Speaker 1: Pushkin. It's July nineteen sixty one, an official ceremony at
Speaker 1: the White House. President Kennedy stands at the microphone, dark suit,
Speaker 1: white shirt, thin black tie. Next to him is a
Speaker 1: second man, shorter, wide through the chest, large square head,
Speaker 1: hair parted triumphantly just off the middle, a thicket of
Speaker 1: decorations on the left breast of his uniform. I want
Speaker 1: to express our great pleasure at the assumption of this
Speaker 1: responsibility by General LeMay Curtis Emerson LeMay. He was one
Speaker 1: of the most distinguished combat commanders in World War Two.
Speaker 1: He played a most instrumental role in developing you knew
Speaker 1: its present. I peak as the great shield of the
Speaker 1: United States in the free world. So, General, you want
Speaker 1: to say that, speaking personally and also as president, that
Speaker 1: it's a great pleasure to welcome you as the new
Speaker 1: Chief of Staff the United States Air Force and member
Speaker 1: of the Joint Chief of Staff. The old cliche says
Speaker 1: that history is written by the victors, and that line
Speaker 1: of Kennedy's he was one of the most distinguished combat
Speaker 1: commanders of World War Two is exhibit A. Distinguished refers
Speaker 1: to the events of nineteen forty five when LEAMAI ordered
Speaker 1: a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths of half
Speaker 1: a million Japanese civilians. In a candid moment, LeMay once
Speaker 1: told one of his subordinates, if we lose this war,
Speaker 1: we'll be tried as war criminals, which is almost certainly true.
Speaker 1: But they didn't lose. They won. After the war, Lema
Speaker 1: joined District Air Command Sack, where he was responsible for
Speaker 1: most of America's nuclear arsenal at a time when war
Speaker 1: with the Soviet Union seemed imminent. Then in nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: he became head of the whole Air Force. Standing next
Speaker 1: to Kennedy on the podium, a surprise, I appreciate very much.
Speaker 1: They're taking a time off from your busy schedule to
Speaker 1: participate them and this ceremony. I'm sure you'll realize that
Speaker 1: a number of the armed services are becoming cheap as
Speaker 1: sass as his service as the highest honor that can
Speaker 1: come to him. LEMI didn't get tried as a war criminal.
Speaker 1: He got promoted. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening
Speaker 1: to Revisionist History, my podcast about Things Overlooked and Misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This is the and final installment in my mini series
Speaker 1: about Curtis LeMay and the super weapon known as Napalm.
Speaker 1: I never intended to devote four episodes to this story.
Speaker 1: I was originally going to do just one. Then one
Speaker 1: episode became two, and two became three, and then I
Speaker 1: was at four because I kept expecting the story to
Speaker 1: come to some kind of appropriate resolution and it didn't.
Speaker 1: I mean, if you kill half a million civilians, something
Speaker 1: should happen, shouldn't it. And then in the middle of everything,
Speaker 1: I went to Tokyo for another reason entirely, and decided
Speaker 1: to visit a little private museum off a side street,
Speaker 1: the only museum in the world dedicated entirely to the
Speaker 1: bombing campaign that burned Tokyo in nineteen forty five. And upstairs,
Speaker 1: in a plane room with linoleum floors that looks like
Speaker 1: a public school classroom, there's a long scroll on the wall,
Speaker 1: beautiful Japanese calligraphy that broke my heart. Da sun Kyo MARINAI.
Speaker 1: The clear eyed military rationale for the fire bombing of
Speaker 1: Tokyo goes something like this. The United States had no
Speaker 1: better option, nor did Japan. There was only one alternative
Speaker 1: to LeMay's long summer of burning down the cities of
Speaker 1: Japan with napalm. That would have been a ground invasion
Speaker 1: of Japan by American troops that fall, and that would
Speaker 1: have been worse, far worse. I actually gave a presentation
Speaker 1: in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a
Speaker 1: Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation at
Speaker 1: one of the your Japanese historians there stood up and
Speaker 1: said he said, in the end, he said, we must
Speaker 1: thank you Americans for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.
Speaker 1: This is the military historian Conrad Crane. That kind of
Speaker 1: took me aback, and then he explained, he said, we
Speaker 1: would have surrendered eventually anyway, but he said the impact
Speaker 1: of the massive firebombing campaign atomic bombs was that we
Speaker 1: surrendered in August, no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and
Speaker 1: the Japanese don't surrender, and if they don't surrender, the
Speaker 1: Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade and Japan gets
Speaker 1: carved up, just like Germany and the Korean Peninsula eventually were.
Speaker 1: And the other thing that would have happened is there
Speaker 1: would have been millions of Japanese that would have starved
Speaker 1: to death in the winter, because what happens is when
Speaker 1: they by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to
Speaker 1: come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan.
Speaker 1: General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific.
Speaker 1: He was the one who accepted the Japanese Emperor's surrender.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's one of Arthur's great successes, bringing in
Speaker 1: massive amount of foods to avoid starvation in the winter
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty five. Much later, in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: the Japanese government accorded LeMay one of its highest honors,
Speaker 1: the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun,
Speaker 1: for his help rebuilding their air force after the war.
Speaker 1: There was a debate in the Japanese parliament about whether
Speaker 1: the award was a good idea, but none of it
Speaker 1: centered on his campaign to burn Japanese cities with napalm.
Speaker 1: The Japanese government had moved on. Everyone moved on. Remember
Speaker 1: Hoddle from the second episode in this series. He's the
Speaker 1: MIT scientist washed and brought in to manage the bomb bakeoff.
Speaker 1: To find the very best possible fire bomb to use
Speaker 1: against the Japanese. Hoddle put together a committee of the
Speaker 1: biggest names in chemistry to create the world's greatest incendiary
Speaker 1: and after the war they scattered it. Amazing how fast
Speaker 1: people wanted to get out. They were fed up on war.
Speaker 1: Fire was still Hoddle's passion, but not burning things down,
Speaker 1: not anymore. Now his passion became stopping things from burning down.
Speaker 1: I was so saturated with fire as a weapon of destruction.
Speaker 1: When I was asked to be on a peacetime fire
Speaker 1: research committee by the Army, I was happy to say yes.
Speaker 1: The mandate of the fire Research Committee was to prevent
Speaker 1: an unquoting large urban fires and forest fires. Hoddle ran
Speaker 1: that committee for eleven years until his retirement. And what
Speaker 1: about Louis Fieser. He was the winner of the bake off,
Speaker 1: the co inventor of napalm. He went back to Harvard
Speaker 1: and resumed his duties, trained in next generation of American chemists,
Speaker 1: wrote the definitive College chemistry textbook with his wife. As
Speaker 1: for his fellow inventor, EB Hirshberg, the wizard of the laboratory,
Speaker 1: Hirshberg went to work for the Shearing Corporation, a pharmaceutical
Speaker 1: company in New Jersey. My father was not a violent person.
Speaker 1: He's a pacifist. He didn't believe in war. I'm quite
Speaker 1: sure it is to be avoided. Robert Hirshberg, EBI's son,
Speaker 1: also a scientist. He would call his father every evening
Speaker 1: and they would talk about their day in the laboratory.
Speaker 1: What would your father have when he looked across his
Speaker 1: entire career, what would he have considered his finest accomplishment,
Speaker 1: Without doubt, I think it would be pregnissonne and pregnissilone pregnisone.
Speaker 1: It's an anti inflammatory agent and aminosuppressant, one of the
Speaker 1: most widely prescribed drugs in the world. I don't know
Speaker 1: how to quantify how many lives have been saved by
Speaker 1: that drug, hundreds of thousands. It was a crucial part
Speaker 1: of the very first breakthrough in drug therapy for cancer,
Speaker 1: amil Freyreich's defeat of childhood leukemia in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: a combination therapy using methachech sate six mp vin Christine
Speaker 1: and pregnazone. Ebi Hershberg led the team that developed it
Speaker 1: was pregnazone Hirschberg's atonement for napalm. Like Hoyt Hoddle's work
Speaker 1: on the Fire Research Committee, maybe, but no one seems
Speaker 1: to have discussed it or considered it. A few years ago,
Speaker 1: the historian Robert Near went searching for a definitive account
Speaker 1: of the birth of the world's most powerful incendiary So
Speaker 1: I started looking, and it was with a kind of
Speaker 1: growing sense of disbelief that I discovered that actually there
Speaker 1: was no history of napalm. And the more research that
Speaker 1: I did on it, the more I discovered that actually,
Speaker 1: really it was true. There was no not even an
Speaker 1: article that was There was no like even a sort
Speaker 1: of academic journal article that was this is a comprehensive
Speaker 1: history of napalm. Robert Near would go to the wide
Speaker 1: new Research Library at Harvard, one of the great libraries
Speaker 1: in the world. He would see shelves of books on
Speaker 1: atomic weapons, the glamorous bomb, built a great expense by
Speaker 1: the smartest people in the world. But this particular weapon,
Speaker 1: there was no history background about it at all. He
Speaker 1: would end up running that history himself. It's called Napalm,
Speaker 1: an American Biography. What's even stranger, of course, was that
Speaker 1: he was looking for a history of napalm in the
Speaker 1: Harvard library and didn't find anything. Because Harvard was where
Speaker 1: napalm was invented. Robert Near took me to the place
Speaker 1: on campus where napalm was born. We think this is
Speaker 1: the converse laboratory right here, which is where they did
Speaker 1: the initial experiments in the basement window wells with Gelden's
Speaker 1: and there I assume there would be some indication of
Speaker 1: which of the labs along the basement hallway have belonged
Speaker 1: to Louis Fezer. But no, we peered in one window
Speaker 1: after another and had to guess it's all very chemical
Speaker 1: lab here, like a zillion pipes and the ceiling there
Speaker 1: are really window wells on this side. No, so it
Speaker 1: is this side were close, assuming that it hasn't ever been,
Speaker 1: you know, dramatically changed. But I think we're quite close
Speaker 1: in the spiritual sense, at least absolutely. Yeah. There are
Speaker 1: long lists of things. Harvard is eager to take credit
Speaker 1: for the transgenic mouse, nuclear and magnetic resonance imaging, the
Speaker 1: pacemaker defibrillators, all important, But on the weapon that played
Speaker 1: a decisive role in the biggest war of the twentieth
Speaker 1: century that burned close to half a million Japanese alive
Speaker 1: in the summer of nineteen forty five, it's not on
Speaker 1: the list. There's not even plaque. And at Harvard, I'll
Speaker 1: point out, they'll put a name on anything. There are
Speaker 1: multiple buildings at Harvard named in honor of the Sackler family,
Speaker 1: whose drug company gave the world oxycontent. So it's not
Speaker 1: like Harvard is squeamish just about napalm. Napalm has simply disappeared.
Speaker 1: And that is the final of napalm's many crimes, because
Speaker 1: it didn't actually disappear. Quite the opposite. Five years after
Speaker 1: the end of the Second World War, after the surrender
Speaker 1: of Japan, the communist back government of North Korea invaded
Speaker 1: South Korea June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty. The United Nations
Speaker 1: condemned the invasion and responded with a show of force
Speaker 1: led by the United States. And what was the strategy
Speaker 1: adopted by the US Air Force in Korea. Basically the
Speaker 1: strategy pioneered by Curtis le May over Japan. Firebomb the
Speaker 1: North Koreans with napalm until they surrender. Napalm again hot
Speaker 1: as the living enges. This is a newsreel the Navy
Speaker 1: put out in the middle of the war called this
Speaker 1: is Korea, directed by the legendary John ford, fry them out,
Speaker 1: burn them out, cook them, fry them, burn them, cook
Speaker 1: them Korea in three sentences. If you go through oral
Speaker 1: history archives, you'll find countless interviews with pilots who remember
Speaker 1: what that bombing campaign was like. Although there a lot
Speaker 1: of napalm dropped, which it was supposed to be top secret,
Speaker 1: the flight crews came up with the idea of strapping
Speaker 1: canisters of napalm to wooden pallets, then pushing them out
Speaker 1: the back of the airplane on rollers, and then the
Speaker 1: parachutes would open up the stock but descent to where
Speaker 1: you were trying to drop it. This is a pilot
Speaker 1: named Robert Billion, interviewed in nineteen ninety five for the
Speaker 1: Rutgers Oral History Archive. What they did. They went after
Speaker 1: personnel centers where they congregated the troops in North Korea
Speaker 1: when they come over, and they would let go with
Speaker 1: thirty six times fifty gallons drops and they figured they
Speaker 1: killed thousands North Korean not burning them, they suffocated them
Speaker 1: because it burned all the oxygen up in the immediate area.
Speaker 1: Napalm was engineered to burn down Japanese houses, which had
Speaker 1: allowed for the pretense that it was intended to destroy buildings,
Speaker 1: not people. In Korea, that pretense was dropped. It turned
Speaker 1: out napalm was very good at destroying people. The North
Speaker 1: Koreans were such vicious enemies and so brutal, but we
Speaker 1: took care of them, and in that war was predominant.
Speaker 1: This is Bill Sinclair, Korean War pilot, interviewed in two
Speaker 1: thousand and four by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.
Speaker 1: I will warn you the story he tells is not pleasant.
Speaker 1: I remember a particular mission when we caught a China
Speaker 1: mixed Chinese and North Korean division in the open, and
Speaker 1: we just attacked them with napalm, and we killed hundreds
Speaker 1: and hundreds of Chinese and North Korean soldiers. I couldn't
Speaker 1: see how they could possibly stand in the midst of
Speaker 1: all this conflagration. I remember distinctly one soldier standing under
Speaker 1: a little tree, and around him was just devastation. Bodies everywhere.
Speaker 1: And here's an interview with a pilot named Leonard Conia
Speaker 1: from the Korean War Legacy Foundation. But it worked, it
Speaker 1: worked well. The Chinese, Yeah, yeah, it'll just hit and
Speaker 1: ended us spreads. Well, we were closer enough that when
Speaker 1: we call it you can feel the heat from the
Speaker 1: from the nap bomb and if you get too close.
Speaker 1: You don't have to be right in it, but if
Speaker 1: you get too close it burns the oxygen out of
Speaker 1: the air. You can't breathe. These stories go on and on.
Speaker 1: There's one so graphic I'm not going to play it
Speaker 1: for you. It's about a US pilot carrying a load
Speaker 1: of napalm who crashes before he can drop it on
Speaker 1: someone else, and his fellow airman run up to the
Speaker 1: crash site and can only watch as he burns to death.
Speaker 1: In the end, the air forcing Korea ran out of targets. Literally,
Speaker 1: they had nothing left to bomb because they had burned
Speaker 1: down and bombed out virtually everything that could be burned
Speaker 1: down a bombed out. The destruction on a North Korean
Speaker 1: urban structure is massive. Historian Konrad Krane says the consequences
Speaker 1: of that bombing campaign were enormous, and in some extent
Speaker 1: that's I think a legacy we're dealing with today because
Speaker 1: part of the motivation for the North Korean pursuit of
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons is to have some kind of a deterrent
Speaker 1: to make sure that never happens again. We've heard a
Speaker 1: lot in the West about how the North Koreans are duplicitous, distrustful, irrational, secretive.
Speaker 1: Not so much about how in three short years the
Speaker 1: United States reduced their country to an ash heap. But
Speaker 1: then again, we've never talked much about napalm and the
Speaker 1: Korean War. We've never talked much about the Korean War period.
Speaker 1: It was all pushed aside. In fact, the most significant
Speaker 1: monument to that war was probably a television show, the
Speaker 1: sitcom Mash. Mash ran for eleven seasons on CBS nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two to nineteen eighty three. It was about a
Speaker 1: mobile medical unit on the front lines of the Korean War.
Speaker 1: If you're old enough, you'll remember the names of the characters,
Speaker 1: Hawkeye Pierce, Colonel Potter, Trapper, John Radar, O'Reilly hot Lips, Houlahan, Clinger.
Speaker 1: It was one of the most remarkable television shows in history, funny, dark, moving.
Speaker 1: So what does Mash have to say about napalm? I
Speaker 1: wondered very little, it turns out, with one exception. The
Speaker 1: most famous Smash episode of all, the series finale February
Speaker 1: twenty eighth, nineteen eighty three, Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen, was
Speaker 1: watched by one hundred and six million Americans, the highest
Speaker 1: rated non sports television event in history. The night the
Speaker 1: last episode was shown, we watched it on a big
Speaker 1: screen at the studio, and then we went out to
Speaker 1: dinner to celebrate. I talked to Alan Alda about it.
Speaker 1: He played Hawkeye, the show's central character, and on the
Speaker 1: way to the restaurant, Lauretta Swood was in the car
Speaker 1: with me, and I said, Lauretta looked, the streets are empty,
Speaker 1: and its suddenly dawned on us that a lot of
Speaker 1: people were probably home watching the show at that time.
Speaker 1: And what I read in the paper the next day
Speaker 1: was that in New York the waterworks were threatened because
Speaker 1: everybody went to the bathroom at the same time during
Speaker 1: the commercial break. The final episode runs two hours. It
Speaker 1: is beautiful and moving. I remember where I was when
Speaker 1: I watched it, packed into the basement TV room at
Speaker 1: my college in Toronto with what must have been a
Speaker 1: hundred other people. So after all those years, I went
Speaker 1: back and watched it again because I remembered that this
Speaker 1: was the episode that finally dealt with Napon. It comes
Speaker 1: just after the halfway point in the show, at the
Speaker 1: one hour and seven minute mark. Colonel, look at that sunset?
Speaker 1: What a beautiful ending for a beautiful day. Corporal Clinger
Speaker 1: is looking up at the sky when Colonel Potter, the
Speaker 1: Mash Unit's commanding officer, walks by. Yeah, it'd be a
Speaker 1: nice sunset of it. We're setting over there. What do
Speaker 1: you mean. Ever since I've been around, the sun's always
Speaker 1: set in the west. And what's that? Once saw that
Speaker 1: same kind of glow in the yard End forest. Next
Speaker 1: day there wasn't any forest left. You better get on
Speaker 1: the phone, die Corps. That fire's headed this way. We're
Speaker 1: headed out. Clinger runs back to the barracks. Potter stands
Speaker 1: and watches the sky. We see the fires start to rage,
Speaker 1: rabbits running for safety. It was started by incendiary bombs.
Speaker 1: It's coming straight out AH personnel, but the mash Unit
Speaker 1: has to evacuate because of a nearby napom attack. I
Speaker 1: asked Alan Alda about that plot point in the show.
Speaker 1: He directed the episode and was one of its writers.
Speaker 1: I had a very specific question without that episode, and
Speaker 1: that is when you have to evacuate the camp because
Speaker 1: of the fire. Yeah, from incendiary bombs. It's left unstated
Speaker 1: whose bombs they are. I got a call on a
Speaker 1: Saturday morning that a fire had raged through the canyon
Speaker 1: where we were shooting, and the whole shed had burned down.
Speaker 1: So I put the phone down and calmly went about
Speaker 1: writing of what we called the bugout. I think they
Speaker 1: called it a bugout in those days when the MASH
Speaker 1: unit had to move and we moved to another location,
Speaker 1: so I had to put a fire into the script
Speaker 1: to justify the move. But I forgot what the justification was.
Speaker 1: What was that a bomb had caused the fire? In
Speaker 1: mendiary bombs, Radar says, there's a fire on the way
Speaker 1: from incendiary bombs. Yeah, so you wonder which side they're from. Well,
Speaker 1: it kind of doesn't matter. Yeah, he's right, absolutely right.
Speaker 1: The great moral innovation of MASH was that it spoke
Speaker 1: out against war without taking sides. But all I could
Speaker 1: think about is that this show is what's left of
Speaker 1: America's memory of the Korean War. And when Mash finally
Speaker 1: comes around to mentioning napalm, the weapon that reduced North
Speaker 1: Korea to ashes, it gets history exactly backwards. It has
Speaker 1: Americans as napalms victims, not the Koreans, and the show
Speaker 1: doesn't mention where the napalm came from, as if it
Speaker 1: could as easily have come from anywhere, when in truth,
Speaker 1: it could only have come from the US Air Force
Speaker 1: dropping their Harvard engineered payloads from high in the sky.
Speaker 1: Later in the episode, Colonel Potter returns to the Mash
Speaker 1: camp after it's been destroyed by napalm. The Mash unit
Speaker 1: is packing up. The doctors and nurses are all going home.
Speaker 1: It is now two pm. In exactly eight hours, the
Speaker 1: Korean War will be officially over. It's a time for
Speaker 1: a summing up, and these are the most up to
Speaker 1: date figures we have. The cost of the war to
Speaker 1: the United States has been wasced at twenty two billion dollars.
Speaker 1: Look at mate, I only get three hundred a month.
Speaker 1: Potter goes one last time to the place they had
Speaker 1: lived for so many years and wanders among the ashes.
Speaker 1: The wreckage is still smoking. Potter takes off his helmet
Speaker 1: and looks around in shock. He bends over, picks up
Speaker 1: a blackened bottle, stands up again. Okay, let's get to work.
Speaker 1: That's it, We're done, Let's move on. I was one
Speaker 1: of millions of viewers who choked up at that moment,
Speaker 1: But if I were North Korean, I would have thrown
Speaker 1: a brick at the television. General Curtis LeMay disapproved of
Speaker 1: the way that Pentagon fought the war in Korea. He
Speaker 1: was in charge of the Strategic Air Command by that point,
Speaker 1: a step removed from day to day control of the war.
Speaker 1: But they were using his tactic and his war horse
Speaker 1: to be twenty nine, along with his incendiary weapon of choice, Napal.
Speaker 1: So he had opinions. He thought the whole business on
Speaker 1: the Korean Peninsula dragged on for far too long. Going
Speaker 1: in the war is a serious business, a serious decision.
Speaker 1: If you have a responsibility for doing it, you'd better
Speaker 1: buy God makes them careful evaluation before you come to
Speaker 1: the conclusion that war is the only solution to your problems.
Speaker 1: This is LeMay in retirement, holding forth and how he
Speaker 1: thought the Korean War ought to have been handled. I
Speaker 1: want you come with the business slusion that you'd better
Speaker 1: be ready to go all away. It's immoral not to
Speaker 1: use too much. If you add the capability of winning,
Speaker 1: and winning rapidly because you saved life, property, destruction, suffering,
Speaker 1: and the quicker you can end the war cold blooded
Speaker 1: hyperrational very Curtis to May, and he thought the Pentagon
Speaker 1: botched it in Korea, dragged it out too long, didn't
Speaker 1: come in hard and fast enough. So we kind of
Speaker 1: slipped the note under the door end of the Pentagon
Speaker 1: and said, look, why don't we walk there and burn
Speaker 1: down four or five of those pounds up in North Korea?
Speaker 1: And maybe they stopped as nonsense on remain business. And
Speaker 1: the answer came back unto the door, this is too horrible.
Speaker 1: You've not called them a bunch of women and shoulder noncombatants.
Speaker 1: Too horrible. The Pentagon couldn't stomach it. Now there are
Speaker 1: a hundred ways to tell the story of the Korean War.
Speaker 1: This is the Curtis LeMay version. The military ignored his suggestion,
Speaker 1: and so what should have been an intense summer fire
Speaker 1: bombing campaign stretched out over many years. We burned down
Speaker 1: every town in North Korea and South Korea too, every
Speaker 1: one of them. Now, drawing all of this time and
Speaker 1: want we do kill off twenty percent of the Korean
Speaker 1: population through direct casualties of war are indirect due to exposure,
Speaker 1: disease and my elutrition and so forth. Wow. Over a
Speaker 1: period of four and a half years. All these highly
Speaker 1: moral people are willing to kill off twenty percent of
Speaker 1: the Korean population over this period of time. But it's
Speaker 1: im moral to kill off a few people to start with,
Speaker 1: to save life, property and suffering and long. That's im moral,
Speaker 1: kill a few people to prevent that. Curtis le May
Speaker 1: on his high horse. If you spend enough time with
Speaker 1: le May, you start to see things his way. Yes,
Speaker 1: Japan was better off for being fire bummed. It spread
Speaker 1: them starvation in the Soviets. Yes, and maybe a summer
Speaker 1: of intense pain in Korea would be more since than
Speaker 1: dragging things out over four years. There's a reason LeMay
Speaker 1: rose as far and fast as he did in the
Speaker 1: US military. He could be awfully persuasive when he needed
Speaker 1: to be. But then comes Vietnam, and what does Lemai
Speaker 1: want the Air Force to do? More napalm, more bombing.
Speaker 1: Military police contain the crowd, but clashes soon break out.
Speaker 1: Federal marshalls arrest several who attempt to break through the
Speaker 1: protective line. There were anti war protests in the streets
Speaker 1: about the Air Force's use of napalm and Vietnam. From
Speaker 1: his laboratory at Harvard, the chemist Louis Feeser sent a
Speaker 1: horrified letter to President Nixon. It seems to me desirable.
Speaker 1: The co inventor of napalm wrote to try to promote
Speaker 1: an international agreement to outlaw further use of napalm or
Speaker 1: napalm type munitions. Lemai would have none of it. In
Speaker 1: his memoirs, published just before his retirement in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: he wrote this about how to defeat North Vietnam. Quote.
Speaker 1: My solution to the problem would be to tell them, frankly,
Speaker 1: that they've got to draw in their horns and stop
Speaker 1: their regression, or we're going to bomb them back into
Speaker 1: the stone age. Lemaie was saying the same thing in
Speaker 1: the nineteen sixties about Vietnam that he did in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties about Korea and the nineteen forties about Japan.
Speaker 1: Heavy bombing could lead to unconditional surrender, and unconditional surrenders
Speaker 1: save lives in the long run, even though, of course,
Speaker 1: the great lesson of Vietnam was that bombing didn't work,
Speaker 1: that air power could not defeat a determined guerrilla force
Speaker 1: in an underdeveloped country. LeMay was a problem solver, but
Speaker 1: he could not conceive of solutions that did not involve
Speaker 1: bombs and airplanes. Remember what LeMay wrote about seeing his
Speaker 1: first airplane as a little boy in Ohio. Suddenly in
Speaker 1: the air above me appeared a flying machine. It came
Speaker 1: from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it.
Speaker 1: And then he goes on. Children can muster enormous strength
Speaker 1: in ideal and idea, in all their effort to grasp
Speaker 1: the trophy they desire. And nobody was holding me back.
Speaker 1: No one was standing close to say. Look, you're just
Speaker 1: a little child. That airplane is a way up there
Speaker 1: in the air, and no matter how fast you run,
Speaker 1: you can't keep up with it. You can't reach high
Speaker 1: enough to seize it. Little Curtis ran across neighbor's backyards,
Speaker 1: vacant lots, down sidewalks, then it was gone. It's wonderful
Speaker 1: sound and force and the freakish illusion of the thing,
Speaker 1: a thing made of wood and metal piercing the air.
Speaker 1: That atuation carried LeMay all the way from working class
Speaker 1: Columbus to the command of the US Air Force. But
Speaker 1: leaders need at a certain point to move beyond their infatuations.
Speaker 1: And the great tragedy of Curtis LeMay is that he
Speaker 1: could not. I hate this word strategy. That's LeMay in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one. By strategy, he meant all of those
Speaker 1: things that you do when you're not dropping bombs from
Speaker 1: a plane. Sure, you should do some planning, and you
Speaker 1: should do some thinking, lots of it about what might
Speaker 1: happen when you get into the war. But anyone who
Speaker 1: thinks that he can sit down and with a few
Speaker 1: who learned individuals plan a strategy for the country that's
Speaker 1: going to keep him out of trouble and win the war,
Speaker 1: as well as LEXI, it's not going to happen. So
Speaker 1: don't defend on strategy and all apparent on thinking a lot.
Speaker 1: And then he says, instead of strategy, instead of thinking,
Speaker 1: what you really need is some hardware to back you up,
Speaker 1: a thing made of wooden metal piercing the air. I
Speaker 1: said way back in the first installment of this story
Speaker 1: that Curtis LeMay was a type, a prototype of the
Speaker 1: modern problem solver, the unshakable belief in technology, the narrowness
Speaker 1: of focus, the ironclad self confidence. You can find versions
Speaker 1: of LeMay everywhere these days, all equally well intentioned, all
Speaker 1: equally successful in their chosen field of battle, all equally
Speaker 1: applauded by the world around them. I applaud them too sometimes,
Speaker 1: and profit from their victories as much as you do.
Speaker 1: It's just that I would have thought that the events
Speaker 1: of March ninth and tenth, nineteen forty five would have
Speaker 1: given us pause just a little. Curtis May died in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety of a heart attack. He's buried in the
Speaker 1: US Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs, where he
Speaker 1: belongs alongside his fellow airmen. So it's exact photo after
Speaker 1: Tokyo air ride. This is it, and so here it's
Speaker 1: a sum the river, and so this area of the
Speaker 1: Hondo and this area and so here is ask In
Speaker 1: East Tokyo, on the edge of the Fukagawa District, there's
Speaker 1: a small museum. It's called the Center of the Tokyo
Speaker 1: Raids and War Damage. It's on a side street, two
Speaker 1: stories brick looks like there should be a dentist's office
Speaker 1: in it. You walk in and there's a little gift
Speaker 1: shop to the side, more like a few bookshelves, and
Speaker 1: what looks like a classroom with a bunch of folding
Speaker 1: chairs where an introductory video plays stop posted Sato your
Speaker 1: name Jersiasca. The museum is the only permanent memorial that
Speaker 1: tells the story of the devastation of Tokyo on March ninth,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty five, one of the deadliest nights in human history.
Speaker 1: There's a scale model of a B twenty nine hanging
Speaker 1: from the ceiling and an M sixty nine bomb casing
Speaker 1: open for display, and maps. Maps showing where the bombs
Speaker 1: fell and where people ran, and which way the winds
Speaker 1: blew and where the bodies were found. So many people
Speaker 1: escape Tuza Elementary School and Asama High School. Our guide
Speaker 1: caru Ito, talked about one of the spots on a map.
Speaker 1: There was an elementary school in the heart of the
Speaker 1: area bomb that night, one of the only concrete buildings
Speaker 1: in the district. So people ran there because they thought
Speaker 1: they would be safer than in the wooden buildings on
Speaker 1: fire all around them. Today. They escaped to the concrete
Speaker 1: the birding, but so inside it was a biodine, so
Speaker 1: they also carried the sheet. They were killed by the
Speaker 1: heat from the burning napalmb outside. A concrete structure in
Speaker 1: the midst of a firestorm becomes an oven. Then itto
Speaker 1: told us the story of one of the few survivors
Speaker 1: that night. He was a teacher at the school, and
Speaker 1: he had been manning the front gate, but so many
Speaker 1: people rushed in that he was knocked down, trampled. There
Speaker 1: were people on top of him. He heard screaming. He
Speaker 1: passed out. Then hours later came too, and so he
Speaker 1: noticed many people so done into the cava on him,
Speaker 1: like like the people who had trampled him had turned
Speaker 1: the carbon people on him, So tied into the cava.
Speaker 1: So with a sheet and a fire, and so only
Speaker 1: him what she survived under under amount of yeah carbon,
Speaker 1: no good ing. Oh that was left to a brick.
Speaker 1: There is no greater sadness. The teacher later became an artist.
Speaker 1: He made a scroll to memorialize what happened that night.
Speaker 1: It hangs on the wall of the Tokyo Raids Museum.
Speaker 1: You're hearing a recitation of it. The survivors were despondent,
Speaker 1: unable to find neither voice. Oh what reason can one
Speaker 1: have to kill innocent people? If you are ever in Tokyo,
Speaker 1: you should go see the scroll. Even if you haven't
Speaker 1: made up your mind about everything you've just heard about
Speaker 1: the things done in the name problem solving could have
Speaker 1: a wife from my memory in US the cries of
Speaker 1: agony of men, women and children I had at that time.
Speaker 1: Religious History is produced by Mila Bell and Leemingistu with
Speaker 1: Jacob Smith, Aloise Lynton and Onanaim. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Speaker 1: Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flawn Williams, fact
Speaker 1: checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew Hadafane,
Speaker 1: Eric Sandler, Carl Migliore, Maya ka, Nick, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrel,
Speaker 1: and of course Jacob Weisberg. Special thanks also to our
Speaker 1: voice actor Yoshia Mao, Jesse Moneihun for his help with
Speaker 1: Japanese translation. The Science History Institute, the Oral History Program
Speaker 1: Collection at the University of North Texas, Special Collections, the
Speaker 1: Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Air Force Academy, Oral
Speaker 1: History Project at the Oral History Archives at Columbia University,
Speaker 1: McDermott Library at the US Air Force Academy, and the
Speaker 1: Rutgers Oral History Archive. Thank you for listening. I'm Malcolm Glabo.