It’s All Ashes… PDF

## It’s All Ashes… ### Chapter Eight "It's all ashes. All that and that and that." 1. Military historian Conrad Crane is an expert on Major General Curtis LeMay. I asked him about LeMay's mind-set when he became head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command after taking over from Haywood Hansell in Ja...

## It’s All Ashes… ### Chapter Eight "It's all ashes. All that and that and that." 1. Military historian Conrad Crane is an expert on Major General Curtis LeMay. I asked him about LeMay's mind-set when he became head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command after taking over from Haywood Hansell in January of 1945. As Crane put it, "When he takes over the Twenty-First Bomber Command, when he first arrives in the Marianas, he does not have his eventual strategy worked out. His mind is still open..." If Hansell was inflexible, a man of principle, LeMay was the opposite. First things first. LeMay was not happy with the military's infrastructure on the Marianas. It was all built by the Navy's construction battalion, the Seabees. LeMay had lost none of his disdain for the Navy, the military branch he believed cheated in the bombing exercise years before. As Crane related: He looks around and sees the primitive nature of the facilities and said, "This won't do" ... He gets invited to have a 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 [a] very formal Navy-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 *C* 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. LeMay starts by trying out his own version of his predecessor's strategy. He decides to take out the Nakajima aircraft plant in Tokyo. He needs to satisfy himself that Hansell's failure wasn’t just Hansell. ### The Bomber Mafia "It’s All Ashes..." LeMay sends his first mission against Nakajima in January, then one in February, and another in early March. Hundreds of B-29s, making the long trek to Japan. And in the end, the plant is still standing. He has run up against the same obstacle as Hansell did. How can I force a Japanese surrender from the air if I can't hit anything? As Crane explains, "There's nothing else he can tweak. He says, 'Okay, I've got to try something different.'" * He starts with the wind. The jet stream is an unstoppable force. It can't be wished away, and LeMay realizes it’s making everything else impossible. Precision-bombing doctrine starts with the requirement that the bomber come in high, well above the range of enemy fire and antiaircraft guns. LeMay throws that doctrine out the window. He decides the B-29s will have to come in under the jet stream. Then there are the clouds. The Norden bombsight only works if the bombardier can see the target. But Japan can be almost as cloudy as England. In February of 1945, the staff meteorologists on Guam tell LeMay that he can expect no more than seven days in March when there would be skies clear enough for visual bombing. He could expect six days in April and May and four in June. How do you mount a sustained attack on Japan if you can only bomb six or seven days a month? There's a strange stream-of-consciousness section in LeMay's autobiography where he writes: How many times have we just died on the vine, right here on these islands? We assembled the airplanes, assembled the bombs, the gasoline, the supplies, the people. We got the crew set- everything ready, to go out and run the mission. Then what would we do? Sit on our butts and wait for the weather...So what am I trying to do now? Trying to get us to be independent of weather. And when we'll get ready, we'll go. So what does "trying to get us to be independent of weather" mean? It means not only is he going to come in under the jet stream, he’s also going to come in under the clouds. He’s going to have the pilots come in between five thousand and nine thousand feet, lower than anyone has ever dreamed of taking a B-29 on a bombing run. Crane explains, "Once he realizes he's going to have to go to lower altitude, then that leads to a whole set of other conclusions." * The next logical step: precision bombing was supposed to be daylight bombing. You needed to see the target before you could line up the bombsight. But if LeMay’s bombers come in low during the day, they will be sitting ducks for the Japanese air defense, so he decides: We’ve got to come under cover of night. Jet stream plus heavy cloud cover means low. Low means night. And the decision to switch to night raids * And there was just a gasp in the audience, 'cause you never thought about doing anything except high-altitude flying. And you went out, and the bottom of your aircraft had been painted black. So you knew that this was going to be a different thing... Most of the guys thought it was a suicide mission. Some of them went in and wrote goodbye letters to their families, you know, because of the low-altitude [flight profile]. To be clear, five thousand feet is not just low. Five thousand feet is also unheard of. Twenty years later, Haywood Hansell was still astonished at the insanity of LeMay's idea: I have been asked whether I would have done that. I think in all honesty the answer would be no. I think I'd have gone in [at] about fifteen thousand feet. But to go in first as low as five or ten thousand feet, without any real knowledge of the density of the antiaircraft defenses, was I think a very dangerous and a very courageous thing to do if it turned out to be right, and I think that was General LeMay’s personal decision. A very dangerous and a very courageous thing. It really isn't necessary to read between the lines of what Hansell said. The day when LeMay briefs his pilots, he almost has a mutiny on his hands. But had you confronted him that morning, he would have said, What choice do I have? As he put it later, "Well, I woke up one day, and I had been up there for about two months and I hadn’t done anything much yet. I’d better do something." Was he really just going to sit there and wait for the clouds to clear, the jet stream to move away, and his bombardiers to become Norden virtuosos? In an oral history recorded long after the war, he still had Haywood Hansell's disgraced exit on his mind. Here is how he responded to questions about his strategy: Question: General LeMay, where did the idea for the low-level fire attacks originate? LeMay: We had ideas flying back and forth, a lot. It was my basic decision. I made it...Nobody said anything about night incendiary bombing. But [we] had to have results, and I had to produce them. If I didn’t produce them, or made a wrong guess, get another commander in there. That's what happened to Hansell. He got no results. You had to have them. ### Chapter Nine “Improvised Destruction." 1. After the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, Curtis LeMay and the Twenty-First Bomber Command ran over the rest of Japan like wild animals. Osaka. Kure. Kobe. Nishinomiya. LeMay burned down 68.9 percent of Okayama, 85 percent of Tokushima, 99 percent of Toyama-sixty-seven Japanese cities in all over the course of half a year. In the chaos of war, it is impossible to say how many Japanese were killed- maybe half a million. Maybe a million. On August 6, the Enola Gay, a specially outfitted B-29, flew from the Marianas to Hiroshima and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. Yet LeMay kept going. In his memoirs, ### The Bomber Mafia “Improvised Destruction.” The nuclear attacks get no more than a couple of pages. That was someone else’s gig. Our B-29s went to Yawata on August 8th and burned up 21 percent of the town, and on the same day some other B-29s went to Fukuyama and burned up 73.3 percent. Still, there wasn’t any gasp and collapse when the second nuclear bomb went down above Nagasaki on August 9th. We kept on flying. Went to Kumagaya on August 14th…45 percent of that town. Flew our final mission the same day against [Isesaki], where we burned up 17 percent of that target. Then the crews came home to the Marianas and were told that Japan had capitulated. * LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done. 2. There is a story that LeMay loved to tell about his firebombing campaign. It’s in his memoirs and in interviews he gave after his retirement. And each time he told the story, the language-the phrases, the order of details-is the same, as if it were part of his repertoire. It involved a fellow general named Joseph Stilwell. Stilwell was the head of US operations in the China-Burma-India theater. He was a generation older than LeMay. He was traditional Army, out of West Point. His nickname was Vinegar Joe. He was shrewd and ornery. On his desk was a plaque with a mock-Latin inscription-Illegitimi non carborundum. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.” Of course LeMay wanted to meet Stilwell, so one day he paid him a courtesy call. As LeMay told the story: I went up to New Delhi to call on him. He was out in the jungle someplace. Well, I wasn’t about to go run him down in the jungle. I just left a card, and saw the chief of staff, and went home. A very LeMay beginning to the story: a little belligerence. I wasn’t about to go run him down in the jungle. LeMay tried again, and not long thereafter he met up with Stilwell at the B-29 staging base in China, in Chengdu. LeMay wanted to show Stilwell what the Twentieth Bomber Command was up to. I took him in tow with me, and we got the mission off, and then had dinner, and [I] stayed up all night talking to him, trying to explain to him what strategic bombardment was all about, and what we were trying to do, and how we were going about doing it, and so forth. … I couldn’t get to first base. Just couldn’t, literally couldn’t get to first base. In other words, he couldn’t make himself clear. There they are, two distinguished generals, having dinner and drinks in the middle of China. And LeMay is trying to explain to his colleague what he’s doing, what he wants to do, what he thinks can be accomplished with his marvelous new plane called the B-29. He was trying to communicate the idea that airpower did not have to be used specifically in support of ground troops- that you had other options. That airpower could leapfrog over the front lines of battle and attack behind the lines. It could take out manufacturing plants, power grids, and entire cities if you wanted. Did he talk about napalm? He must have. The work on the replica Japanese buildings in the Utah desert was a matter of record. And LeMay had already used napalm at least once, on one of his bombing runs into Japan. So maybe he went even further and said to Stilwell, “You know, we could just burn the whole country down.” And Stilwell-as savvy and experienced and grizzled a military mind as there was in the Second World War-hadn’t the slightest clue what LeMay was talking about. What did this mean? You would wage an entire war from the sky? A year passes. Japan surrenders, and the two men meet up again. And the next time I saw him was when we went out to the Missouri in Yokohama. For the surrender, he was there. And when we went into Yokohama-Yokohama was a city of about four and a half million then, I guess-I didn’t see a hundred Japs in Yokohama. I’m sure there were more than that around, but they stayed out of sight. LeMay had hit Yokohama in May of 1945, two months after Tokyo. More than 450 B-29s dropped 2,570 tons of napalm, reducing half the city to ashes and killing tens of thousands. A couple of days after their surrender-day encounter in Yokohama, LeMay and Stilwell met again in Guam. As LeMay later recalled: [Stilwell] came over to see me, and he said, “LeMay, I stopped to tell you that it finally dawned on me what you were talking about... And it didn’t dawn on me until I saw Yokohama.” Why didn’t Stilwell understand, back in that first conversation in China, what LeMay was intending? It’s not like Stilwell was some shrinking violet. When he walked around the rubble of Yokohama, he was delighted. This is what he wrote in his diary: “What a kick to stare at the arrogant, ugly, moon-faced, buck-toothed, bowlegged bastards, and realize where this puts them. Many newly demobilized soldiers around. Most police salute. People generally just apathetic. We gloated over the destruction & came in at 3:00 feeling fine.” That’s the kind of man Stilwell was. Yet, he had to see, with his own eyes, what airpower did to Yokohama to understand LeMay, because what LeMay had been talking about in their conversation in China was outside the old general’s imagination. He had been taught back at West Point that soldiers fought soldiers and armies fought armies. A warrior of Stilwell’s generation was slow to understand that you could do this, as an American Army officer, if you wanted: you could take out entire cities. And then more. One after another. Roosevelt’s secretary of war, Henry Stimson, reacted the same way. Stimson was responsible, more than anyone, for the extraordinary war machine that the United States built in the early years of the Second World War. He was a legend, the elder statesman of the elder statesmen, a blue blood, the adult in the room during any discussion of military strategy or tactics. But he seemed strangely oblivious to what his own air forces were up to. General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, once told Stimson, with a straight face, that LeMay was trying to keep Japanese civilian casualties to a minimum. And Stimson believed him. It wasn't until LeMay firebombed Tokyo a second time, at the end of May, that Stimson declared himself shocked at what was happening in Japan. Shocked? This was two and a half months after LeMay had incinerated sixteen square miles of Tokyo the first time around. Historians have always struggled to make sense of Stimson’s obliviousness.* Was it possible that the secretary of war knew less about the March 10 bombing of Tokyo than a reader of the New York Times? Why did he accept Arnold’s statement about attempting to limit the impact of bombing on Japanese civilians? Was he signaling that he really did not wish to be told what the AAF was doing to enemy civilians? I wonder if the explanation for Stimson’s blindness isn’t the same as the explanation for Stilwell’s. What LeMay was doing that summer was simply outside his imagination. When we talk about the end of the war against Japan, we tend to talk about the atomic bombs dropped on * Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August of 1945. The use of nuclear weapons against Japan was a matter of serious planning and consideration. It was endlessly debated and agonized over at the highest levels. Should we use the bomb? If so, where? Once? Twice? Have we set a dangerous precedent? President Truman, who had taken office after Roosevelt died, in the spring of 1945, was advised by a panel of military and scientific experts, weighing the decision well in advance. Truman lost sleep over the decision. He wandered the halls of the White House.* But LeMay’s firebombing campaign unfolded with none of that deliberation. There was no formal plan behind his summer rampage, no precise direction from his own superiors. To the extent that the war planners back in Washington conceived of a firebombing campaign, they thought of hitting six Japanese cities, not sixty-seven. By July, LeMay was bombing minor Japanese cities that had no strategically important industry at all--just people, living in tinderboxes. The historian William Ralph calls LeMay's summer bombing campaign “improvised destruction”: * In his diary on July 25, 1945, Truman wrote: “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world… This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.” It is striking that such a lethal campaign…sprang from the commander in the field. How was it permitted to originate this way? How could a decision laden with such ethical and political consequences be handed to a young field commander? Where was the personal responsibility and active involvement from above? But up above, 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. 3. The ground invasion of Japan--which both the Japanese and American militaries dreaded--never had to happen. In August of 1945, Japan surrendered. This was exactly the outcome LeMay had hoped for that night in March, after he sent his first armada of B-29s to Tokyo. He had sat in his car with St. Clair McKelway and said, “If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten * On January 21, 2009, the day after his inauguration, President Obama signed a United Nations protocol banning the use of incendiary weapons. As of this writing, 115 nations have signed the disarmament treaty, first introduced in 1981.