Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb
With James M. Scott
Part of Aviation and Naval Battles in the Pacific Week
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Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed.
Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: “If we lose the war, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” James M. Scott will talk abut that horrific night, and how, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later.
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Our guest today is James M Scott, a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, and the author most recently of Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, from which this article is adapted. His previous books include Rampage, which was named one of the best books of the year by the editors at Amazon, Kirkus, and Military Times, and Target Tokyo, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History. Other works include The War Below and The Attack on the Liberty, which won the Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Excellence in Naval Literature.
Other shows with a similar theme:
Rampage - The Battle of Manila 1945 - with James M. Scott [ Ссылка ]
Whirlwinds of Flame - The Bombing of the Japanese mainland [ Ссылка ]
B-29s over Japan - 1945, Curtis Le May and Operation Meetinghouse [ Ссылка ]
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