"Black Snow: The Firebombing of Tokyo" Lecture & Book Signing

69 Hagood Avenue,Charleston SC 29403

13 October, 2022

Description

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atom Bomb Free public lecture from James M. Scott, Citadel Graduate College of ’22, celebrated historian, and 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Thursday, October 13, 5:30PM Holliday Alumni Center, The Citadel 69 Hagood Avenue, Charleston, SC Doors open at 5PM, book signing before and after “The world stands horrified at Russia’s indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in the war against Ukraine. But civilian casualties have long been one of the tragedies of modern warfare, and one of the most horrific episodes was carried out by none other than the United States in the firebombing of Tokyo during World War II. Just after midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly three hundred American B-29s rained incendiary bombs down on the Japanese capital of Tokyo. The bombs created a nearly 2,800-degree inferno that vaporized almost sixteen square miles of the ancient city and killed more than 100,000 people. The attack was so horrifyingly effective that Major General Curtis LeMay, who directed the mission, said, “If we lose, we’ll be tried as war criminals.” The attack marked a major and deadly shift in American military strategy and formed the moral and strategic framework for the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just months later. In his new book, BLACK SNOW: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb, celebrated historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist James M. Scott tells the complete story of the Tokyo firebombing. Drawing extensively on first-person interviews in the United States and with survivors in Japan, air force archives, and oral histories never before published in English (including the 5,000-page Japanese collection known as the Tokyo Air Raid Damage Records), Scott re-creates the nightmarish raid and what led to it, bringing to life the military, political, and moral debates that convinced American forces to shift from a policy of daylight precision bombing to low-altitude incendiary raids. He also explains how it set the stage for modern tactics, from the development of nuclear arsenals to the use of drone strikes in regions of conflict around the world. The air campaign was made possible by the development of the B-29 Superfortress bomber, the single-most expensive weapons system of the war. With new planes’ increased range and bomb loads, America could take the war directly to the heart of the Japanese empire. At the center of this effort was the tough-talking, cigar-chomping, ruthlessly pragmatic Curtis LeMay. LeMay put into place an aggressive and destructive policy of nighttime raids, intended to destroy Japan’s war industries as well as punish the citizens of Japan to the point where the nation ground to a halt and its people demanded an end to the war, thereby forestalling a full-blown invasion of Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo killed more than those who initially died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The attack turned a section of city slightly smaller than the island of Manhattan into nothing but ash. The success of the mission ended the debate over whether precision daylight bombing was the only way to conduct an air campaign. With moral qualms now set aside and a new policy of including civilians as an inherently valuable military target, the way was clear for the use of atomic weapons against Japan. Scott deftly interweaves multiple historical threads to show how domestic and foreign politics, high-minded idealism, the carnage of battle, and the pragmatic brutality of the drive toward victory all led to one of the most lethal bombings in history. It is, at once, a gripping story pitting brave pilots against staggering odds, a story of technological innovation, and a tragic cautionary tale about the consequences of total warfare. BLACK SNOW uses firsthand reports, new research, interviews with Japanese survivors, and keen analysis to reveal the complexity of America’s commitment to a vision of modern combat, and the cost the entire world paid for peace.” “[An] immersive, meticulously researched history. . . . Drawing on oral histories and survivor diaries, Scott vividly recounts the air raid on Tokyo orchestrated by Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay. . . . Full of vivid action scenes and sharp character observations, this riveting WWII history reveals the staggering cost of obtaining peace.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review, and selected for the magazine’s Top 10 Books in the History category of its Fall 2022 announcements