by Ashutosh Jogalekar
“Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb”, by James M. Scott
On the night of March 9, 1945, almost 300 B-29 bombers took off from Tinian Island near Japan. Over the next six hours, 100,000 civilians in Tokyo were burnt to death, more possibly than in any six hour period in history. James Scott’s “Black Snow” tells the story of this horrific event which was both a technological and a moral failure. It is also the story of how moral failures can result from technological failures, a lesson that we should take to heart in an age when we understand technology less and less and morality perhaps even lesser.
The technological failure in Scott’s story is the failure of the most expensive technological project in World War 2, the B-29 bomber. The United States spent more than $3 billion on developing this wonder of modern technology, more than on the Manhattan Project. Soaring at 30,000 feet like an impregnable iron eagle, the B-29 was supposed to drop bombs with pinpoint precision on German and Japanese factories producing military hardware.
This precision bombing was considered not only a technological achievement but a moral one. Starting with Roosevelt’s plea in 1939 after the Germans invaded Poland and started the war, it was the United States’s policy not to indiscriminately bomb civilians. The preferred way, the moral way, was to do precision bombing during daytime rather than carpet bombing during nighttime. When the British, led by Arthur “Butcher” Harris, resorted to nighttime bombing using incendiaries, it was a moral watershed. Notoriously, in Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1944, the British took advantage of the massive, large-scale fires caused by incendiaries to burn tens of thousands of civilians to death.
And yet the United States could not stay away from the moral watershed for too long. The roots of the change went back to the perceived utility of the air force. Air force evangelists like Billy Mitchell in America and Giulio Douhet in Italy were convinced that bombing alone could win wars. Their philosophy was captured in the slogan, “The Bomber will always get through.” In this view, bombers weren’t just necessary to support the army and navy, to sweep battlefields clean before the other forces moved in, but were the foolproof weapon that would render the army and navy unnecessary to begin with.
As the war progressed, clamor for winning the conflict through bombing increased. The biggest proponent of this gospel was Carl Spaatz, commander of strategic forces in Europe and then in Japan. Spaatz had lobbied for the development of the B-29 as the linchpin of U.S. strategy. He believed that fleets of bombers flying above antiaircraft defenses could bring a population to its knees by destroying key enemy production facilities. After that, the army or navy would only have to orchestrate mopping up operations.
As the old saying goes, in principle there is no difference between principle and practice but in practice there is. The best laid theories of strategic bombing winning wars crashed and burned against reality because of fundamental technological issues. The B-29 was supposed to bomb from high up using a wondrous invention, the Norden bombsight. The Norden bombsight would presumably adjust for drift in a bombardier’s calculations. What the bombardiers over Japan had not known was the jet stream, a massive current of air which was known to the Japanese but not the Americans. Pilots over Japan suddenly discovered tail winds of up to 100 miles per hour which could buffet and toss their planes and throw them off course. In such cases, even the top-secret Norden bombsight could not prevent them from dropping their bombs way off target.
The man spearheading the precision bombing effort of Japan was Haywood Hansell. Hansell, a lover of Shakespeare and the classics, was an old-fashioned soldier who believed in proportionate responses and limits to war. He knew that the precision bombing effort was going badly but did not believe in the alternative – large-scale civilian bombing. That went against United States strategy. That was the immoral thing, the wrong thing to do. But the war was going badly. As 1944 gave way to 1945, the Japanese were increasingly putting up desperate resistance. Their kamikaze pilots were launching suicidal attacks against naval ships, killing thousands. And inside the homeland, a starved, battered nation was teaching high school girls to fight with bamboo spears in anticipation of an invasion, an invasion that according to some U.S. plans could cost up to a million casualties. The American people were tired of war, the Japanese people were not planning to give up anytime soon. Haywood Hansell’s strategy was no working.
Enter Curtis “The Demon” LeMay. LeMay had grown up in Ohio through a hard scrabble childhood, working even in his teenage years in a steel plant at night and attending college during the day. As a pilot in the European theater, he quickly advanced through the ranks through sheer grit and gumption, often leading seemingly suicidal missions against Germany himself. For many in the air force, he was the biggest SOB they had ever seen, but he could get things done. His philosophy in life was simple – never give up. That philosophy metamorphosed into a very different philosophy for winning wars – “The way to win wars is to kill people. And if you kill enough of them, they give up.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, as the war against Japan reached a crescendo, Curtis LeMay replaced Haywood Hansell.
LeMay quickly found out that Hansell’s strategy for precision bombing was ineffective, but unlike Hansell he had no moral qualms to take the next giant step. In a moment of inspiration he had an idea: take the B-29, strip it of unnecessary antiaircraft defenses, drop it down from 30,000 feet to 5000 feet and load it up to its gills with incendiary bombs containing napalm, a substance discovered by a Harvard chemist in 1942. Napalm burns with a demon-like ferocity and resists attempts to put it out. LeMay knew the damage it could do, but he knew something more important. He knew that more than 90% of the houses in downtown Tokyo were made out of wood. A mock Japanese town, complete with restaurants, hospitals and single-family homes with bedrooms and cribs was set up at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. The ominous nature of the destruction of infant cribs and hospitals probably did not register in the minds of planners who wanted to end the war as quickly as possible.
The March 9th raid was the culmination of smaller, experimental raids over multiple cities in Japan. Pathfinders dropped flares to mark an “X” for the bombers to see their targets. The bombers dropped 1500 tons of napalm-infused bombs that split into multiple bomblets at a height to cover the largest possible area.
For the people on the ground, it was nothing less than hell on earth. An hour into the raid, Tokyo’s feeble fire defense abandoned efforts to try to put out the fire, instead trying to guide people to safety. But it was to no avail. The unprecedented fires from the wooden structures created a firestorm, starting winds exceeding 50 miles an hour. People’s clothes were ripped from their backs, their hair caught on fire, the very ground on which they had been walking melted. Scott’s account is full of harrowing images and stories; the mother who jumped into the water below a bridge to save herself and the twins strapped to her back, only to realize that the twins were dead; the man taking refuge in a house and seeing a charred blob in a bathtub, realizing with horror that it was a family who had embraced each other in the flames of death; people walking around aimlessly, bleating like animals for their children, brothers and sisters, parents. The smell of roasted flesh rose up 5000 feet to meet the bombers. For more than two hours the B-29s did their terrible work before they returned to their bases. Meanwhile, the wooden city burnt and took more than 100,000 of its citizens with it.
Public and official reaction in the United States was muted. The war of escalation had now escalated to a point which was a pale shadow of the moral stance the country had took six years ago, but the escalation seemed so logical, so forced upon war strategy by the limitations of technology and the desperation of the enemy, that nobody noticed. Even Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War who later crossed off Kyoto from the list of targets for the atomic bomb because he thought it was so historic and beautiful, seemed to have reserved any strong reaction for private. As far as Curtis LeMay’s reaction was concerned, while he had no moral qualms, he well understood the consequences: “If we had lost”, he said in a speech a few years later, “we would have been hung as war criminals.” Perhaps without meaning it, LeMay was saying that the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg were acts of sheer, wanton terror and murder that equalled the war crimes that the Allies prosecuted at Nuremberg and at the Japanese war tribunal.
The fact is that the moral watershed was crossed with the March 9th raid; the atomic bomb was, in a sense, simply a continuation of the slaughter.
Importantly, there is little evidence that the raid did much to force the Japanese to consider unconditional surrender. Bombing only made the populations who had to bear the brunt of it more resilient; it is a point of particular irony that the British who had seen how little a difference the Blitz made to the resolve of the population of London somehow thought that the same tactics would work against the populations of Dresden and Hamburg.
The story of Curtis LeMay and the firebombing of Tokyo drives home an important point about the relationship between technology and morality. The physicist Joseph Rotblat who was the only scientist to leave the Manhattan Project after Germany’s defeat once said that our cardinal problem is that our morality always lags behind our technology. In case of the Tokyo firebombing it was a failure of technology. In other cases it was the success of technology. A prime example of the latter is the creation of the cotton gin which, just as it made the separation of cotton easier, automatically raised demand for the picking of cotton and therefore for slaves. In another century, the advent of lobotomy which was considered such a moral advance that its inventor received a Nobel Prize for it was seen, in retrospect, as a horrifying procedure that robbed human beings of their very humanity and identity. The sad thing is that men and women have always had their moral monstrosities piggyback on technological progress.
Which brings us to the present. As we enter a brave new world of artificial intelligence and gene editing, of brain implants and “smart” warfare through drones, what moral boundaries will we cross? Will we be wise to learn from the example of the indiscriminate killing of civilians during World War 2? Or will we, as the old cliche goes, be condemned to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Only time can tell, but until then all we have is our morality.