S8 Ep549: 5. Preparation for Firebombing LeMay prepares for the March 9 raid by stripping B-29s of guns to maximize bomb loads. Despite warnings of high casualties, he orders 325 bombers to fly at just 5,000 feet. He targets Tokyo’s densest residential ward, Asakus

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This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Bachelor.

James Scott is new book as Black Snow, Curtis Lemay,

the fire bombing of Tokyo, and the road to the atomic bomb.

It is early March, 1945.

Curtis Lemay, commanding a bomber command out of the Mariana Islands,

has a new idea about how to advance his campaign against the Tokyo Warmaking

and bring the war to a close.

James, thank you.

We go to the briefing of the day is March 9th,

but you tell me in your reporting that the word was out beforehand.

How so, what kind of word to the crews of the B-29s?

Lemay in early March, they posted a message saying they're not going to

be any more raids for several nights.

Of course, the airmen who are used to flying these patterns

are very aware that signifies a change in this coming.

And so the rumor mill just starts burning at that point.

And then, of course, Lemay, before the crews get brief,

he then has to bring in all of his wing commanders

and sell them and tell them exactly what's going to be going down

because they're going to have to then run these briefings

for all these thousands of pilots,

bombardiers and navigators, for what amounts to a very radical new way

of attacking the Japanese.

The plan is extremely detailed.

However, it involves elements that are surprising when you first read them.

For example, we've talked about low-level bombing,

taking a bomber that was designed to fly with pressurized cabin

six or seven miles above and do strategic bombing,

he's taking it down to 5,000 feet.

But no weapons, James.

Exactly, no. Well, you know, Lemay worries the bombers all stripped of their guns.

And if they don't take guns and they don't need to take ammunition

and they don't even need to take gunners and all of that frees up more weight for bombing,

Lemay's rationale for that is in part because he's going to be sending these planes in,

not in a formation, but singly, and they're going to be going in at night.

And he was quite frankly worried that these guys might shoot each other down

in the dark sky as they were dope you.

So it was a safety thing for the crews,

but in the end, it also had the added effect of a bonus of allowing them to carry more bombs.

The remarks are immediate.

The one remark that says everything is suicide.

Is that the opinion of the wing commanders?

Yeah, that's the opinion.

These airmen, when they hear that they're going to be going from 30,000 feet to 5,000 feet,

going in into one of the most heavily defended cities in the world,

without fighter cover, without guns.

I mean, these guys, it's one of the guys said it,

like when they left that briefing, even the briefers seem to think they'd never see these crews

again. And of course, Lemay's own artillery officers were telling him,

hey, if you go through it this mission, you need to be prepared that you might lose 70% of your force.

And of course, Lemay's sending over 300 bombers.

That means he would lose 200 planes in 2200 lives.

And so it's a big calculated risk for Lemay.

Is Lemay's idea, does he put it in front of half-arnels, does Arnold put it in front of Marshall?

No. Lemay doesn't tell anyone what he's going to do.

The president to join Chiefs of Staff, Arnold, nobody knows.

And it's important to remember, Arnold's actually had a massive heart attack in January.

And so he's convalescing down and Florida at this point.

And Arnold has set up Lemay's operation as part of a brand new Air Force, called the 20th Air Force,

which is operating as a sort of strategic arm. And Arnold is the commander of that.

So he goes to the Joint Chiefs of Staff initially and he says,

you know, rather than give these new bombers to MacArthur Nimitz, I'm going to create the 20th

Air Force. I'm going to be in charge. And I'm going to report directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And they buy that idea. Of course, so Arnold then has Lemay operating as his person out there

that Arnold is felled by this heart attack. And in Arnold's place is a guy by the name of Larus

Norstad, who is a brigadier general. So he is a lower rank than Lemay. And Lemay doesn't trust him.

Lemay thinks Norstad's gone in for his job. So when Lemay sets on this new idea for how to attack

the Japanese, he doesn't even tell Norstad what's going to happen. But he does make a cryptic question

on Norstad. He says, it's half Arnold a gambling man. And Norstad responds, Arnold is will be in

favor of anything that promises to hurry up and in the war. And with that, Lemay makes this decision.

But he doesn't run it past anybody else until what he does do, however, is Norstad is planning to

come out in like April to visit. And before that, in February, Lemay sends him a message. He says,

you know, I know you're planning on coming out, but if I were you, I would come out now.

I've got some things I want to run past you. And I don't want to send him over the telecommunication

system. Norstad kind of blows it off. And then Lemay writes back about a week or so later. And he says,

I want to reiterate, you need to come out here now. So Norstad finally gets on a plane and takes off

on March 7th. And of course, you have flying from Washington all the way out to the

Maryland Islands on propeller planes takes 48 hours. He touches down on the morning that this

operation is planned. And that's the first time we may brief anybody outside of his own headquarters

on what's going to happen with that. I know, say three elements, 314 out of Guam,

73rd and the 313. These are three elements to maintain radio silence,

seven hours, 15 minutes to Tokyo. They have four aircraft assigned as homing aircraft.

What is their job change? They're basically going to fly a pattern and broadcast a homing beacon

that way that, you know, because the pilots are going to be flying at night, they're going to be

flying singly, not information. And that way it gives them a, um, for navigational purposes,

it helps guide them if needed. Targeting is critical here. James provides a illustration map

as books. So you can see the targeting is not on the Imperial Palace. Yes, it's not on the

manufacturing center north of the city. It's on one particular word as a kusa. Why James?

Because it's the densest part of Tokyo, 135,000 people per square mile.

When May's target area, if you look at it on a map, it looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece,

basically. And it encompasses about 12 square miles. And those 12 square miles represent the

densest part of Tokyo. Asakusa has the highest level of population density, but throughout that

entire target area, the average population density is 103,000 people per square mile. More than

five times the average density at that time of, like, of Washington, D.C., for example,

this area is 87% residential. And that's, and so this is really, this is the heart of Tokyo.

It's where the workers live. There are a lot of those homes, also small workshops,

few employees that manufactured small parts that were then fed into the larger industrial plants.

So there is sort of this, a industrial component to it, but it's all the home industries,

that ways, but the Lamei is going after it. And we now go to a concern that everybody has,

which is what this will lead to is what Lamei has in mind of a firestorm. He's practiced this before.

And that's the title of your book, Black Snow. What did he learn in his tests of the fire bombing?

Yeah, they were really looking to see, you know, once you can start a fire in Japan,

can you build an uncontrollable fire? And that's, that's what happened in Dresden. That's what

happened in Hamburg. And what, what a firestorm essentially is, is it becomes its own weather system.

So as a fire's grow in size and intensity, all that heat is escaping vertically and it creates

a thermal updraft. And of course, at the center of the fire, then there's a vacuum.

And nature hates that vacuum. And so we're all, so that vacuum then starts pulling in cold,

oxygenated air from the perimeter of the fire. And those winds, they're racing into the center of

the fire to feed this, can reach hurricane four speeds. You know, strong enough to literally

topple trees, utility poles, like, you know, pull an infant out of a mother's arms. And so it's

essentially, it creates a self-feeding, sustaining fire weather system that then just devours everything.

And he's practiced this. He knows what he wants to achieve. And that's the goal.

That's the goal. At some point, it might be in his autobiography, that if we lose the war,

we're war criminals. Is that is, is that at the time or later? That's actually Robert McNamara,

who worked in Lemais headquarters, actually with the statistical analysis group. It was there during

this time period, recounts Lemais, saying that to the men that, you know, if we lose this war,

we'll be tried as war criminals. The bombers take off. 325. And Tokyo is asleep. It's winter

in Tokyo. It's cold when we come back. The book is black snow. I'm John Dungeon.

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