Well Read

WELL READ By: Nick McCall

BLACK SNOW: CURTIS LEMAY, THE FIREBOMBING OF TOKYO, AND THE ROAD TO THE ATOMIC BOMB

“If we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.”

“You’ve got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

The first of these pungent quotations was not from a Nazi or Imperial Japanese general; the second was not from the Civil War’s General Sherman. Both came from one of America’s leading airmen, as he contemplated a radical revision in his forces’ combat tactics--one that, he knew too well, would be on the razor’s edge of legality and morality. He also knew too well that the same tactical changes could result in the deaths or capture of hundreds of his own flight crews. This transition of U.S. strategic bombing in the Pacific during 1944-45 and, equally, the mental transition of its leadership--and the grim consequences of these transitions--form the core of James M. Scott’s remarkable new book, Black Snow.

Black Snow’s protagonist is General Curtis LeMay. Beetle-browed, cigar-smoking, a tough and driven combat leader, LeMay could be enigmatic: tender to his wife and child, yet seemingly as dogged towards to his own airmen as he was to his nation’s foes. Scott susses out his childhood fight for survival in a harsh Depression-era family, which went far to mold LeMay’s legendary toughness and flinty outlook on life and death. While his Army Air Force crews might fear LeMay, they respected him as a technologically-savvy airman; as a leader who did not believe in taking unnecessary risks; and as an aviator who flew exactly the same missions and risked his life just as they did.

After European air combat, LeMay transferred in late 1944 to the Pacific to take command of America’s technological marvel, the B-29 super-bombers. LeMay’s ultimate boss, Army Air Forces chief General Hap Arnold, staked all on the war-winning potential of his nation’s newest aircraft, one produced in record time but costing billions and filled with mechanical flaws.

LeMay’s predecessor over the B-29s, Haywood “Possum” Hansell, was LeMay’s antithesis. Courtly, poetic, sensitive, Hansell was of the airpower school that thought that wars could be won by precisely targeted daytime bombing of the enemy. The only legitimate targets for bombing, this so-called “Bomber Mafia” said, were military and industrial ones. Unlike Britain’s Royal Air Force, American bombers would not undertake “area bombardments”: massive, non-precise obliteration of enemy cities, intended to destroy morale and break civilian populations. Until February 1945, the U.S. air forces in Europe largely abided by the doctrine of daytime precision bombing, despite losing thousands of aircraft and tens of thousands of U.S. airmen.

Japanese skies and climatology, however, were far different from Europe’s. With changeable weather conditions and incredibly fast highaltitude jet streams over Japan, Hansell’s force was not getting results, and Hap Arnold was no man to wait patiently. Exit Possum Hansell; enter Curtis “The Cigar” LeMay.

After continuing in the Air Corps’ precision-bombing doctrine for a time, LeMay envisioned a radical break with that policy: ultra-low-altitude, nighttime fire-bombing of Japan’s capital, Tokyo. This would be made by B-29s stripped of defensive guns and all nonessentials except the fuel needed for return to their central Pacific bases and the napalm bombs needed to set Tokyo ablaze.

A Pulitzer Prize finalist and a skilled writer on World War II in the Pacific (and whose father was a former Knoxvillian), unlike other recent accounts of Tokyo’s bombing that obsess over technology and America’s bomber leadership, Scott masterfully weaves a holistic story from all angles. This ranges from LeMay, his commanders and staff; to the airmen who had to live with LeMay’s calculated risks; to those Japanese civilians under the gun—literally—of LeMay’s force on a savage winter night in Tokyo in early 1945.

Those easily upset by wartime horrors should be alerted to the grisly nature of the incineration of Tokyo and its largely civilian population. Interviewing survivors and spending time on the ground in Japan, Scott has done his homework in fleshing out the brutality of what it meant to be on the receiving end of a B-29 bombing raid, even if one survived it.

This is a compelling saga: vividly told, well written and impeccably researched. It is not a pretty story, but as LeMay himself said, war is brutal. Having written in his last book, Rampage, about vast Japanese brutality during the liberation of Manila—occurring at the same time that LeMay’s staff was planning his air offensives—Scott chronicles the bloody skies over Japan during the last months of World War II and how LeMay’s raids helped pave the way for the A-bombings in August 1945.

For lawyers, as much as for other American citizens, this book can pose challenges to faith in the legality of American armed forces’ actions and to the simplistic legend of the Allies’ waging the “Good War,” as some have termed the Second World War. While that war may have been a “necessary war” (to use Professor Samuel Hynes’ phrase), it was not always a “good” war. Even for the Allies, one can validly question whether the war was always fought as a just war. The moral quandaries presented to LeMay and his bomber crews facing the skies of Tokyo in 1945 summon fundamental questions of just-war theory and the laws of armed conflict and international treaties such as the Hague and Geneva conventions.

In Black Snow, James Scott examines the nature of the moral and legal compromises called forth in wartime by soldiers and their leaders across all nations—even the United States—and presents starkly the very real consequences of those decisions and actions.