children when we burned that town,” he wrote in 1965. “The right thing to do.”
People in Tokyo lost their homes due to US bombing. March 10, 1945. The raid on the Campaign Meeting House on March 9-10, 1945 was later assessed as the most powerful bombing in history. It was part of a series of firebomb raids conducted by the United States Army Air Forces during the Pacific campaigns of World War II. Photo: Kouyou Ishikawa, an officer of the Metropolitan Police Department. Tokyo, Japan.
Photo Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty
LeMay was not alone in thinking that the damage America inflicted on ordinary Japanese in the closing months of the war was the only practical option for saving more American lives. “I considered dropping the bomb of great importance and felt that it could end the war better than anything else — which it did,” commented Army Chief of Staff George Marshall a decade ago. post-war century. “I think it is very wise to use it.”
In this regard, what separates LeMay from Marshall is politeness. LeMay’s outspokenness made him his own worst enemy, and after World War II he took on more criticism of himself with crude advice on how to end the war in Vietnam. “My solution to this problem is to tell them straight up that they must pull out their horns and stop their aggression, or we will bomb them back to the Stone Age,” LeMay writes in her autobiography. me, Quest with LeMay. Two decades after World War II, LeMay’s remarks were widely controversial, but his advice, Scott pointed out, was no stranger to controversial comments when in July 1945, he talked about bringing Japan back to the “Dark Ages”.
Today, the issues that Scott cleverly brought up Black Snow This can be seen most clearly in the war of aggression that Russia is waging against Ukraine. What has changed is our disqualification against the sight of ordinary citizens being targeted by a great power determined to minimize damage on its battlefields.
Nicolaus Mills is a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College and the author of Win Peace: The Marshall Plan and America Become a Superpower.
