Speaker 1: Pushkin. Curtis Emerson LeMay, who for the better part of
Speaker 1: twenty five years dominated the greatest fighting force the world
Speaker 1: had ever known, had three nicknames, Old Iron Pants, the Demon,
Speaker 1: and bombs Away LeMay. He was not that category of
Speaker 1: leader who led by force of wit, charm and charisma.
Speaker 1: Nor was he some great thinker, the kind of leader
Speaker 1: whose appeal lies with carefully thought out manifestos and elaborate ideologies.
Speaker 1: LeMay never took his cigar out of his mouth long
Speaker 1: enough to say anything. He belonged to a different category,
Speaker 1: the one that gets overlooked. Curtis LeMay. In my view,
Speaker 1: he was the greatest air commander in history. I'm talking
Speaker 1: to the military historian Conrad Crane. No historian writes about
Speaker 1: the Second World War without considering the legacy of LeMay.
Speaker 1: Everything he touched he transformed. He was a dynamic leader.
Speaker 1: He shared the difficulties of his airman. He was the
Speaker 1: best navigator of the Air Force had. He was a
Speaker 1: great pilot. He could do mechanic stuff. He was the
Speaker 1: Air Force's ultimate problem solver. But it was one of
Speaker 1: those guys that you would if you gave him a
Speaker 1: problem to fix. You didn't ask a whole lot of questions.
Speaker 1: Hire was going to do it bombs away. LeMay was
Speaker 1: known as someone who get the job done. My name
Speaker 1: is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast
Speaker 1: about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is part three of
Speaker 1: my four part series about Curtis LeMay and the events
Speaker 1: of March nineteen forty five. This episode is about the
Speaker 1: role of people like Curtis le May in times of crisis.
Speaker 1: In the normal course of events, we are led by
Speaker 1: people of ideas and people of rhythma. But when things
Speaker 1: start to go badly, those people get pushed aside and
Speaker 1: the problem solver takes center stage. Only the problem solver
Speaker 1: doesn't play by the same moral rules. Let me give
Speaker 1: you an example of what it means to approach the
Speaker 1: world the way someone like Curtis LeMay did. It's not
Speaker 1: one of the signature stories in the Lama legend. It
Speaker 1: happened long before he was famous, years before the Second
Speaker 1: World War. He would mention it sometimes in passing in
Speaker 1: some of the interviews he gave in retirement, but it's
Speaker 1: one of those stories that made me stop and say, oh,
Speaker 1: I think I understand him. Now, in nineteen thirty seven,
Speaker 1: with the threat of war in Europe growing, the Army's
Speaker 1: Air Corps wanted a chance to practice their bombing technique,
Speaker 1: real world practice, only with dummy bombs fifty pounders filled
Speaker 1: with water. I'm gonna tell you the story of that.
Speaker 1: I mentioned that the Air Force has been battling a
Speaker 1: maker contribution to the fans of the country. Ever since
Speaker 1: I've done around, nobody paid much attention to it. This
Speaker 1: is an interview LeMay gave to the Air Force Academy
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy one, a few years after leaving his
Speaker 1: post as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, when
Speaker 1: he was taking the post retirement victory lap. The famous
Speaker 1: general's take, We wanted an exercise or are we could
Speaker 1: drop bomb on a battleship. Find a battleship for the
Speaker 1: practice run. To work, the Air Corps needed the Navy
Speaker 1: to play along. Hide a battleship out on the seas,
Speaker 1: give out its coordinates at the last minute, and dare
Speaker 1: the bombers to find it. This was before sophisticated radar
Speaker 1: and navigation aids. To find a battleship you had to
Speaker 1: see it with your eyes, then hit its narrow decks
Speaker 1: with a bomb from thousands of feet up, all the
Speaker 1: while flying at hundreds of miles an hour. The Navy
Speaker 1: was not enthusiastic. Finally, they agreed that they would have
Speaker 1: an exercise and it would be in August off the
Speaker 1: West coast. In August, off the West coast, there's nothing
Speaker 1: but fog for a thousand miles out there, and they
Speaker 1: deliberately picked it the best time. I'm sure how could
Speaker 1: you spot a battleship in a thousand miles of fog.
Speaker 1: To make matters worse, the Navy bent the rules. The
Speaker 1: agreement was to have the war game run for twenty
Speaker 1: four hours from noon the first day until noon the next,
Speaker 1: but the Navy didn't give out the coordinates of its ship,
Speaker 1: the uss Utah, until late the first afternoon, and the
Speaker 1: coordinates they gave were wrong, off by sixty miles. A
Speaker 1: thousand miles of fog, late directions, fake directions, a needle
Speaker 1: in a haystack would have been easier at ten minutes
Speaker 1: before noon. At the very last moment, Lemai found the
Speaker 1: ship and dropped his bombs. Now, of course he found
Speaker 1: the ship. There was nothing Lemi could not do if
Speaker 1: he put his mind to it. That's not the point
Speaker 1: of the story. The point is what happened before he
Speaker 1: dropped his bombs. The Navy was certain they couldn't be found,
Speaker 1: so they took no precautions. The sailors were all over
Speaker 1: the decks, going about their business. They were supposed to
Speaker 1: take cover in a bombing exercise. They didn't. So what
Speaker 1: did Lemill do. He bombed the Utah anyway, raining fifty
Speaker 1: pound water bombs down on the sailors, and the Navy
Speaker 1: was so sure they weren't going to be found. I
Speaker 1: don't know if that fog by, but the men were
Speaker 1: all over the decks, everybody diving for the gang black
Speaker 1: hatches and way hard. Rumors that there are a few
Speaker 1: people heard a little bit. Imagine how other types of
Speaker 1: leaders might have handled the decision to bomb after seeing
Speaker 1: sailors out in the deck. The thinker would have understood
Speaker 1: the moral dimensions of willingly harming one of your own
Speaker 1: in the course of a routine training exercise. The charismatic
Speaker 1: leader would have wondered, what will my own men think
Speaker 1: of me if they see that I am capable of
Speaker 1: such a casual act of brutality. But the problem solver.
Speaker 1: The problem was to find the Utah and bomb it,
Speaker 1: and so he bombs it. I'd rather have somebody who
Speaker 1: was real stopid or did something. I think it was wrong.
Speaker 1: He did something, and I have somebody who wouldvs late
Speaker 1: do nothing. You cannot do nothing in the world view
Speaker 1: of the problem solver, even if what you end up
Speaker 1: doing is horrifying. In his memoirs, le May says they
Speaker 1: were rumors for years at some sailors got killed in
Speaker 1: the bombing exercise of nineteen thirty seven, and then he says, quote,
Speaker 1: I remember watching the first bomb which smashed into the deck.
Speaker 1: It sent splintered pieces of wood flying in every direction.
Speaker 1: I hadn't realized that wood could frag like that. It
Speaker 1: was a learning opportunity. Who knew wood reacted that way.
Speaker 1: He files that fact away and goes on to the
Speaker 1: next problem. In the first years of the Second World War,
Speaker 1: the American fight against the Japanese was defined by a
Speaker 1: single fact. Japan was beyond the reach of the US
Speaker 1: Air Force. The American workhorse bomber was the B seventeen.
Speaker 1: It had a range of roughly two thousand miles that's
Speaker 1: a thousand miles out and a thousand miles back. Now
Speaker 1: look at a map of the world from say, January
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty four, and try and find an air
Speaker 1: base controlled by the Allies that is within a thousand
Speaker 1: miles of Oko. You can't. And if you can't reach Japan,
Speaker 1: how on earth are you going to defeat them? This
Speaker 1: solution comes in two parts. This is where it began,
Speaker 1: here in the exact geographic center of the United States,
Speaker 1: Grand Island, Nebraska. That voice sounds familiar, doesn't it. It's
Speaker 1: front of Reagan. Long before he became president, Reagan narrated
Speaker 1: newsreels during the Second World War. The men were brought
Speaker 1: here from every corner of the country and a few
Speaker 1: corners outside the country. There were a hand picked American
Speaker 1: mixture of draftees and west pointers, of butchers, teachers, and bankers,
Speaker 1: of your son's husbands and fathers. In the newsreel, we
Speaker 1: see soldiers arriving in barracks, handsome crisp uniforms, all gazing
Speaker 1: up at a magnificent, sent gleaming airplane. She was a
Speaker 1: B twenty nine, the superport designed to carry more destruction
Speaker 1: and carry it higher, faster, farther than any bomber ever
Speaker 1: built before, and to complete this mission, that's exactly what
Speaker 1: she was going to have to do. She The B
Speaker 1: twenty nine was one of the great achievements of the
Speaker 1: American war effort, an enormous bomber dedicated entirely to the
Speaker 1: fight against the Japanese. In the war specific theater, the
Speaker 1: B twenty nine's range fifty six hundred miles much better
Speaker 1: than its predecessor. So then came the second step. In
Speaker 1: the summer of nineteen forty four, in some of the
Speaker 1: most brutal fighting of the war, the Marines captured three
Speaker 1: tiny specks in the middle of the Western Pacific, the
Speaker 1: Mariana Islands, Guam, Saipan and Tinian. Why were they captured
Speaker 1: because the mary Is with thirteen hundred and forty two
Speaker 1: miles from Tokyo, straight shot across the ocean. Put the
Speaker 1: B twenty nine together with the Marianas, and overnight the
Speaker 1: odds of beating Japan shifted. June nineteen forty four is
Speaker 1: a arguably the most important month of the war. You
Speaker 1: have D Day and where we go ashore northwest Europe,
Speaker 1: you have the invasion of the Marianas and the Pacific.
Speaker 1: The final break breaking of the internal defense line of
Speaker 1: the Japanese, the fall of the Tojo government because of that,
Speaker 1: So all that stuff happens in that same month. Throughout
Speaker 1: the summer and fall of nineteen forty four, the Navy
Speaker 1: built massive bases on each of the captured islands of
Speaker 1: the Marianas. The biggest base contained the largest airport in
Speaker 1: the world that was on Tinian six runways, the equivalent
Speaker 1: of three Boulder dams worth of concrete, and when they
Speaker 1: were finished, the military again flying in brand new B
Speaker 1: twenty nine bombers, hundreds of them. Their final base was
Speaker 1: no longer a mystery, four thousand miles farther west, with
Speaker 1: only one refueling stop on the way, lay the island
Speaker 1: of Saipan. Less than four months before, it had still
Speaker 1: been in the hands of the Japanese. To head up
Speaker 1: the newly created B twenty nine strike force known as
Speaker 1: the twenty first Bomber Command, the military brass brought in
Speaker 1: a high priest of the bomber mafia, a brilliant young
Speaker 1: general named Haywood Hansel. Haywood Hansel came from an aristocratic
Speaker 1: Southern military family. His great grandfather was a general in
Speaker 1: the Confederate Army. His grandfather a Confederate officer. Hansel's father
Speaker 1: had been an army surgeon who came to dinner in
Speaker 1: a white linen suit and a panama hat. Hansel himself
Speaker 1: was a skilled dancer, a poet, and an afficionado of
Speaker 1: Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His favorite book was Don Quixote.
Speaker 1: He felt a connection with the knight tilting at windmills.
Speaker 1: He put flying first, Polo second, and family a distant third.
Speaker 1: Once the story goes early in his marriage, he heard
Speaker 1: a baby cry and turned to his wife, what's that sound.
Speaker 1: That's your son, she said. He liked to carry a
Speaker 1: swagger stick, like the English army officers did. As a child,
Speaker 1: he was nicknamed Possum because of the narrowness of his face.
Speaker 1: The name stuck. On his final mission as a pilot,
Speaker 1: a bombing run over Belgium, Hansel entertained his exhausted crew
Speaker 1: with a rendition of the popular music hall song The
Speaker 1: Man on the Flying Trapeze. This is the most famous version.
Speaker 1: Eddie canters. He floats through the air with the greatest aviase,
Speaker 1: this daring young man, and I'm the flying trappee. His
Speaker 1: actions are graceful old girls. He does please, and my
Speaker 1: love was stolen away. Of all the bombing fundamentalists to
Speaker 1: come out of the Air Corps tactical school, Hayward Hansel
Speaker 1: was the truest believer the idealist air power, intelligently and
Speaker 1: surgically deployed could bring any enemy to its knees well.
Speaker 1: The first operation against Japam was called San Antonio one.
Speaker 1: It was coordinated with the joint CHESUS staff strategy, which
Speaker 1: made the timing extremely important. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 1: we were going. We were in some danger of standing
Speaker 1: a fallen on this operation. When Possum Hansel takes over
Speaker 1: in the Marianas in nineteen forty four, he says to himself,
Speaker 1: what is the critical vulnerability of the Japanese war economy?
Speaker 1: What can Manu be twenty ninth attack? The answer to
Speaker 1: him is obvious the Japanese air craft manufacturing plants, which
Speaker 1: are almost entirely concentrated in a few factories in and
Speaker 1: around Tokyo, in particular the Nakajima Aircraft Company known as Subru. Today,
Speaker 1: Nakajima made at least a third of all Japanese combat
Speaker 1: aircraft engines. Hansel said, let's hit Nakajima, and we'll cripple
Speaker 1: the Japanese fighting force. The newsreel Ronald Reagan narrated is
Speaker 1: all about that first attack by Hansel and Nakajima. Six
Speaker 1: hours later, through the clouds they saw it Bujiyama. Here
Speaker 1: comes some modern symbols, phosphorus bombs and flank. The b
Speaker 1: twenty ninths traveled fifteen hundred miles from the Marianas, skimming
Speaker 1: over the ocean at several thousand feet. As they approached Japan,
Speaker 1: they climbed to twenty five or thirty thousand feet out
Speaker 1: of harm's way. They turned at Mount Fuji, then came
Speaker 1: in from the west over Tokyo. Here, speaking over aerial
Speaker 1: shots of the city, Reagan lays it on thick. Within
Speaker 1: a radius of fifteen miles of the Imperial Palace live
Speaker 1: seven million Japanese, a people we used to think of
Speaker 1: a small, dainty, polite concerning themselves only with floral arrangements
Speaker 1: and rock gardens and the cultivation of silkworms. But it
Speaker 1: isn't silkworms, and it isn't imperial palaces these men are
Speaker 1: looking for in the suburbs of Tokyo. Is the huge
Speaker 1: Nakajima aircraft plant. Well, Bud, what are you waiting for?
Speaker 1: Like I said, he dated on a little thick That
Speaker 1: first mission San Antonio one was hugely symbolic proof that
Speaker 1: Japan could finally be reached, but was it as success
Speaker 1: as a military operation? After the war, Speaking to cadets
Speaker 1: at the Air Force Academy, Hansel tried to put a
Speaker 1: good face on things. The operation wasn't good, had liked,
Speaker 1: but unoficial help. Ah, it did show it could be done,
Speaker 1: and this was a very very doubtful issue at the time.
Speaker 1: The operation wasn't as good as we would have liked,
Speaker 1: was to say the least, an understatement. None of the
Speaker 1: bombs dropped by Hansel's B twenty ninths actually hit the
Speaker 1: Nakajima plant, so Hansel tried again three days later, same thing.
Speaker 1: Hansel sent mission after mission. On one of his last attempts,
Speaker 1: he went back with seventy two B twenty ninths. They
Speaker 1: missed the plant and hit a hospital. Heyward Hansel couldn't
Speaker 1: solve the problem because the problem was much bigger than
Speaker 1: anyone at the time understood. Long after the war, one
Speaker 1: of Hayward Hansel's B twenty nine pilots. Lieutenant Ed Hyatt
Speaker 1: was interviewed for a documentary by the BBC. After flying
Speaker 1: six hours, we climbed up to bombing altitude. We climbed
Speaker 1: up to thirty seven thousand feet and just as we
Speaker 1: broke out of the storm, there's Mount Fuji sitting right
Speaker 1: in front of us, and it's a gorgeous side. It
Speaker 1: really is. Hyatt tried to describe what went wrong on
Speaker 1: those first B twenty nine precision attacks on Tokyo. His bombardier,
Speaker 1: a man named Glenn, starts to make his calculations on
Speaker 1: their bomb side, lining up the Nakajima factory, but the
Speaker 1: telescope on the bomb side wouldn't line up. They turned
Speaker 1: around and he said, he said, I can't get this
Speaker 1: damned telescope on the target. And so we called a
Speaker 1: radar operator check our ground speed and see what our
Speaker 1: ground speed is. He came back and he says, we
Speaker 1: got one hundred and twenty five tail win. He said,
Speaker 1: we're going about four hundred and eighty miles an hour.
Speaker 1: It's impossible, it can't be. There's no wins like that.
Speaker 1: New Air Force pilots had ever experienced. What was now
Speaker 1: happening to the B twenty nine bombers over Japan. They
Speaker 1: expected winds a fraction of these speeds. We're going four
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty miles an hour when we should be
Speaker 1: going three hundred and forty miles an hour. I said, well,
Speaker 1: Glenn dropped the damn bombs. He dropped the bombs, and
Speaker 1: we were all ready twelve miles past the target because
Speaker 1: of that wind. They were bewildered, and back at base
Speaker 1: they couldn't explain what happened to their superiors. They debriefed us.
Speaker 1: They gave us a third degree. They said, no, there
Speaker 1: is no such thing. There can't be a wind like that.
Speaker 1: You're a lion. You didn't make it over the target.
Speaker 1: You're just making this up. But one crew after another
Speaker 1: they were arrived back at the Marianas and told the
Speaker 1: exact same story. To tell you how powerful these winds were.
Speaker 1: A reconnaissance plane went up one time to take some
Speaker 1: pictures after a mission to see how effective they'd been,
Speaker 1: and the navigator called the pilot and told him they
Speaker 1: were going three miles an hour backwards. That was something
Speaker 1: you couldn't afford to do, because if you went from
Speaker 1: east to west, you were going to be a sitting
Speaker 1: duck for Japanese fighters or their flag. To solve that puzzle,
Speaker 1: Hansel turned to his team of meteorologists. They'd all been
Speaker 1: trained at the University of Chicago. Back then, in the
Speaker 1: days before sophisticated radar, meteorologists were crucial to the success
Speaker 1: of bombing campaigns. If you were doing a daylight bombing
Speaker 1: run over a city, you had to see the target
Speaker 1: in orders to line up the bomb site, and if
Speaker 1: the skies were too cloudy, that was impossible. So going
Speaker 1: or not going on a mission hinged on the weather forecast.
Speaker 1: But the tools available to meteorologists of that era were crude.
Speaker 1: The easiest thing to forget about the Second World War
Speaker 1: is that it was another technological era. It's half twentieth
Speaker 1: century and half nineteenth century. The chief tool of the
Speaker 1: meteorologists of that time were balloons weather balloons that would
Speaker 1: float up into the atmosphere, carrying little instrument kits that
Speaker 1: could record the wind, the temperature, and the humidity and
Speaker 1: transmit that information back to Earth. I asked John Lewis
Speaker 1: about those days. He's a scientist at the Desert Research
Speaker 1: Institute in Nevada. He knew a number of the meteorologists
Speaker 1: who worked with the Air Force during the war. Are
Speaker 1: these balloons they forgive me, it's a very naive question.
Speaker 1: Are they connected by a rope or are they just
Speaker 1: free floating? Oh? No, their relays they'll eventually as the
Speaker 1: pressure gets lower, as the balloon goes higher in the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: they expand, expand, expand. Kaboom, they explode and they fall
Speaker 1: to the ground with the instrument attached. And at that
Speaker 1: time they had a message on all the instrument packages,
Speaker 1: could you please return this to the University of Chicago
Speaker 1: in the Pacific field of war. That technique wasn't going
Speaker 1: to work. So there they were, the meteorologists in the
Speaker 1: middle of the Pacific with one of the most important
Speaker 1: jobs in the whole outfit, figuring out when to send
Speaker 1: the bombers, and they're baffled, what's with these winds? On
Speaker 1: a theoretical level, do they have a suspicion that there
Speaker 1: may be very very high winds at high altitudes that
Speaker 1: the Air Force or is it that they don't reach
Speaker 1: that conclusion until the pilots come back with there They
Speaker 1: did not reach the conclusions until the pilots came back.
Speaker 1: What slowly became clear is that the pilots had stumbled
Speaker 1: on a previously unknown phenomenon in the upper atmosphere, what
Speaker 1: came to be known as the jet stream, a river
Speaker 1: of fast blowing air. It circles the globe starting at
Speaker 1: around twenty thousand feet. Some scientists had theorized about the
Speaker 1: jet stream, but until the B twenty nine was built,
Speaker 1: almost no one had ever flown at altitudes high enough
Speaker 1: to experience those winds firsthand. This fast stream of air,
Speaker 1: very narrow, moves from north to south in both hemispheres. Basically,
Speaker 1: it is dividing the very cold air of the polar
Speaker 1: regions from the more warm middle latitude and equatorial air. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When you say very narrow, how narrow, I would say
Speaker 1: typically two hundred kilometers across something on that order. So
Speaker 1: that's the narrowness of it. And did it entirely in
Speaker 1: circle Earth? It does? So what is the problem facing
Speaker 1: the pilots gathered on the marianas that in the winter
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty four and the early spring of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five, this narrow hurricane force band of air known
Speaker 1: as a jet stream, happens to be directly over Japan,
Speaker 1: and that makes it impossible for Hansel to do any
Speaker 1: of the precision bombing that he had planned to do.
Speaker 1: If they fly across it, the plane will get blown sideways.
Speaker 1: If they fly into it, they'll be fighting to stay
Speaker 1: aloft and be easy targets for the Japanese. And if
Speaker 1: they fly with it, they'll be racing too fast to
Speaker 1: take proper aim. In the service of a conviction that
Speaker 1: bombing could bring Japan to its knees. Thousands of Marines
Speaker 1: had been killed in the fight to capture the Marianas.
Speaker 1: The construction of the three island air bases had been
Speaker 1: one of the most intensive engineering feats of the war.
Speaker 1: The B twenty nine was a three billion dollar project
Speaker 1: that's forty three billion in today's money. All of that
Speaker 1: investment in the air war against the Japanese by December
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty four had come up empty. Hansel and
Speaker 1: all the other brass and the Marianas were bewildered. When
Speaker 1: a true believer discovers that his God cannot save him,
Speaker 1: what's left nothing Heywood. Hansel was finished. In January of
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five, Hansel was relieved of his post as
Speaker 1: head of the twenty first bomber command in his place
Speaker 1: was put the man you bring in when all else
Speaker 1: has failed Curtis LeMay. Even decades later, Possum hanselwood Bristle,
Speaker 1: when asked about the circumstances of his departure and the
Speaker 1: person who replaced him in the Pacific, he had taught
Speaker 1: LeMay at the Air Courts Tactical School and was his
Speaker 1: commanding officer in Europe. Here's Hansel again at the Air
Speaker 1: Force Academy in nineteen sixty seven. He's just been asked
Speaker 1: to name who he felt were the finest officers of
Speaker 1: his generation. Among the people who I knew in my
Speaker 1: military career, I would say the three horg standing ones,
Speaker 1: John Marshall, John Drews, and John Farton. And they were.
Speaker 1: They were outstanding for pretty much the same reason they
Speaker 1: were on a character. They were obviously intelligent man, but
Speaker 1: they were not an enormous personal integrity and character. General
Speaker 1: May was one of your group commanded. I thought, if
Speaker 1: you didn't put him in this last group, well exactly.
Speaker 1: LeMay was not a patrician with a swagger stick. He
Speaker 1: did not read savantes and sing musical theater to his
Speaker 1: crew at the end of long missions. He had no
Speaker 1: time for demonstrations of personal integrity and character. He had
Speaker 1: a problem to solve when he takes over the twenty
Speaker 1: first Bartman command. When he first arrives in the marianas
Speaker 1: he does not have his eventual strategy worked out, his
Speaker 1: mind is still open. Yes, Zach, Yeah, that is correct.
Speaker 1: I'm talking again with the military historian Conrad Crane about
Speaker 1: Curtis LeMay after he takes over command from General Hayward
Speaker 1: Hansel in January of nineteen forty five. I'm really curious
Speaker 1: to reconstruct his thought process, how he all the reasons
Speaker 1: why he arrives at the strategy finally arrives at So
Speaker 1: he begins by does he begin by doing exactly what
Speaker 1: Hansel had done? Well, he walks in and he looks
Speaker 1: around and sees the primitive nature of the facilities that
Speaker 1: said this won't do. Lemaie is not happy with the
Speaker 1: military's infrastructure on the marianas it was all built by
Speaker 1: the Navy's construction Battalion, the Seabees. Lemaie has lost none
Speaker 1: of his disdain for the Navy, the people who cheated
Speaker 1: in the bombing exercise. Years before he gets invited to
Speaker 1: to have dinner with the Admiral Nimitz, who also is
Speaker 1: headquartered in Marianna's And he goes over to Nimbus's place
Speaker 1: and he's into ornate almost a palace, and he gets
Speaker 1: fed on the very formal naval style dinner with the
Speaker 1: table cloths and being served and everything. So he invites
Speaker 1: the Admiral Nimitts to visit him for dinner in the
Speaker 1: next couple of days, and Admiral Nimitz shows up for
Speaker 1: his dinner and they're sitting at a concert hut on
Speaker 1: a couple of crates, eating sea rations, and at the
Speaker 1: end of the end of the meal, Nimitz looks at
Speaker 1: LeMay and says, I get your point. And then he
Speaker 1: started sending more construction materials lem to help finish up
Speaker 1: the rest of the facilities. By the early spring of
Speaker 1: nineteen footy five, LeMay was ready. He starts out by
Speaker 1: trying his own version of the strategy taken by his predecessor.
Speaker 1: He decides to take out the Nakajima aircraft planned in Tokyo.
Speaker 1: His perception is is that he's still expected to do
Speaker 1: high altitude precision bombing, so he's going to do everything
Speaker 1: he can to make sure that our altitude precision bombing
Speaker 1: is going to be more effective. Le May sends two
Speaker 1: missions against Nikajima in January, one in February another in
Speaker 1: early March. Hundreds of B twenty nine is making the
Speaker 1: long trek to Japan, and in the end the plant
Speaker 1: is still standing. He's run up against the same obstacle
Speaker 1: as Hansel did. How can I force a Japanese surrender
Speaker 1: from the air if I can't hit anything. But when
Speaker 1: he realizes he's fixed all those problems, there's nothing else
Speaker 1: he can tweak, you know, he says, Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try something different. Le May's first realization is that the
Speaker 1: jet stream is a powerful force. It can't be wished away,
Speaker 1: and it's making everything else impossible. The first principle of
Speaker 1: precision bombing doctrine is that the bomber should come in high,
Speaker 1: well above the range of enemy fire and anti aircraft guns.
Speaker 1: LeMay throws it out the window. He decides the B
Speaker 1: twenty ninths will have to fly at lower altitudes under
Speaker 1: the jet stream, and once he realizes he's going to
Speaker 1: have to go to lower altitude, then that leads to
Speaker 1: a whole set of other conclusions from that next logical step.
Speaker 1: Precision bombing was supposed to be daylight bombing. You needed
Speaker 1: to see the target before you could line up the
Speaker 1: bomb site. But if LeMay's bombers came in low during
Speaker 1: the day, they would be sitting ducks for the Japanese
Speaker 1: air defenses. So he decides they have to come under
Speaker 1: cover of night. Once you realize you can't go to
Speaker 1: high altitude anymore, it drives kind of the rest of
Speaker 1: his decision process. Jet stream means low, low means night,
Speaker 1: and the decision to switch to night raids means you
Speaker 1: can't do precision bombing anymore, because there's no way with
Speaker 1: the technology of the time that a bombing crew would
Speaker 1: be able to focus on any precise target if they
Speaker 1: couldn't see it. So, just like that, Curtis Lemai does
Speaker 1: in About Face, the man who came of age in
Speaker 1: the high church of precision bombing decides, at the most
Speaker 1: crucial juncture of his career to abandon his faith to
Speaker 1: bomb indiscriminately to become an area bomber. And what weapon
Speaker 1: would he use for that task? He knew as well
Speaker 1: as anyone the reports from the Army testing grounds back
Speaker 1: in America, where perfect replicas of Japanese towns had been
Speaker 1: incinerated by Harvard's new wonder weapon. The whole plan is
Speaker 1: so radical that when LeMay sends a copy of it
Speaker 1: to Washington for the approval of his boss, General Happ Arnold,
Speaker 1: he makes sure it arrives on a day when Arnold
Speaker 1: isn't in his office, so he can get that initial
Speaker 1: raid off before Arnold Roy has a chance to look
Speaker 1: at it very much because he realized he's taken a
Speaker 1: risky nines are very valuable. It's very risky. You're talking
Speaker 1: about going in at night, low altitude. He leaves most
Speaker 1: of the ammunition and gunners behind. Crucial fact. The only
Speaker 1: thing Lemai lets his pilots have to defend themselves is
Speaker 1: a tailgunner. All other guns are removed. He wants to
Speaker 1: save as much weight as possible for bombs. In the
Speaker 1: Air Force archives, it is possible to find interviews from
Speaker 1: long ago with pilots who remember the day when Lemi
Speaker 1: told them what was going to happen that night, and
Speaker 1: they were just a gasp in the audience because you
Speaker 1: never thought about doing anything ship high altitude flying. This
Speaker 1: is a b twenty nine navigator named David Braden, and
Speaker 1: you went out and the bottom of your aircraft had
Speaker 1: been painted black. So you do this is going to
Speaker 1: be a different thing. Most of the guys thought it
Speaker 1: was the suicide mission, and Braden's commander, Curtis le Maaey
Speaker 1: know this was going to work. Of course he didn't,
Speaker 1: but remember his words, the credo of the man who
Speaker 1: gets things done. I'd rather have someone who was real
Speaker 1: stupid but did something than have someone who'd vacillate and
Speaker 1: do nothing. Curtis le Maay was going to do something.
Speaker 1: He was going to erry a bomb Tokyo under cover
Speaker 1: of night with napalm. Oh. I woke up one day
Speaker 1: and I've been up there for about two months. I
Speaker 1: had done anything much, yet I'd better do something. I
Speaker 1: wonder if this is why le Maae fascinated so many
Speaker 1: people in his day, because of his ability to make
Speaker 1: that sudden turn, to turn his back on who he
Speaker 1: was in the service of solving the problem. Curtis le
Speaker 1: Maay was a member of the bombing Mafia, a graduate
Speaker 1: of the Air Corps Tactical School, a proponent of precision
Speaker 1: bombing progress unhindered by custom later in his career he
Speaker 1: would champion something called the B seventy Bomber, an airplane
Speaker 1: so absurdly complicated, so ridiculously advanced, so preposterously expensive, and
Speaker 1: so deliciously and fantastically tricked out that the Air Force
Speaker 1: only built two prototypes, one of which crashed. The other
Speaker 1: has spent his entire life in a museum. LeMay was
Speaker 1: in his heart always the little boy who ran after
Speaker 1: airplanes in the sky, and yet when he needed to,
Speaker 1: he could take all that, his entire identity, the modern, progressive,
Speaker 1: skilled warmaker, and throw it out the window. There remain
Speaker 1: where did the idea for the low level fire attacks originate? Ah?
Speaker 1: Where he had ideas flying back and forth a lot.
Speaker 1: It was my basic decision. Nobody said anything about night
Speaker 1: Sanduray bombing. I we had to have some resolves, and
Speaker 1: I had to produce them. I didn't produce them. I
Speaker 1: made long Ast get another commander in there. That's what
Speaker 1: happened to Hansel got no results them. That's a reason
Speaker 1: for it. On the night of March ninth, nineteen forty five,
Speaker 1: Curtis LeMay launched Operation Meeting House. He sent three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty four B twenty ninths from the Marianas to Tokyo,
Speaker 1: loaded with as much napalm as they could carry. The
Speaker 1: target was not the Nakajima aircraft plant. That plan was over.
Speaker 1: The new target was a densely populated region of Tokyo
Speaker 1: straddling the Simida River, a few miles east of the
Speaker 1: Imperial Palace Zone one. The first few bombers dropped flares
Speaker 1: marking the target area for those that followed. LeMay was
Speaker 1: sending in his bombers at five thousand feet incredibly low.
Speaker 1: That was so crazy that the Japanese were completely unprepared.
Speaker 1: The bombs fell from the B twenty nines in clusters.
Speaker 1: They were small steel pipes twenty inches long, weighing six pounds,
Speaker 1: packed with TNT and napalm, little baby bombs, each with
Speaker 1: a long silver gauze streamer at one end, so that
Speaker 1: if you looked in the sky that night in Tokyo,
Speaker 1: there would have been a moment of extraordinary beauty, thousands
Speaker 1: of these little silver daggers falling down to earth and
Speaker 1: then boom on impact. Thousands of small explosions, burning gloves
Speaker 1: of napomb thrown in every direction, All told by morning
Speaker 1: one thousand, six hundred and sixty five tons of napalm
Speaker 1: dropped on Tokyo in one night. Circling above Tokyo is
Speaker 1: the master bomber LeMay's deputy, Tommy Power, choreographing the attack.
Speaker 1: Conrad Crane says that Powers sat in his cockpit drawing
Speaker 1: pictures of everything he saw. He remarked, you know, the
Speaker 1: aero's soulful of and center areas. You could not have
Speaker 1: walked through them. By two thirty seven, the largest visual
Speaker 1: fire areas was about forty blocks long and fifteen wide.
Speaker 1: The smoke was up to twenty five thousand feet. When
Speaker 1: he draws his last sketch, which is about an hour
Speaker 1: after initial his first one, there's basically a score of
Speaker 1: separate areas from fifty to one thousand city blocks burning
Speaker 1: at the same time, and his last part last report
Speaker 1: says that the glow from the fires was visible one
Speaker 1: hundred fifty miles away. The napomb creates a firestorm, a
Speaker 1: conflagration hundreds of blocks long, a fire of such intensity
Speaker 1: and duration that it creates and sustains its own wind system.
Speaker 1: Everything burns sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before
Speaker 1: the fire even reaches them. After the war, the US
Speaker 1: Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following, Probably more persons lost
Speaker 1: their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour
Speaker 1: period than any time in the history of man. More
Speaker 1: than one hundred thousand people died that night. Frankly, well,
Speaker 1: those cities were all fire. It looked like you're looking
Speaker 1: into the mouth of hill. I mean, you should not
Speaker 1: imagine a fire that big. Over the course of the
Speaker 1: spring and summer of nineteen forty five, LeMay went on
Speaker 1: to firebomb another sixty six Japanese cities in the chaos
Speaker 1: of war. The dead were never counted. The final toll
Speaker 1: may be as high as half a million. They're about
Speaker 1: five thousand feet. They are pretty loved. They are low
Speaker 1: enough that the the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft.
Speaker 1: They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land
Speaker 1: back in the Marianas because the smell of burning flesh
Speaker 1: remains within the aircraft. Two cities were spared, Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Speaker 1: They were left for another day and another Air Force
Speaker 1: command with a different idea of how to win a war.
Speaker 1: On August fifteenth, nineteen forty five. At twelve noons, the
Speaker 1: Emperor of Japan surrendered. The Air force was asked to
Speaker 1: bring Japan to its knees from the air so that
Speaker 1: a ground invasion could be avoided. They succeeded. Next week
Speaker 1: the reckoning When you burn alive hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: civilians in the course of a military objective, what happens next?
Speaker 1: Provisionist History is produced by mil LaBelle and Lee Mingustu,
Speaker 1: with Jacob Smith, Eloise Lynton and On and I'm our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering
Speaker 1: by Flawn Williams, fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks
Speaker 1: to the Pushkin crew had a fine Carly Migliore, Maya Kanig,
Speaker 1: Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm
Speaker 1: Malcolm Blecko.