At two minutes before noon on September 1, 1923, a massive earthquake struck Japan. Centered below Sagami Bay, thirty miles south of Tokyo, and measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale, the first shocks lasted for fourteen seconds. Powerful seismic waves instantly toppled almost every building in the port city of Yokohama, sent a wall of water crashing across the coast of the island of Honshu, and unleashed mudslides that inundated fishing villages and buried inhabitants alive.
But the most horrific phase of one of the twentieth century’s worst natural disasters began minutes later. In densely populated neighborhoods of flimsy wooden houses, charcoal braziers tumbled over, fuel tanks ruptured, combustible chemicals in apothecaries exploded, and high winds fanned the flames through alleys. Within half an hour of the earthquake, 136 fires had erupted in twelve of Tokyo’s fifteen wards. Water mains broke throughout the city, making it impossible for firefighters to douse the flames. The Great Kanto Earthquake and the ensuing conflagration killed 140,000 people, traumatized the country, and set back Japanese industrial production for years.* “The Yokohama and Tokyo disaster,” wrote an editor at the Japan Weekly Chronicle, “did as much damage in twenty-four hours as the warring armies on the Western Front did in four years.”
Two decades later, as battles raged between the US and Japan in the South Pacific, the earthquake loomed large in the minds of Allied war planners. As US forces seized atoll after atoll and advanced to within bomber range of the Japanese mainland, hard-liners advocated a drastic strategy: the indiscriminate firebombing of Japanese cities that would replicate the mass death and destruction of 1923. “The type of bomb concentration discussed is calculated to start sweeping fires in heavily built-up urban areas,” declared an intelligence report in October 1943, “utilizing the combustible materials in Japanese construction as ‘kindling’ for conflagrations capable of destroying factories and other military objectives over wide areas.”
The prospect of widespread firebombing obsessed military planners. In 1944 US Air Force officers even consulted Canadian and British insurance adjusters who had worked in Tokyo at the time of the earthquake, including one who had assisted with the redesign of the city. Incendiary bombs, they calculated, “would destroy 70 per cent of the houses in the six major cities and would result in the estimated death of 560,000 persons.” Apocalyptic destruction of city after city, they believed, would break the will of the Japanese to continue the war.
These hard-liners were opposed by a group of air force officers who had risen together through the ranks in the 1920s and 1930s and called themselves the Bomber Mafia. (The name was originally a term of disparagement used by many US military officers for graduates of the Air Corps Tactical School in Langley, Virginia, who believed that aerial bombardment would be essential to victory in modern warfare.) Appalled by the prospect of mass civilian deaths, they argued that US technological advances, including sophisticated bombsights and a powerful long-range bomber known as the Superfortress, meant they could inflict precision strikes on military and industrial targets while avoiding actions that might be judged war crimes.
As World War II entered its final phase, the argument between these two factions played out in the hallways of the Pentagon and the skies over Japan. But Americans were clamoring for a speedy end to the war, and the result was a foregone conclusion. US bombers ended up dropping hundreds of tons of incendiaries on Japanese cities between March and July 1945, killing 333,000 people and injuring 473,000. Today, however, the firebombings remain a footnote to the atomic blasts that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. A full moral reckoning of the horror they inflicted has never taken place.
James Scott’s Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb is a briskly paced and often gruesome account of how the US military came to put that strategy into action. The author of several books focusing on the Pacific theater in World War II, including Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (2015) and Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila (2018), Scott has, at one level, written a classic war story: a mix of colorful and clashing personalities, tense dogfights, and epic human suffering. But he is aiming at something deeper here: a meticulous examination of how and why the old rules of war were cast aside and men came to embrace a new level of barbarity.
As Scott points out, it was Great Britain, not the United States, that first broke a once inviolable taboo. The British had begun the war as advocates of restraint against civilians. But after the Nazi bombings of Warsaw and Rotterdam, followed by the London Blitz and aerial attacks on Liverpool, Coventry, and other British cities in 1940 and 1941, that restraint loosened. Winston Churchill was an early proponent of incendiary attacks on Nazi Germany. He found an eager ally—too eager, perhaps—in Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris of the Royal Air Force, a former gold miner from Rhodesia regarded by some as a psychopath. Scott describes him in more moderate terms, while leaving no doubt about his appetite for murder:
Harris was a ruthless and tenacious commander; he chain-smoked Lucky Strikes while guzzling Dr. Collis Browne’s mixture to quiet his ulcers. “He gave,” one historian noted, “no sign of fearing God or man.” Harris approached his job with a vulgar glee, which seemed more fitting in the rough-and-tumble colonies than in the parlors of English high society. “We can wreck Berlin,” he once crowed, “from end to end.”
On the night of July 24, 1943, Harris ordered Operation Gomorrah, one of the first firebombings of a city in Nazi Germany. Over eight nights, RAF bombers dropped thousands of tons of explosives and incendiaries on Hamburg, the regime’s main producer of submarines and warships. During the worst night of the operation, July 27, fires whipped up windstorms that ripped “children from the arms of their parents,” incinerated 8.5 square miles of the city, and killed 45,000 people; more civilians died that night than in the entire nine months of the London Blitz. The attack horrified some US military strategists, who thought the indiscriminate slaughter might only strengthen German resolve to fight.
The main advocate of a more humane approach to warfare, as sketched out by Scott, was General Haywood “Possum” Hansell. The son of a career army officer from Georgia, Hansell attended Georgia Tech and joined the fledgling US Army Air Corps with ambitions to design airplanes. But he fell in love with flying, and in the early 1930s he became one of the Three Men on a Flying Trapeze, who performed stunts in traveling aerial shows. Afterward he spent four years teaching at the Air Corps Tactical School at Alabama’s Maxwell Field. The pilots there were “a different breed of cat,” remembered his colleague and future air force general Carl Spaatz. “We flew through the air and other people walked on the ground. It was as simple as that.”
Hansell and his circle believed that the future of warfare lay in the aerial bombardment of an enemy’s industrial facilities, which would largely eliminate the grinding infantry combat that had cost millions of lives in the Great War. He continued preaching that philosophy as he ascended the air force ranks, becoming the commander of the First Bombardment Wing early in World War II and then deputy commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe. Scott writes:
At his core…Hansell was a gentleman, whose love of writing verse had made him the air force’s unofficial poet laureate. The genteel general, who recited Shakespeare and adored Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, approached combat in a similar manner. He despised the firebombing of cities that defined the British air war in Europe, advocating instead that America execute daylight precision raids designed to knock out an enemy’s industry while minimizing civilian deaths. “The idea,” he once wrote, “of killing thousands of men, women and children was basically repugnant to American mores.”
Opposing Hansell’s approach was Curtis LeMay, another air ace turned commander who was as gruff and pragmatic as Hansell was genteel and intellectual. The son of an itinerant laborer who moved his family from Ohio to Montana to California, LeMay became captivated as a boy by the stunt pilot Lincoln Beachey and nurtured dreams of flying even after watching Beachey plummet to his death in San Francisco Bay during a 1915 air show. LeMay enrolled in the ROTC at Ohio State and then finagled a spot in the US Army Air Corps. He studied celestial navigation under the legendary Australian pilot Harold Gatty, eventually becoming known, said one colleague, as “the best damned navigator in the Army Air Corps.” In 1942 LeMay was appointed commander of the 305th Bombardment Group, charged with leading air raids over Germany.
Scott does a skillful job of charting the rivalry between the two commanders. Initially both men supported targeted raids on German munitions and aircraft factories carried out during the daytime at high altitudes by the B-17 bomber, known as the Flying Fortress, a muscular four-engine plane bristling with guns and sheathed in armor. But the B-17 was plagued by its heavy weight and its troublesome engines. Moreover, it often flew without the protection of short-range fighter planes, making it an easy target for the Luftwaffe. LeMay came up with clever modifications, such as changing the flying formation to allow an unobstructed field of fire on German warplanes. But a series of ineffective bombing runs cast doubt on Hansell’s strategy.
Hansell remained a believer. In 1944 he was reassigned to the South Pacific as the commander of the Twenty-First Bomber Command. The US had just secured a series of hard-won victories in the Mariana Islands, culminating in the seizure of Saipan, which became a vital US Air Force base. Those conquests came just as the first B-29 Superfortress, a long-range bomber that dwarfed its predecessor, rolled off the assembly line. All the Japanese islands now lay tantalizingly within reach of US warplanes. Hansell began dispatching his squadrons to attack aircraft plants in the suburbs of Tokyo, 1,500 miles away. But Japan’s often thick cloud cover and violent jet stream winds made precision bombing raids difficult, and the B-29s faced stiff resistance from kamikaze pilots and heavy antiaircraft fire.
Hansell’s days as a commander were numbered. By mid-1944 Churchill had persuaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to back low-altitude nighttime firebombings of residential areas in Germany, a strategic and moral shift that signaled the end of the limited war advocated by Hansell and his Bomber Mafia. A Pentagon “incendiary subcommittee” met in the spring of 1944 and determined that Japan was a far more promising target for this strategy than Germany, since many of its military factories were concentrated in six cities and much production was located in the houses of civilian workers. Commander William McGovern of the Office of Strategic Services argued that the Japanese were especially fearful of fire and that incendiary attacks in the heart of the capital would quickly sap them of their will to continue the war. “The closer you get to the center of Tokyo, the heart of Tokyo, the greater the psychological effect,” he wrote.
By early 1945 Hansell had lost the support of his men. “Possum was a weak sister. Likeable but weak,” one later said. More importantly, he had lost the confidence of Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, the commander of the US Air Force and the chief figure behind the production of the Superfortress. LeMay, now leading the Twentieth Bomber Command in India, had won Arnold’s admiration with a series of bold missions across the Himalayas to China, which LeMay described as “1,200 miles of the worst flying imaginable.” The B-29s refueled at US air bases there and then struck targets on the island of Kyushu and in Singapore and Sumatra. In January 1945 Arnold fired Hansell and replaced him with LeMay.
Scott lays out the ineluctable slide toward mass murder with gripping clarity. Initially LeMay continued Hansell’s approach, ordering daytime raids on factories in Kobe. But after several of these raids fizzled, LeMay recast himself as an American Bomber Harris. In February he devised a plan to fly the B-29s far below the jet stream, at an altitude of just five thousand to seven thousand feet, and to elude Japanese flak and fighters by using the cover of darkness. Out went the selective target list of the Hansell era; now the bombers would blindly drop incendiaries over Japan’s crowded residential neighborhoods. LeMay was under no illusions about the horrors that his B-29s would inflict. “I suppose if I had lost the war,” he later confided to an aide, “I would have been tried as a war criminal.”
At 5:36 PM on March 9, 1945, weeks after British bombers incinerated the German city of Dresden, the first of a squadron of 325 B-29 bombers, representing 84 percent of LeMay’s entire arsenal, took off from Saipan, bound for Tokyo. The aircraft had been stripped of their conventional armaments so they could carry more clusters of small incendiary munitions. Scott writes:
An aerial freight train of terror rumbled through the capital’s skies. Nearly ten tons of bombs fell on average each minute of the attack. The clusters blew open a couple of thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm. Those hexagonal cylinders guided by canvas streamers tore through the tile roofs of homes and shops, factories and businesses, spraying flaming jellied gasoline on walls, tatami mats, and mattresses.
Scott’s descriptions of the fires on the streets of Tokyo go on at great length, and their grisly detail stands in counterpoint to the detachment and, later, the self-congratulatory swagger of LeMay and the US military planners. He relies heavily on the account of the police photographer Koyo Ishikawa, who risked his life repeatedly to document the raid:
“Everywhere I looked,” he wrote, “there was only fire.” He dropped to his knees and crawled, desperately searching for a place to shield himself from the wind. Around him people collapsed and died. He pulled one knee in front of the other, as the flames roared. Mattresses and bags ignited into fireballs, rolling down the street. Ahead Ishikawa saw a stream of fire rush, like a torrent, shooting up side streets and alleys, picking up bodies…. “The heat mixed with sparks covered me. I wondered how long I’d be able to endure,” he recalled. “I was prepared for this to be the end of my life.”
At the end of this night of horror, another eyewitness recounted,
in the black Sumida River, countless bodies were floating, clothed bodies and naked bodies, all as black as charcoal. It was unreal. These were dead people, but you couldn’t tell whether they were men or women. You couldn’t even tell if the objects floating by were arms and legs or pieces of burnt wood.
Reading the accounts of mass death that Scott has assembled from archives and a handful of survivors, I was struck by their similarity to the stories told by those who lived through the 1923 fires in Tokyo and Yokohama. I had to remind myself that this was not a natural disaster but the deliberate targeting of civilians.
The raid, which the air force called Operation Meetinghouse, destroyed 15.8 square miles of Tokyo, including 267,171 homes, shops, and businesses, and killed 105,000 people, more than twice the number of deaths in Hamburg two years earlier. From the perspective of the US military, it was a resounding success. “The results far exceed my optimistic expectations,” declared General Lauris Norstad of the Twentieth Air Force. Once LeMay got started, his pace accelerated. Over the next weeks, night after night, bombing raids reduced fifty-eight Japanese cities, including Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Kawasaki, and Kobe, to ruins and caused millions of casualties. Only the dropping of the atomic bombs in August ended LeMay’s incendiary spree.
Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War deals in just one chapter with the suffering endured by the Japanese. The author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Talking to Strangers, and other popular works that explore social psychology and the mysteries of human interaction, Gladwell chooses to focus almost entirely on the events leading up to the firebombing of Tokyo. He considers it as a moral puzzle, a story of human obsessions and technological ingenuity converging to create a terrible event. Writing in the conversational, gently didactic style that has become his trademark, he presents the “longest night” as a fable about
how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime. It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in basement labs at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back.
Like Scott, Gladwell sees the story in part as a struggle between two large personalities with clashing visions: Possum Hansell, the aristocratic southerner with a penchant for Gilbert and Sullivan and Don Quixote, and LeMay, a “bulldog” of a man with an oversize square head, a passion for poker, and an imperviousness to self-doubt. But Gladwell also introduces important figures who don’t appear in Scott’s book, notably Frederick Lindemann, a German-born physicist who formed a profound bond with Churchill after they met in England in the 1920s. The messy, impulsive Churchill found himself drawn to the “disciplined, almost fanatically consistent” Lindemann, and in the early days of World War II Lindemann won over Churchill to his argument that the indiscriminate firebombing of cities could break an enemy’s will to fight:
In America, at the Air Corps Tactical School, the Bomber Mafia dreamed of a world where bombs were used with dazzling precision. Lindemann went out of his way to promote the opposite approach—and the only explanation [the novelist and government adviser C.P. Snow] could come up with is personal. Lindemann was just a sadist. He found it satisfying to reduce the cities of the enemy to rubble: “About him there hung a kind of atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You felt that he didn’t understand his own life well, and he wasn’t very good at coping with the major things. He was venomous; he was harsh-tongued; he had a malicious, sadistic sense of humor, but nevertheless you felt somehow he was lost.”
Gladwell is fascinated as well by how technological innovation shapes history. He devotes much attention to Carl Norden, a brilliant tinkerer from Dutch Indonesia whose work had profound effects on air warfare. Norden’s great invention was a bombsight known as the Mark XV, nicknamed “the football,” a fifty-five-pound device, stabilized by a gyroscope, that kept a target in the crosshairs no matter how much an airplane bounced because of turbulence or a pilot’s evasive maneuvers. The Mark XV, Norden promised, would allow a bomber to “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up.” Without Norden, Gladwell argues, Hansell and his Bomber Mafia’s push for precision strikes on German and Japanese targets would never have gained traction.
Yet Norden’s bombsight was not the only innovation that determined the way the aerial war was fought. In the late 1930s the US National Defense Research Committee enlisted some of the country’s preeminent chemists, including Louis Fieser of Harvard and Hoyt Hottel of MIT, to develop conventional weapons as a counterpart to its Manhattan Project. Fieser traveled to Delaware to investigate a DuPont hydrocarbon known as divinylacetylene, which made paint burst into flames. That led to experiments with incendiary gels and the development of a sticky goo made of gasoline and aluminum palmitate that clung to bodies and kept burning—napalm. A delivery system was invented by an organic chemist, E.B. Hershberg:
Hershberg had figured out how to turn their new gel into a bomb: by inserting a stick of TNT with a layer of white phosphorus wrapped around it in the middle of a canister of napalm. Phosphorus burns at a very high temperature, so the TNT would go off, driving the burning phosphorus into the napalm gel, igniting it, and sending globs of it in every direction. For a bomb case, they used a shell that had originally been designed to hold mustard gas.
Gladwell bores in on the tiniest details to illuminate his larger themes. A discussion of precision bombing leads to a meditation on ball bearings, rolling elements filled with tiny balls and covered with grease that are critical to the functioning of machinery, from bicycle gears to airplane engines. Almost all of Germany’s ball bearing industry was concentrated in Schweinfurt, “a Bomber Mafia fantasy,” writes Gladwell, where five factories produced millions of units a month. The US bombing raid on Schweinfurt in 1943 was the first real test of Norden’s bombsight, and it was a resounding failure. Most of the bombers missed their targets, and the Germans shot down sixty US planes. Extreme low temperatures at high altitudes, it was learned, affected the sensitive device’s accuracy, as did the nervousness of pilots under fire. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that “there is no evidence that the attacks on the ball bearing industry had any measurable effect on essential war production.” Norden’s invention turned out to work far better in the lab than in real-life combat.
Napalm, by contrast, functioned with malevolent efficiency, and in the end the incendiary gel would be the weapon of choice. Instead of allowing for a near-bloodless conflict, technological innovation created a new horror.
Was the firebombing justified? US planners never questioned the righteousness of the air raids, pointing out that Japan had started the war and perpetrated countless atrocities against soldiers and civilians. Beyond retribution, the US cast the firebombing as a necessity that, along with the atomic bombs, broke the enemy’s will to fight and obviated the need for an invasion of the Japanese mainland, which would almost certainly have caused hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties—both soldiers and civilians.
Yet the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had codified a set of international laws intended to protect civilians in wartime; the Geneva Conventions of 1949, ratified by all member states of the United Nations and adopted by the International Criminal Court in its Rome Statute of 1998, outlawed “wilful killing” of persons not involved in conflict, as well as “wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health” and “extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity.” Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the atrocities that followed—the execution of civilians, the targeting of hospitals and other infrastructure, the deportation of children to Russian territory—are reminders that deliberately killing noncombatants remains a fundamental part of modern conflict. Though smaller in scale than the firebombings of World War II, Russia’s actions raise the question of what defines a war crime and how perpetrators should be held to account. Neither Gladwell nor Scott addresses this head on, but according to the definitions established by international accords, the firebombings of Japan and Germany certainly fit the definition of war crimes.
In Japan the firebombing has prompted little public discussion, in contrast to the emotional debate that still surrounds Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Early on there was a general recognition among civilians that Japan had been the aggressor and that napalm fell under the definition of a conventional weapon of war. The silence also stemmed from the fact that Japan bent over backward to avoid antagonizing its postwar occupiers, even awarding LeMay the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun for helping to establish Japan’s modern air force. (LeMay later became notorious for remarking in a 1968 memoir that the US should bomb North Vietnam “back to the stone age” and for being George Wallace’s running mate during his presidential campaign that year.)
The silence has continued to the present. A March 2020 New York Times Magazine article pointed out that in 2018 fewer than 10,000 people visited the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damages, a memorial on the capital’s outskirts, compared with the 1.5 million who visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. “I think people do not want to see or know,” a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing, Katsumoto Saotome, told the Times. Saotome spent decades collecting and publishing survivors’ accounts and pushing the government, with little success, to memorialize those who died.
But a reassessment of the Allied policy of incendiary warfare has begun elsewhere. The German historian Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940–1945 (2002) was a groundbreaking account of the firebombing of Dresden told from the German perspective. Several other works have focused on Germans as victims, such as W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction (1999). Sebald castigated other German authors for their incapacity “to describe what they had seen, and to convey it to our minds,” referring to the Allied air raids on German cities. Friedrich’s book is filled with gruesome descriptions of people asphyxiating in cellars and burning in melting asphalt, and of the carbonized remnants of victims being carted to mortuaries. Yet the book made almost no mention of Germans as the aggressors in World War II, and Friedrich’s use of inflammatory terms such as “final solution” to describe the Allied raids generated controversy. Still, there was no attempt in Germany after its publication to equate the firebombing with the Holocaust.
In Black Snow, Scott makes the immolation of hundreds of thousands of civilians viscerally powerful but can’t arrive at a definitive judgment about it. Gladwell argues that the Pentagon could have limited LeMay’s “rampage” against Japanese cities, including many that had negligible strategic importance:
People like Stimson and Stilwell could not—or would not—wrap their minds around what LeMay was doing. They struggled not just with the scale of the destruction LeMay planned and inflicted on Japan that summer but also with the audacity of it. A man, out there in the Marianas, falls in love with napalm, comes up with an improvised solution to get around the weather. And then he just keeps going and going.
Yet Gladwell also cites the testimony of US and Japanese historians who agree that the relentless incendiary attacks followed by the atomic bombs did force Japan’s surrender in August 1945, thus avoiding an even more prolonged conflict. We are left with the image of Hansell as a good man fighting a good war, “a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world,” Gladwell writes. In the end, however, he was pushed aside by a rival who had an endless capacity for cruelty yet also an understanding of the war’s merciless imperatives.
English (US) · 