S8 Ep549: In these interview segments, James M. Scott discusses his book *Black Snow*, which chronicles the American air campaign against Japan during World War II. (9)

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This is CBS Eye on the World.

Here's John Bachelorette.

It is November 24th, 1944.

Brigadier General Haywood Hansel arrives in the theater of the Pacific Theater in the war against the Imperial Japanese Navy and Army.

These are the last months of the Japanese Pacific War fought by the US Navy, the US Marine Corps, and the Army Air Force.

General Hansel has a mission which is to take a new weapon, a very expensive weapon called the B-29

and turn it into the destruction of the Japanese ability to make war.

I welcome James Scott, James M. Scott is the author of the new book Black Snow, Curtis Lemay, The Firebombing of Tokyo, and The Road to the Atomic Bomb.

James greetings to you and congratulations telling the story of these months which I'd read about beginning an end but not in between as to how

the B-29, a very buggy aircraft in addition to being expensive, did not arrive as a success.

The early days were a challenge to the Army Air Force, to the high command in Washington and to the men who flew the B-29.

So we needed to start with Haywood Hansel, a premier figure in the Air Force for his success in the European campaign by the Army Air Force.

It's a great success, which is why he's given what is regarded, what he regards as the best command in the Army Air Force, the 20th Air Force.

What is his mission? What are the challenges for Haywood Hansel? What do we need to know about him? Good even to James.

John, thanks so much for having me on your program again, Sorula.

Treat me with you and your listeners.

Haywood Hansel is a fascinating figure and that not only is he a combat commander in both Europe and the Pacific,

but he's also an air pioneer and strategic thinker during the interwar period in which it's important to remember.

Aviation is a pretty new addition to the battlefield by the time World War II rolls around.

It sort of has its combat debut in the end of World War I and that time between World War I and World War II is when a lot of thinkers start looking at how can we bring this new technology to bear in a modern war?

And Hansel is one of the pioneers of that and so he is a big believer in what's called high altitude daylight strategic bombing.

And the idea behind that is that a modern economy is like a house of cards and that if you use planes and you bomb strategically,

you knock out oil refineries, for example, and bridges, you can then collapse this economy just like you would with a house of cards.

And therefore avoid the trenches and stalemates and whatnot that had haunted the nightmares of infantrymen after World War I.

And so that's kind of Hansel's background and so he comes from sort of this intellectual planning academic background to to bring this sort of strategy to to bear against the Germans during the first part of World War II.

And of course, there are a lot of challenges with that because what works well and theory and an academic settings does not always work in combat.

And so they realize, for example, that the German economy is far more resourceful than they had thought that the Germans can pull in raw materials from occupied countries that they can disperse industry and things like that.

And so the air war that Hansel and others thought was going to be pretty quick and painless in Europe really devolves into a year's long slog.

And the Americans are flying these high altitude daylight precision rays. The British eventually abandoned those and began fire bombing cities.

He's a hamburger and of course, Dresden, which has come sort of this international symbol of airborne horror.

And so Hansel, he goes from the European theater over to the Pacific theater in late 1944.

And the idea there is that the hope is to try to avoid a year's long fight against the Japanese and also to avoid American troops having to storm the beaches and do battle inside cities like Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka.

And so an extraordinary amount of pressure is placed on Hansel that to be able to bomb the Japanese out of the war before America has to have this incredibly bloody invasion.

Importantly, he has a personality that is striking and it's a you commented at length, James. He is an intellectual about war.

And a half Arnold, the commander of the US Army Air Force, regards that as a worthy attribute. He is helping to invent bombers that we take it for granted here in the 21st century.

But the original concept was fighter aircraft and I believe Hansel trained on fighter aircraft.

So he is part of that transformation from the 1930s into believing that the bomber was all powerful and then the disappointment, James.

Exactly, exactly. And Arnold is a really good person to sort of address to.

For folks who may not know, half Arnold was the commander of the Army Air Forces. And he is America's top airman.

And he really embodies the evolution of aviation. And I'll tell you why because he actually learned how to fly from none other than an Orville and Wilbur Wright.

I mean, as a young airman, I mean, the whole reason that early aviators wore this trademark goggles that you see in all the old images is because half Arnold got hit in the eye by a bug while landing one time.

So he goes from learning how to fly with Orville and Wilbur Wright to commanding the largest global strike force during World War II.

So he has seen aviation rise that entire time. And he's as just as you noted, he's seen aviation evolve from these primitive wood and fabric byplanes

to these muscular four-engine bombers that are capable of, you know, bridging oceans and turning an entire nation into a battlefield.

And along with that, he sees, and people like Hansel, his underlings sort of see that aviation has an independent role to play.

And it's not something that should be just brought in to help sort of facilitate troops landing on beaches or, you know, help facilitate sea battles with the Navy,

but that the air can be an independent fighting arm because they can then destroy an enemy nation's capability to wage war.

And that becomes like one of the big missions here is demonstrating that the power, that raw force of air power to break an enemy.

And Hansel, of course, had worked closely with General Half Arnold. He had been his chief of staff. So they were, they were very friendly.

Hansel was an intellectual. He was a planner. He was not a predator, so to speak, not as not really as great as a combat commander, but he was a thinker.

And Arnold liked that because Hansel sort of helped push the bounds of sort of what what we could do the strategies and things like that to employ these new weapons on the battlefield.

I want to mention the politics of this moment, James.

Half Arnold is Army Air Force. Air Force is not a separate organization. He works within the bounds of what George Marshall permits.

And the competition with the army is not slight. He also has competition with the U.S. Navy commanded by Ernest King back in Washington and

Chester Nimitz now moved to Guam, I believe, as Hansel arrives. This is forward-basing. Nimitz had been in Hawaii for the bulk of the war, but we're closing in on the Japanese, oh, my lens now.

So Guam, Saipan, Tainan, Tainan are important launching platforms because they have to be able to reach Japan. That's the B-29. It has the range.

Half Arnold is the B-29. I learned from you. It's more expensive to design and build and roll out the B-29 than the atomic bomb. Everything was on half Arnold.

He's in competition with the Navy and the Army. How's he doing on in Thanksgiving 44? How's that contest going, James?

Well, I mean, you can just say this. He had three heart attacks during those first few years of the war. And that's indicative of the amount of stress that was on Arnold.

Arnold was kind of like the the forgotten stepchild at the dinner table when you got the joint cheese of staff together because you know, the army was largely dominating the war in Europe.

And so the Navy very much viewed the Pacific as their theater. And here you had Arnold who was operating as an auxiliary of the Army, sort of trying to elbow for scraps there in order to demonstrate that the power of his of his service.

And he was absolutely hellbent that the Air Force should be an independent service separately army. And in order to make that case, he.

Only share victory alongside the Army and the Navy. And and so he, I mean, the pressure on him to be able to demonstrate that was tremendous. And as I noted earlier, the air war in Europe had turned out to be this incredibly long battle with even the combined forces of British and the Americans still weren't able to quite break the Germans, the war goes on and eventually troops have to invade.

And so he views the war against Japan Arnold does as a blank canvas on which he can paint the awesome power of his Air Force.

But he's up against these big personalities and it's a territorial fight. And and say that Arnold's having to engage. And again, all of that leads to multiple heart attacks, multiple stress.

And all that pressure trickles down from Arnold onto Hansel who is out there in the Mariana Islands, having to figure out how to put this new weapon in combat against the Japanese.

We're going to launch the early raids by the B-29 against Japan's ability to make war. Black snow is the book, Curtis Lemay, the fire bombing of Tokyo and the road to the atomic bomb, James M. Scott, James Scott is the author. I'm John Batch.

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