Bombs-Away LeMay

SPEAKER_07: Pushkin. SPEAKER_06: on orchestrate. IBM. SPEAKER_08: Let's create. You can find inspiring stories almost anywhere. For instance, check out the co-founders of Girls Who Do Interiors. This Miami-based design company was started by three friends when they were still in school. And right from the start, they turned to Chase for Business for everything from banking and payment acceptance to credit cards. And they handled them all in one place with the Chase mobile app. It's so important to have that kind of help when you're just starting out. Learn more at Chaseforbusiness.com. Make more of what's yours. Chase mobile app is available for select mobile devices. Message and data rates may apply. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. From Pushkin Industries and Ruby Studio at iHeartMedia, Incubation is a new show about humanity's struggle against the world's tiniest villains, viruses. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And on this show, you'll hear how viruses attack us, how we fight back and what we've learned in the course of those fights. Listen to Incubation on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_07: Curtis Emerson LeMay, who for the better part of 25 years dominated the greatest fighting force the world had ever known, had three nicknames, Old Iron Pants, The Demon and Bombs Away LeMay. He was not that category of leader who led by force of wit, charm and charisma, nor was he some great thinker, the kind of leader whose appeal lies with carefully thought out manifestos and elaborate ideologies. LeMay never took his cigar out of his mouth long enough to say anything. He belonged to a different category, the one that gets overlooked. SPEAKER_09: Curtis LeMay, in my view, he was the greatest air commander in history. SPEAKER_07: I'm talking to the military historian Conrad Crane. No historian writes about the Second World War without considering the legacy of LeMay. SPEAKER_09: Everything he touched, he transformed. He was a dynamic leader. He shared the difficulties of his airmen. He was the best navigator the Air Force had. He was a great pilot. He could do mechanic stuff. He was the Air Force's ultimate problem solver. But he was one of those guys that you would, if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn't ask a whole lot of questions how he was going to do it. SPEAKER_07: Bombs Away LeMay was known as someone who'd get the job done. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is part three of my four-part series about Curtis LeMay and the events of March 1945. This episode is about the role of people like Curtis LeMay in times of crisis. In the normal course of events, we are led by people of ideas and people of charisma. But when things start to go badly, those people get pushed aside and the problem solver takes center stage. Only the problem solver doesn't play by the same moral rules. Let me give you an example of what it means to approach the world the way someone like Curtis LeMay did. It's not one of the signature stories in the LeMay legend. It happened long before he was famous, years before the Second World War. He would mention it sometimes in passing in some of the interviews he gave in retirement. But it's one of those stories that made me stop and say, oh, I think I understand him now. In 1937, with the threat of war in Europe growing, the Army's Air Corps wanted a chance to practice their bombing technique. Real world practice, only with dummy bombs, 50 pounders filled with water. SPEAKER_02: Let me tell you the story of that. I mentioned that the Air Force has been battling to make a contribution to the defense of the country ever since I've been around. Nobody paid much attention to it. SPEAKER_07: This is an interview LeMay gave to the Air Force Academy in 1971, a few years after leaving his post as chief of staff of the Air Force, when he was taking the post-retirement victory lap that famous generals take. SPEAKER_02: We wanted an exercise where we could drop bombs on a battleship, find a battleship. SPEAKER_07: For the practice run to work, the Air Corps needed the Navy to play along, hide a battleship out on the seas, give out its coordinates at the last minute, and dare the bombers to find it. This was before sophisticated radar and navigation aids. To find a battleship, you had to see it with your eyes, then hit its narrow decks with a bomb from thousands of feet up, all the while flying at hundreds of miles an hour. The Navy was not enthusiastic. SPEAKER_02: Finally, they agreed that they would have an exercise, and it would be in August off the West Coast. Now, in August off the West Coast, there's nothing but fog for a thousand miles out there. And they deliberately picked it at this time, I'm sure. SPEAKER_07: How could you spot a battleship in a thousand miles of fog? To make matters worse, the Navy bent the rules. The agreement was to have the war game run for 24 hours, from noon the first day until noon the next. But the Navy didn't give out the coordinates of its ship, the USS Utah, until late the first afternoon. And the coordinates they gave were wrong. Off by 60 miles. A thousand miles of fog, late directions, fake directions, a needle in a haystack would have been easier. At ten minutes before noon, at the very last moment, LeMay found the ship and dropped his bombs. Now, of course he found the ship. There was nothing LeMay could not do if he put his mind to it. That's not the point of the story. The point is what happened before he dropped his bombs. The Navy was certain they couldn't be found, so they took no precautions. The sailors were all over the decks going about their business. They were supposed to take cover in a bombing exercise. They didn't. So what did LeMay do? He bombed the Utah anyway, raining 50-pound water bombs down on the sailors. SPEAKER_02: And the Navy was so sure that they weren't going to be found under that fog blanket that the men were all over the decks. They were diving for the gangplank, patches. And we heard rumors that there were a few people hurt a little bit. SPEAKER_07: Imagine how other types of leaders might have handled the decision to bomb after seeing sailors out on the deck. The thinker would have understood the moral dimensions of willingly harming one of your own in the course of a routine training exercise. The charismatic leader would have wondered, what will my own men think of me if they see that I am capable of such a casual act of brutality? But the problem solver? The problem was to find the Utah and bomb it. And so he bombs it. SPEAKER_02: I'd rather have somebody who was real stupid but did something, and even if it was wrong, he did something, and have somebody who would vacillate and do nothing. SPEAKER_07: You cannot do nothing in the worldview of the problem solver, even if what you end up doing is horrifying. In his memoirs, LeMay says there were rumors for years that some sailors got killed in the bombing exercise of 1937. And then he says, quote, I remember watching the first bomb which smashed into the deck. It sent splintered pieces of wood flying in every direction. I hadn't realized that wood could frag like that. It was a learning opportunity. Who knew wood reacted that way? He files that fact away and goes on to the next problem. In the first years of the Second World War, the American fight against the Japanese was defined by a single fact. Japan was beyond the reach of the US Air Force. The American workhorse bomber was the B-17. It had a range of roughly 2,000 miles. That's 1,000 miles out and 1,000 miles back. Now look at a map of the world from, say, January of 1944 and try and find an airbase controlled by the Allies that is within 1,000 miles of Tokyo. You can't. And if you can't reach Japan, how on earth are you going to defeat them? The solution comes in two parts. SPEAKER_11: This is where it began. Here in the exact geographic center of the United States. Grand Island, Nebraska. SPEAKER_07: That voice sounds familiar, doesn't it? It's Ronald Reagan. Long before he became president, Reagan narrated newsreels during the Second World War. SPEAKER_11: The men were brought here from every corner of the country and a few corners outside the country. They were a hand-picked American mixture of draftees and west pointers, of butchers, teachers, and bankers, of your sons, husbands, and fathers. SPEAKER_07: In the newsreel, we see soldiers arriving in barracks. Handsome, crisp uniforms, all gazing up at a magnificent, gleaming airplane. SPEAKER_11: She was the B-29, the Superfort. Designed to carry more destruction and carry it higher, faster, farther than any bomber ever built before. And to complete this mission, that's exactly what she was going to have to do. SPEAKER_07: She, the B-29, was one of the great achievements of the American war effort. An enormous bomber dedicated entirely to the fight against the Japanese in the war's Pacific theater. The B-29's range? 5,600 miles. Much better than its predecessor. So then came the second step. In the summer of 1944, in some of the most brutal fighting of the war, the Marines captured three tiny specks in the middle of the western Pacific. The Mariana Islands. Guam, Saipan, and Tinian. Why were they captured? Because the Marianas were 1,342 miles from Tokyo. Straight shot across the ocean. Put the B-29 together with the Marianas, and overnight, the odds of beating Japan shifted. SPEAKER_09: June of 1944 is arguably the most important month of the war. You have D-Day, where we go ashore in northwest Europe. You have the invasion of the Marianas in the Pacific, the final breaking of the internal defense line of the Japanese, the fall of the Tojo government because of that. So all that stuff happens in that same month. SPEAKER_07: Throughout the summer and fall of 1944, the Navy built massive bases on each of the captured islands of the Marianas. The biggest base contained the largest airport in the world. That was on Tinian. Six runways. The equivalent of three boulder dams worth of concrete. And when they were finished, the military began flying in brand new B-29 bombers. Hundreds of them. SPEAKER_11: Their final base was no longer a mystery. 4,000 miles farther west, with only one refueling stop on the way, lay the island of Saipan. Less than four months before, it had still been in the hands of the Japanese. SPEAKER_07: To head up the newly created B-29 strike force, known as the 21st Bomber Command, the military brass brought in a high priest of the bomber mafia, a brilliant young general named Heywood Hansell. Heywood Hansell came from an aristocratic southern military family. His great-grandfather was a general in the Confederate Army. His grandfather a Confederate officer. Hansell's father had been an army surgeon who came to dinner in a white linen suit and a Panama hat. Hansell himself was a skilled dancer, a poet, and an aficionado of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His favorite book was Don Quixote. He felt a connection with a knight tilting at windmills. He put flying first, polo second, and family a distant third. Once the story goes, early in his marriage, he heard a baby cry and turned to his wife, what's that sound? That's your son, she said. He liked to carry a swagger stick, like the English army officers did. As a child, he was nicknamed Possum because of the narrowness of his face. The name stuck. On his final mission as a pilot, a bombing run over Belgium, Hansell entertained his exhausted crew with the rendition of the popular music hall song, The Man on the Flying Trapeze. This is the most famous version, Eddie Cantor's. SPEAKER_01: Oh, he floats through the air with the greatest of ease. This daring young man on the flying trapeze. His actions are graceful, all girls he does please. And my love was stolen away. SPEAKER_07: Of all the bombing fundamentalists to come out of the Air Corps Tactical School, Haywood Hansell was the truest believer, the idealist. Air power, intelligently and surgically deployed, could bring any enemy to its knees. SPEAKER_13: Well, the first operation against Japan was called San Antonio 1. It was coordinated with the Joint Chiefs of Staff strategy, which made the timing extremely important. As a matter of fact, we were in some danger of standing or falling on this operation. SPEAKER_07: When Possum Hansell takes over in the Marianas in 1944, he says to himself, What is the critical vulnerability of the Japanese war economy? What can my new B-29s attack? The answer to him is obvious, the Japanese aircraft manufacturing plants, which are almost entirely concentrated in a few factories in and around Tokyo. In particular, the Nakajima Aircraft Company, known as Subaru today. Nakajima made at least a third of all Japanese combat aircraft engines. Hansell said, Let's hit Nakajima and we'll cripple the Japanese fighting force. The newsreel Ronald Reagan narrated is all about that first attack by Hansell and Nakajima. SPEAKER_11: Six hours later, through the clouds, they saw it. Fujiyama. Here comes some modern symbols. Phosphorus bombs. And flak. SPEAKER_07: The B-29s traveled 1,500 miles from the Marianas, skimming over the ocean at several thousand feet. As they approached Japan, they climbed 25 or 30,000 feet out of harm's way. They turned at Mount Fuji, then came in from the west over Tokyo. Here, speaking over aerial shots of the city, Reagan lays it on thick. SPEAKER_11: Within a radius of 15 miles of the imperial palace lives 7 million Japanese. A people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite. They're concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens and the cultivation of silkworms. But it isn't silkworms and it isn't imperial palaces these men are looking for. In the suburbs of Tokyo is the huge Nakajima aircraft plant. Well, bud, what are you waiting for? SPEAKER_07: Like I said, he laid it on a little thick. That first mission, San Antonio 1, was hugely symbolic. Proof that Japan could finally be reached. But was it a success as a military operation? After the war, speaking to cadets at the Air Force Academy, Hansel tried to put a good face on things. SPEAKER_13: The operation wasn't as good as we'd like, but as a mission of effort, it did show that it could be done. This was a very doubtful issue at the time. SPEAKER_07: The operation wasn't as good as we would have liked, was to say the least, an understatement. None of the bombs dropped by Hansel's B-29s actually hit the Nakajima plant. So Hansel tried again, three days later, same thing. Hansel sent mission after mission. On one of his last attempts, he went back with 72 B-29s. They missed the plant and hit a hospital. Heywood Hansel couldn't solve the problem, because the problem was much bigger than anyone at the time understood. SPEAKER_06: Introducing Watson X, a platform designed to multiply output by training AI with your data. When you Watson X your business, you can build AI to help coders code faster. Customer service respond quicker and employees handle repetitive tasks in less time. Let's create AI that transforms business with Watson X. Learn more at ibm.com slash Watson X. IBM, let's create. SPEAKER_07: Do you know that right now, as you listen to this, there's an astronaut named Frank Rubio in some tiny spacecraft way, way up there in space. He left for the International Space Station in September of last year, thought he was going for six months. And then once he was up there, NASA called him up and said, actually, Frank, we want you out there for a year. 371 days to be exact. My question is, if you're NASA and you pull that bait and switch once, how do you recruit the next crop of astronauts? I mean, you say to your recruits, I need you to leave your family and friends and everything, you know, and love dearly, eat food out of a tube, but only for six months. And they're like, wait, look at Frank. That's what you told him. And he's still up there. Recruiting for astronauts. If you're NASA is hard. If only there was some sophisticated job recruiting site capable of finding those few Americans who are perfectly happy to float around in space for an undetermined length of time. Sadly for NASA, there's no such tool. But for the rest of us. Oh, yes, there is. Zip Recruiter. New hires cost on average forty seven hundred dollars for all of us non spaceflight companies. And with that kind of money at stake, you have to get it right. So what's the most effective way to find the right people for your roles? Zip Recruiter. See for yourself. Right now, you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell and experience the value Zip Recruiter brings to hiring. Once you post your job, Zip Recruiter's smart technology works quickly to identify people whose skills and experience line up with exactly what you want. It's simple. Zip Recruiter helps you get hiring right. Four out of five employers who post on Zip Recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. See for yourself. Go to this exclusive Web address to try Zip Recruiter for free before you commit ZipRecruiter.com slash Gladwell. Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash G L A D W E L L. Zip Recruiter. The smartest way to hire. Somewhere out there. Believe it or not, there's someone who wants Frank Rubio's job. SPEAKER_07: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contained special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to three thousand years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside. But in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now you'll save two hundred dollars on a thousand dollars or more at Saatva.com slash Gladwell. That's S double A TVA dot com slash Gladwell. SPEAKER_07: Long after the war, one of Haywood Hansel's B-29 pilots, Lieutenant Ed Hyatt, was interviewed for a documentary by the BBC. SPEAKER_12: After flying six hours, we climbed up to bombing altitude. We climbed up to 37,000 feet. And just as we broke out of the storm, there's Mount Fuji sitting right in front of us. And it's a gorgeous sight. It really is. SPEAKER_07: Hyatt tried to describe what went wrong on those first B-29 precision attacks on Tokyo. His bombardier, a man named Glenn, starts to make his calculations on their bomb site, lining up the Nakajima factory. But the telescope on the bomb site wouldn't line up. SPEAKER_12: He turned around and he said, I can't get this damn telescope on the target. And so we called a radar operator, check our ground speed and see what our ground speed is. He came back and he says, we got a 125 knot tailwind. He said, we're going about 480 miles an hour. It's impossible. It can't be. There's no winds like that. SPEAKER_07: No Air Force pilots had ever experienced what was now happening to the B-29 bombers over Japan. They expected winds a fraction of these speeds. SPEAKER_12: We're going 480 miles an hour when we should be going 340 miles an hour. I said, well, Glenn dropped the damn bombs. He dropped the bombs and we were already 12 miles past the target because of that wind. SPEAKER_07: They were bewildered and back at base, they couldn't explain what happened to their superiors. When they debriefed us, they gave us a third degree. SPEAKER_12: They said, no, there is no such thing. There can't be a wind like that. You're lying. You didn't make it over the target. You're just making this up. SPEAKER_07: But one crew after another arrived back at the Marianas and told the exact same story. SPEAKER_04: To tell you how powerful these winds were, a reconnaissance plane went up one time to take some pictures after a mission to see how effective they'd been. And the navigator called the pilot and told him they were going three miles an hour backwards. That was something you couldn't afford to do because if you went from east to west, you were going to be a sitting duck for Japanese fighters or their flak. SPEAKER_07: To solve that puzzle, Hansel turned to his team of meteorologists. They'd all been trained at the University of Chicago. Back then, in the days before sophisticated radar, meteorologists were crucial to the success of bombing campaigns. If you were doing a daylight bombing run over a city, you had to see the target in order to line up the bomb site. And if the skies were too cloudy, that was impossible. So going or not going on a mission hinged on the weather forecast. But the tools available to meteorologists of that era were crude. The easiest thing to forget about the Second World War is that it was another technological era. It's half 20th century and half 19th century. The chief tool of the meteorologists of that time were balloons, weather balloons that would float up into the atmosphere carrying little instrument kits that could record the wind, the temperature, and the humidity and transmit that information back to Earth. I asked John Lewis about those days. He's a scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Nevada. He knew a number of the meteorologists who worked with the Air Force during the war. Are these balloons, are they, forgive me, it's a very naive question. Are they connected by a rope or are they just free floating? Oh no, they're released. SPEAKER_10: They'll eventually, as the pressure gets lower, as the balloon goes higher in the atmosphere, they expand, expand, expand, kaboom, they explode, and they fall to the ground with the instrument attached. And at that time, they had a message on all the instrument packages, could you please return this to the University of Chicago? SPEAKER_07: In the Pacific field of war, that technique wasn't going to work. So there they were, the meteorologists in the middle of the Pacific with one of the most important jobs in the whole outfit, figuring out when to send the bombers. And they're baffled. What's with these winds? On a theoretical level, do they have a suspicion that there may be very, very high winds at high altitudes at the Air Force, or is it that they don't reach that conclusion until the pilots come back with their? SPEAKER_10: They did not reach the conclusions until the pilots came back. SPEAKER_07: What slowly became clear is that the pilots had stumbled on a previously unknown phenomenon in the upper atmosphere. What came to be known as the jet stream. A river of fast flowing air that circles the globe starting at around 20,000 feet. Some scientists had theorized about the jet stream, but until the B-29 was built, almost no one had ever flown at altitudes high enough to experience those winds firsthand. SPEAKER_10: This fast stream of air, very narrow, moves from north to south in both hemispheres. Basically, it is dividing the very cold air of the polar regions from the more warm mid-latitude and equatorial air. SPEAKER_07: Yeah. When you say very narrow, how narrow? SPEAKER_10: I would say typically 200 kilometers across something on that order. So that's the narrowness of it. SPEAKER_07: And does it entirely encircle the earth? It does. So, what is the problem facing the pilots gathered on the Marianas? That in the winter of 1944 and the early spring of 1945, this narrow hurricane force band of air known as the jet stream happens to be directly over Japan. And that makes it impossible for Hansel to do any of the precision bombing that he had planned to do. If they fly across it, the plane will get blown sideways. If they fly into it, they'll be fighting to stay aloft and be easy targets for the Japanese. And if they fly with it, they'll be racing too fast to take proper aim. In the service of a conviction that bombing could bring Japan to its knees, thousands of Marines had been killed in the fight to capture the Marianas. The construction of the three island air bases had been one of the most intensive engineering feats of the war. The B-29 was a $3 billion project. That's $43 billion in today's money. All of that investment in the air war against the Japanese by December of 1944 had come up empty. Hansel and all the other brass in the Marianas were bewildered. When a true believer discovers that his God cannot save him, what's left? Nothing. Haywood Hansel was finished. In January of 1945, Hansel was relieved of his post as head of the 21st Bomber Command. In his place was put, the man you bring in when all else has failed, Curtis LeMay. Even decades later, Possum Hansel would bristle when asked about the circumstances of his departure and the person who replaced him in the Pacific. He had taught LeMay at the Air Corps Tactical School and was his commanding officer in Europe. Here's Hansel again at the Air Force Academy in 1967. He's just been asked to name who he felt were the finest officers of his generation. SPEAKER_13: SPEAKER_13: General LeMay was one of your group commanders. I noticed you didn't put him in this last group. SPEAKER_07: Well, exactly. LeMay was not a patrician with a swagger stick. He did not read Cervantes and sing musical theater to his crew at the end of long missions. He had no time for demonstrations of personal integrity and character. He had a problem to solve. SPEAKER_06: The one thing we can never get more of is time. Or can we? This is Watson X Orchestrate, AI designed to multiply productivity by automating tasks. When you Watson X your business, you can build digital skills to help human resources spend less time generating offer letters, writing job recs, and managing schedules, and spend more time on humans. Let's create more time for your business with Watson X Orchestrate. Learn more at ibm.com slash orchestrate. IBM. Let's create. SPEAKER_07: Let's talk about Pandora's box. According to Greek mythology, Pandora was given a box from the gods that contained special gifts, but they forbade her from opening it. In the end, Pandora's curiosity got the best of her. She opened the box, thereby unleashing curses upon mankind. Cut to 3,000 years later, and we could very well be talking about the story of those mattresses in a box. You know what I'm talking about. They promised something special inside, but in the end, many would say it's a curse. After all, they're just glorified slabs of foam that are crushed, crammed into a box, and then left on your doorstep. If you want a mattress that feels like a true gift from the gods, consider a Saatva luxury mattress. Saatvas don't come in a box. That kind of quality simply can't be crammed into a cardboard container. What's more, Saatva will set up your new mattress for you and take your old one at no extra charge. If history has taught us anything, it's do not open Pandora's box. And right now, you'll save $200 on $1,000 or more at saatva.com slash gladwell. That's S-A-A-T-V-A dot com slash gladwell. Picture this, it's Monday morning. You're cruising through hundreds of unread emails. You didn't know you needed Mimecast. Your impulse to promptly click download or respond could be the launch of a cyber attack. You see, an email address is a direct digital path to the mind, the machine, and the data of every person in your organization. That means your M365 accounts are at risk of cyber attacks, but you can put your mind at ease with Mimecast. They developed an integrated frictionless solution that fortifies your existing email security and reduces risk, cost, and complexity, allowing your organization to work protected. Best of all, you can get set up in under five minutes with a free 30-day trial of their advanced email security and see all the malicious threats that your current security solution is letting through the cracks. So before you click your next email, visit mimecast.com for your free 30-day trial. That's M-I-M-E-C-A-S-T dot com to learn how you can work protected with Mimecast. SPEAKER_07: When he takes over the 21st Barnard Command, when he first arrives in the Marianas, he does not have his eventual strategy worked out. His mind is still open. Yes. Is that? Yeah. That is correct. I'm talking again with the military historian Conrad Crane about Curtis LeMay after he takes over command from General Heywood Hansell in January of 1945. I'm really curious to sort of reconstruct his thought process, how he, all the reasons why he arrives, that the strategy he finally arrives at. So he begins by, does he begin by doing exactly what Hansell had done? Well, he walks in and he looks around and sees SPEAKER_09: the primitive nature of the facilities and said, this won't do. SPEAKER_07: LeMay is not happy with the military's infrastructure on the Marianas. It was all built by the Navy's construction battalion, the Seabees. LeMay has lost none of his disdain for the Navy. The people who cheated in the bombing exercise years before. SPEAKER_09: He gets invited to have dinner with Admiral Nimitz, who also is headquartered in the Marianas. And he goes over to Nimitz's place and he's in this ornate, almost a palace. And he gets fed on the very formal naval style dinner with the tablecloths and being served and everything. So he invites Admiral Nimitz to visit him for dinner in the next couple of days. And Admiral Nimitz shows up for his dinner and they're sitting in a Quonset hut on a couple of crates eating sea rations. And at the end of the meal, Nimitz looks at LeMay and says, I get your point. And then he started sending more construction materials to LeMay to help finish up the rest of the facilities. SPEAKER_07: By the early spring of 1945, LeMay was ready. He starts out by trying his own version of the strategy taken by his predecessor. He decides to take out the Nakajima aircraft plant in Tokyo. SPEAKER_09: His perception is that he's still expected to do high altitude precision bombing. So he's going to do everything he can to make sure that high altitude precision bombing is going to be more effective. SPEAKER_07: LeMay sends two missions against Nakajima in January, one in February, another in early March. Hundreds of B-29s making the long trek to Japan. And in the end, the plant is still standing. He's run up against the same obstacle as Hansel did. How can I force a Japanese surrender from the air if I can't hit anything? When he realizes he's fixed all those problems, SPEAKER_09: there's nothing else he can tweak, he says, OK, I've got to try something different. SPEAKER_07: LeMay's first realization is that the jet stream is a powerful force. It can't be wished away, and it's making everything else impossible. The first principle of precision bombing doctrine is that the bomber should come in high, well above the range of enemy fire and anti-aircraft guns. LeMay throws it out the window. He decides the B-29s will have to fly at lower altitudes under the jet stream. SPEAKER_09: And once he realizes he's going to have to go to lower altitude, then that leads to a whole set of other conclusions from that. SPEAKER_07: Next logical step, precision bombing was supposed to be daylight bombing. You needed to see the target before you could line up the bomb site. But if LeMay's bombers came in low during the day, they would be sitting ducks for the Japanese air defenses. So he decides they have to come under cover of night. SPEAKER_09: Once you realize you can't go to a high altitude anymore, it drives the rest of his decision process. SPEAKER_07: Jet stream means low. Low means night. And the decision to switch to night raids means you can't do precision bombing anymore. Because there's no way with the technology of the time that a bombing crew would be able to focus on any precise target if they couldn't see it. So just like that, Curtis LeMay does an about face. The man who came of age in the high church of precision bombing decides at the most crucial juncture of his career to abandon his faith, to bomb indiscriminately, to become an area bomber. And what weapon would he use for that task? He knew as well as anyone the reports from the Army testing grounds back in America, where perfect replicas of Japanese towns had been incinerated by Harvard's new wonder weapon. The whole plan is so radical that when LeMay sends a copy of it to Washington for the approval of his boss, General Hap Arnold, he makes sure it arrives on a day when Arnold isn't in his office. So he can get that initial raid off before Arnold really SPEAKER_09: has a chance to look at it very much, because he realizes he's taken a risk. B-29s are very valuable. It's very risky. You're talking about going in at night, low altitude. He leaves most of the ammunition and gunners behind. Crucial fact. SPEAKER_07: The only thing LeMay lets his pilots have to defend themselves is a tail gunner. All other guns are removed. He wants to save as much weight as possible for bombs. SPEAKER_07: In the Air Force archives, it is possible to find interviews from long ago with pilots who remember the day when LeMay told them what was going to happen that night. SPEAKER_03: And there was just a gasp in the audience, because you never thought about doing anything except high altitude flying. SPEAKER_07: This is a B-29 navigator named David Braden. And you went out and the bottom of your aircraft SPEAKER_03: had been painted black. So you do, this is going to be a different thing. Most of the guys thought it was a suicide mission. SPEAKER_07: And did Braden's commander, Curtis LeMay, know this was going to work? Of course he didn't. But remember his words, the credo of the man who gets things done. I'd rather have someone who was real stupid, but did something, than have someone who'd vacillate and do nothing. Curtis LeMay was going to do something. He was going to area bomb Tokyo under cover of night with napalm. SPEAKER_02: Well, I woke up one day and I'd been up there for about two months and I hadn't done anything much yet. I'd better do something. SPEAKER_07: I wonder if this is why LeMay fascinated so many people in his day, because of his ability to make that sudden turn, to turn his back on who he was in the service of solving the problem. Curtis LeMay was a member of the bombing mafia, a graduate of the Air Corps Tactical School, a proponent of precision bombing, progress unhindered by custom. Later in his career, he would champion something called the B-70 bomber, an airplane so absurdly complicated, so ridiculously advanced, so preposterously expensive and so deliciously and fantastically tricked out that the Air Force only built two prototypes, one of which crashed. The other has spent his entire life in a museum. LeMay was in his heart, always the little boy who ran after airplanes in the sky. And yet when he needed to, he could take all that, his entire identity, the modern, progressive, skilled war maker, and throw it out the window. SPEAKER_10: General LeMay, where did the idea for the low-level fire attacks originate? SPEAKER_02: We had ideas flying back and forth a lot. It was my basic decision that made it. Nobody said anything about night centering bombing, but he had to have some results, and I had to produce them. If I didn't produce them, I made a wrong guess, get another commander in there. That's what happened to Hansel. I got no results. I had to have them. So that's the reason for it. SPEAKER_07: On the night of March 9th, 1945, Curtis LeMay launched Operation Meeting House. He sent 334 B-29s from the Marianas to Tokyo, loaded with as much napalm as they could carry. The target was not the Nakajima aircraft plant. That plan was over. The new target was a densely populated region of Tokyo, straddling the Sumida River, a few miles east of the Imperial Palace, Zone 1. The first few bombers dropped flares, marking the target area for those that followed. LeMay was sending in his bombers at 5,000 feet, incredibly low. That was so crazy that the Japanese were completely unprepared. The bombs fell from the B-29s in clusters. They were small steel pipes 20 inches long, weighing six pounds, packed with TNT and napalm, little baby bombs, each with a long silver gauze streamer at one end, so that if you looked in the sky that night in Tokyo, there would have been a moment of extraordinary beauty. Thousands of these little silver daggers falling down to earth, and then boom. On impact, thousands of small explosions, burning globs of napalm thrown in every direction. All told, by morning, 1,665 tons of napalm dropped on Tokyo in one night. Circling high above Tokyo is the master bomber, LeMay's deputy, Tommy Power, choreographing the attack. Conrad Crane says that Power sat in his cockpit, drawing pictures of everything he saw. He remarked, you know, the air was so full of incendiary areas you could not have walked through them. SPEAKER_09: By 2.37, the largest visible fire area was about 40 blocks long and 15 wide. The smoke was up to 25,000 feet. When he draws his last sketch, which is about an hour after the initial, his first one, there's basically a score of separate areas from 50 to 1,000 city blocks burning at the same time. And his last report says that the glow from the fires was visible 150 miles away. The napalm creates a firestorm, a conflagration SPEAKER_07: hundreds of blocks long. The firestorm is a firestorm that is a firestorm that is a conflagration hundreds of blocks long. A fire of such intensity and duration that it creates and sustains its own wind system. Everything burns, 16 square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire even reaches them. After the war, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following. Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour period than any time in the history of man. More than 100,000 people died that night. SPEAKER_03: Frankly, when those cities were on fire, it looked like you're looking into the mouth of hell. I mean, you should not imagine a fire that big. SPEAKER_07: Over the course of the spring and summer of 1945, LeMay went on to firebomb another 66 Japanese cities. In the chaos of war, the dead were never counted. The final toll may be as high as half a million. SPEAKER_09: They're about 5,000 feet. They are pretty low. They are low enough that the smell of burning flesh permeates the aircraft. They actually have to fumigate the aircraft when they land back in the Marianas because the smell of burning flesh remains within the aircraft. SPEAKER_07: Two cities were spared, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. They were left for another day and another Air Force command with a different idea of how to win a war. SPEAKER_07: On August 15th, 1945, at 12 noon, the Emperor of Japan surrendered. The Air Force was asked to bring Japan to its knees from the air so that a ground invasion could be avoided. They succeeded. Next week, the reckoning. When you burn alive hundreds of thousands of civilians in the course of a military objective, what happens next? Provisionist History is produced by Mia Lebel and Lee Mingistu with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra, mastering by Flawn Williams, fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Hedda Fain, Carly Migliori, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Malcolm Gladwell here. Let's re-examine employee benefits. With the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance, you'll get it right the first time. Keep your business competitive by looking out for your employees' needs with quality benefits from the Hartford. The Hartford Group Benefits team makes managing benefits and absences a breeze while providing your employees with a streamlined world-class customer experience that treats them like people, not policies. Keep your workforce moving forward with group benefits from the Hartford Insurance Group Benefits Insurance. Learn more at theheartford.com. The bucks got you back. Learn more at theheartford.com slash benefits. This year, Hyundai features their all-electric Hyundai IONIQ SPEAKER_00: lineup as a proud sponsor of the I Heart Radio Music Festival in Las Vegas with two high-tech models. The IONIQ 5 can take you an EPA-estimated 303 miles on a single charge and has available two-way charging for electronic equipment inside and outside the car. The IONIQ 6 boasts a mind-blowing range of up to 360 miles and can deliver up to an 80% charge in just 18 minutes with its 800-volt DC ultra-fast charger. Check out Hyundai at the I Heart Radio Music Festival in Las Vegas as their all-star IONIQ lineup hits the stage like you've never seen before. Hyundai, it's your journey. SPEAKER_05: It's semi-annual sale season at cheapcaribbean.com, which means you can unlock more savings on your next all-inclusive beach vacay. If you want to visit the beach in the fall, winter, or spring, it's never too early or late to start planning. Which is why we're offering up to $150 off your booking of four nights or more. Just use code SAVINGBIG150 at checkout to unlock your exclusive offer at cheapcaribbean.com. Semi-annual sale ends October 3rd. See you at the beach.