Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: It's July nineteen sixty one, an official ceremony at the
Speaker 2: White House. President Kennedy stands at the microphone. Dark sued
Speaker 2: white shirt, thin black tie. Next to him is a
Speaker 2: second man, shorter, wide through the chest, large square head,
Speaker 2: hair parted triumphantly just off the middle, a thicket of
Speaker 2: decorations on the left breast of his uniform.
Speaker 3: I want to express our great pleasure at the assumption
Speaker 3: of this responsibility by General.
Speaker 2: Le May Curtis Emerson LeMay.
Speaker 3: He was one of the or distinguished combat commanders in
Speaker 3: World War Two. He played a most instrumental role in
Speaker 3: developing who its present death. I pete as the great
Speaker 3: shield of the United States in the free world. So, General,
Speaker 3: you want to say that, speaking personally and also as president,
Speaker 3: that it's a great pleasure to welcome you as the
Speaker 3: new Chief of Staff the United States Air Force and
Speaker 3: member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Speaker 2: The old cliche says that history is written by the victors,
Speaker 2: and that line of Kennedy's he was one of the
Speaker 2: most distinguished combat commanders of World War II is exhibit A.
Speaker 2: Distinguished refers to the events of nineteen forty five when
Speaker 2: LeMay ordered a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths
Speaker 2: of half a million Japanese civilians. In a candid moment,
Speaker 2: LeMay once told one of his subordinates, if we lose
Speaker 2: this war, we'll be tried as war criminals, which is
Speaker 2: almost certainly true. But they didn't lose.
Speaker 4: They won.
Speaker 2: After the war, LeMay joined the Strite Air Command Sack,
Speaker 2: where he was responsible for most of America's nuclear arsenal
Speaker 2: at a time when war with the Soviet Union seemed imminent.
Speaker 2: Then in nineteen sixty one, he became head of the
Speaker 2: whole Air Force. Standing next to Kennedy on the podium.
Speaker 5: I surprised. I appreciate very much they're taking a time
Speaker 5: out from your busy schedule to participate them and this ceremony.
Speaker 5: I'm sure you realize that a number beyond services, I've
Speaker 5: become a Chief assaff as his service as the highest
Speaker 5: honor that can come to him.
Speaker 2: LeMay didn't get tried as a war criminal. He got promoted.
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 2: my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is and
Speaker 2: final installment in my miniseries about Curtis le May and
Speaker 2: the super weapon known as Napalm. I never intended to
Speaker 2: devote four episodes to this story. I was originally going
Speaker 2: to do just one. Then one episode became two, and
Speaker 2: two became three, and then I was at four because
Speaker 2: I kept expecting the story to come to some kind
Speaker 2: of appropriate resolution and it didn't. I mean, if you
Speaker 2: kill half a million civilians, something should happen, shouldn't it.
Speaker 2: And then in the middle of everything, I went to
Speaker 2: Tokyo for another reason entirely and decided to visit a
Speaker 2: little private museum off a side street, the only museum
Speaker 2: in the world dedicated entirely to the bombing campaign that
Speaker 2: burned Tokyo in nineteen forty five. And upstairs, in a
Speaker 2: plain room with linoleum floors that looks like a public
Speaker 2: school classroom, there's a long scroll on the wall, beautiful
Speaker 2: Japanese calligraphy that broke my heart.
Speaker 6: Sank.
Speaker 2: The clear eyed military rationale for the fire bombing of
Speaker 2: Tokyo goes something like this. The United States had no
Speaker 2: better option, nor did Japan. There was only one alternative
Speaker 2: to le Maay's long summer of burning down the cities
Speaker 2: of Japan. With napalm. That would have been a ground
Speaker 2: invasion of Japan by American troops that fall, and that
Speaker 2: would have been worse, far worse.
Speaker 7: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary
Speaker 7: bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the
Speaker 7: end of the presentation at one of the your Japanese
Speaker 7: historians there stood up and said he said, in the end,
Speaker 7: he said, we must thank you Americans for the firebombing
Speaker 7: and the atomic bombs.
Speaker 2: This is the military historian Conrad Crane.
Speaker 7: That kind of took me aback, and then he explained,
Speaker 7: he said, we would have surrendered eventually anyway, but he
Speaker 7: said the impact of the massive firebombing campaign atomic bombs
Speaker 7: was that we surrendered in August.
Speaker 2: No fire bombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese
Speaker 2: don't surrender, and if they don't surrender, the Soviets invade,
Speaker 2: and then the Americans invade and Japan gets carved up
Speaker 2: just like Germany and the Korean Peninsula eventually were.
Speaker 7: And the other thing that would have happened is there
Speaker 7: would have been millions of Japanese that would have starved
Speaker 7: to death in the winter because what happens is when
Speaker 7: by surrendering on August, that gives MacArthur time to come
Speaker 7: in with his occupation forces and actually feed.
Speaker 2: Japan General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific.
Speaker 2: He was the one who accepted the Jetjapanese Emperor's surrender.
Speaker 7: I mean, that's one of MacArthur's great successes, bringing in
Speaker 7: massive amount of foods to avoid starvation in the winter
Speaker 7: of nineteen forty five.
Speaker 2: Much later, in nineteen sixty four, the Japanese government accorded
Speaker 2: le May one of its highest honors, the Grand Cordon
Speaker 2: of the Order of the Rising Sun, for his help
Speaker 2: rebuilding their air force after the war. There was a
Speaker 2: debate in the Japanese parliament about whether the award was
Speaker 2: a good idea, but none of it centered on his
Speaker 2: campaign to burn Japanese cities with napalm. The Japanese government
Speaker 2: had moved on. Everyone moved on. Remember Hoyt Hoddel from
Speaker 2: the second episode in this series. He's the MIT scientist
Speaker 2: Washington brought in to manage the bomb bakeoff. To find
Speaker 2: the very best possible fire bomb to use against the Japanese.
Speaker 2: Hoddle put together a committee of the biggest names in
Speaker 2: chemistry to create the world's greatest incendiary And after the
Speaker 2: war they scattered.
Speaker 8: Amazing how fast people wanted to get out. They were
Speaker 8: fed up on war.
Speaker 2: Fire was still Hoddle's passion, but not burning things down,
Speaker 2: not anymore. Now his passion became stopping things from burning down.
Speaker 8: I was so saturated with fire as a weapon of destruction.
Speaker 8: When I was asked to be on a peacetime fire
Speaker 8: research committee by the Army, I was happy to say yes.
Speaker 2: The mandate of the fire Research Committee was to prevent
Speaker 2: an unquoting large urban fires and forest fires. Hoddle ran
Speaker 2: that committee for eleven years until his retirement. And what
Speaker 2: about Louis Feezer. He was the winner of the bakeoff,
Speaker 2: the co inventor of napalm. He went back to Harvard
Speaker 2: and resumed his duties, trained the next generation of American chemists,
Speaker 2: wrote the definitive College Chemistry textbook with his wife. As
Speaker 2: for his fellow inventor, Eb Hirschberg, the wizard of the laboratory,
Speaker 2: Hirshburg went to work for the Shearing Corporation, a pharmaceutical
Speaker 2: company in New Jersey.
Speaker 9: My father was not a violent person, he's a pacifist.
Speaker 9: He didn't believe in war.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 9: I'm quite sure it is to be avoided.
Speaker 2: Robert Hirschberg, Eb's sun also a scientist. He would call
Speaker 2: his father every evening and they would talk about their
Speaker 2: day in the laboratory. What would your father have when
Speaker 2: he looked across his entire career, what would he have
Speaker 2: considered his finest accomplishment.
Speaker 9: Without doubt, I think it would be prednisone and prinis
Speaker 9: alone pregmozone.
Speaker 2: It's an anti inflammatory agent and amino suppressant, one of
Speaker 2: the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. I don't
Speaker 2: know how to quantify how many lives have been saved
Speaker 2: by that drug, hundreds of thousands. It was a crucial
Speaker 2: part of the very first breakthrough in drug therapy for cancer,
Speaker 2: Amo Freireich's defeat of childhood leukemia in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 2: a combination therapy using methachrekx eight six mp vin Christine
Speaker 2: and prednozone. Eb Hirschberg led the team that developed it
Speaker 2: was prednazone, Hirschberg's atonement for napalm. Like Hoyt Hoddle's work
Speaker 2: on the Fire Research Committee. Maybe, but no one seems
Speaker 2: to have discussed it or considered it. A few years ago,
Speaker 2: the historian Robert nir went searching for a definitive account
Speaker 2: of the birth of the world's most powerful incendiary.
Speaker 10: So I started looking, and it was with a kind
Speaker 10: of growing sense of disbelief that I discovered that actually
Speaker 10: there was no history of napalm. And the more research
Speaker 10: that I did on it, the more I discovered that actually,
Speaker 10: really it was true. There was no not even an
Speaker 10: article that was There was no like even a sort
Speaker 10: of academic journal article that was this is a comprehensive
Speaker 10: history of napalm.
Speaker 2: Robert Near would go to the Widner Research Library at Harvard,
Speaker 2: one of the great libraries in the world. He would
Speaker 2: see shelves of books on atomic weapons, the glamorous bomb,
Speaker 2: built a great expense by the smartest people in the world.
Speaker 10: But this particular weapon, there was no history background about
Speaker 10: it at all.
Speaker 2: He would end up writing that history himself. It's called Napalm,
Speaker 2: an American Biography. What's even stranger, of course, was that
Speaker 2: he was looking for a history of napalm in the
Speaker 2: Harvard library and didn't find anything. Because Harvard was where
Speaker 2: napalm was invented. Robert Neir took me to the place
Speaker 2: on campus where napalm was born.
Speaker 10: We think this is the converse laboratory right here, which
Speaker 10: is where they did the initial experiments in the basement
Speaker 10: window wells with Jeldenson.
Speaker 1: We're looking at them.
Speaker 2: I assumed there would be some indication of which of
Speaker 2: the labs along the basement hallway have belonged to Louis Feeser,
Speaker 2: But no. We peered in one window after another and
Speaker 2: had to guess. It's all very chemical lab here, like
Speaker 2: a zillion pipes and the ceiling. There don't really window
Speaker 2: wells on this side. No, so it is this side.
Speaker 10: Were close, assuming that it hasn't ever been, you know,
Speaker 10: dramatically changed. But I think we're quite close in the
Speaker 10: spiritual sense at least absolutely.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 2: There are long lists of things. Harvard is eager to
Speaker 2: take credit for the transgenic mouse, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging,
Speaker 2: the pacemaker defibrillators, all important, But on the weapon that
Speaker 2: played a decisive role in the biggest war of the
Speaker 2: twentieth century that burned close to half a million Japanese
Speaker 2: alive in the summer of nineteen forty five, it's not
Speaker 2: on the list. It's not even a plaque. And at Harvard,
Speaker 2: I'll point out, they'll put a name on anything. There
Speaker 2: are multiple buildings at Harvard named in honor of the
Speaker 2: Sackler family, whose drug company gave the world OxyContin. So
Speaker 2: it's not like Harvard is squeamish just about napalm. Napalm
Speaker 2: has simply disappeared. And that is the final of napalm's
Speaker 2: many crimes, because it didn't actually disappear. Quite the opposite.
Speaker 2: Five years after the end of the Second World War,
Speaker 2: after the surrender of Japan, the communist back government of
Speaker 2: North Korea invaded South Korea June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty.
Speaker 2: The United Nations condemned the invasion and responded with a
Speaker 2: show of force led by the United States. And what
Speaker 2: was the strategy adopted by the US Air Force in Korea.
Speaker 2: Basically the strategy pioneered by Curtis le May over Japan.
Speaker 2: Firebomb the North Koreans with napalm until they surrender.
Speaker 3: Napalm again, how does the living engines.
Speaker 2: This is a newsreel the Navy put out in the
Speaker 2: middle of the war called this is Korea, directed by
Speaker 2: the legendary John Ford.
Speaker 11: Fry them out, burn them out, cook them, fry them,
Speaker 11: burn them, cook them Korea in three sentences.
Speaker 2: If you go through oral history archives, you'll find countless
Speaker 2: interviews with pilots who remember what that bombing campaign was like.
Speaker 12: Oh, a lot of napalm dropped, which it was supposed
Speaker 12: to be top secret.
Speaker 2: The flight crews came up with the idea of strapping
Speaker 2: canisters of napalm to wooden pallets, then pushing them out
Speaker 2: the back of the airplane on rollers.
Speaker 12: And then the parachutes would open up the stone of
Speaker 12: descent to where you were trying to drop it.
Speaker 2: This is a pilot named Robert Billion, interviewed in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five for the Rutgers Oral History Archive.
Speaker 12: What they did. They went after personnel centers where they
Speaker 12: congregated the troops in North Korea when they come over,
Speaker 12: and they would let go with thirty six times fifty
Speaker 12: fifty gallon drops, and they figured they killed thousands North
Speaker 12: Korean not burning them, they suffocated them because it burned
Speaker 12: all the oxygen up in the mediate area.
Speaker 2: Napalm was engineered to burn down Japanese houses, which had
Speaker 2: allowed for the pretense that it was intended to destroy buildings,
Speaker 2: not people. In Korea. That pretense was dropped. It turned
Speaker 2: out napalm was very good at destroying people.
Speaker 13: The North Koreans were such vicious enemies and so brutal,
Speaker 13: but we took care of them, and power in that
Speaker 13: war was predominant.
Speaker 2: This is Bill Sinclair, Korean War pilot, interviewed in two
Speaker 2: thousand and four by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.
Speaker 2: I will warn you the story he tells is not pleasant.
Speaker 13: I remember a particular mission when we caught a mixed
Speaker 13: Chinese and North Korean division in the open, and we
Speaker 13: just attacked them with napalm, and we killed hundreds and
Speaker 13: hundreds of Chinese and North Korean soldiers. I couldn't see
Speaker 13: how they could possibly stand in the midst of all
Speaker 13: this conflagration. I remember distinctly one soldier standing under a
Speaker 13: little tree, and around him was just devastation. Bodies everywhere.
Speaker 2: And here's an interview with a pilot named Leonard Lee
Speaker 2: Conia from the Korean War Legacy Foundation.
Speaker 4: But it worked, it worked well.
Speaker 14: The burning, yeah, yeah, it'll just hit and then it
Speaker 14: just spreads. Well, we were close enough that when we
Speaker 14: call it, you could feel the heat from the from
Speaker 14: the nap bomb and if you get too close. You
Speaker 14: don't have to be right in it, but if you
Speaker 14: get too close it burns the oxygen out of the air.
Speaker 15: You can't breathe.
Speaker 2: These stories go on and on. There's one so graphic
Speaker 2: I'm not going to play it for you. It's about
Speaker 2: a US pilot carrying a load of napalm who crashes
Speaker 2: before he can drop it on someone else, and his
Speaker 2: fellow airman run up to the crash site and can
Speaker 2: only watch as he burns to death. In the end,
Speaker 2: the Air Force in Korea ran out of targets. Literally,
Speaker 2: they had nothing left to bomb because they'd burned down
Speaker 2: and bombed out virtually everything that could be burned down
Speaker 2: a bombed out.
Speaker 7: The destruction on a North Korean the urban structure is massive.
Speaker 2: Historian Conrad Crane says the consequences of that bombing campaign
Speaker 2: were enormous.
Speaker 7: And in some extent that's I think a legacy we're
Speaker 7: dealing with today because part of the motivation for the
Speaker 7: North Korean pursuit of nuclear weapons is to have some
Speaker 7: kind of deterrent to make sure that never happens again.
Speaker 2: We've heard a lot in the West about how the
Speaker 2: North Koreans are duplicitous, distrustful, irrational, secretive. Not so much
Speaker 2: about how in three short years the United States reduced
Speaker 2: their country to an ash heap. But then again, we've
Speaker 2: never talked much about napalm and the Korean War. We've
Speaker 2: never talked much about the Korean War period. It was
Speaker 2: all pushed aside. In fact, the most significant monument of
Speaker 2: that war was probably a television show, the sitcom Mash.
Speaker 2: Mash ran for eleven seasons on CBS nineteen seventy two
Speaker 2: to nineteen eighty three. It was about a mobile medical
Speaker 2: unit on the front lines of the Korean War. If
Speaker 2: you're old enough, you'll remember the names of the characters,
Speaker 2: Hawkeye Pierce, Colonel Potter, Trapper, John Rader, O'Reilly hot Lips,
Speaker 2: Hulihan Clinger. It was one of the most remarkable television
Speaker 2: shows in history. Funny, dark, moving. So what does Mash
Speaker 2: have to say about napalm? I wondered very little, it
Speaker 2: turns out, with one exception. The most famous Smash episode
Speaker 2: of all, the series finale, February twenty eighth, nineteen eighty three, Goodbye, Farewell,
Speaker 2: and Amen, was watched by one hundred and six million Americans,
Speaker 2: the highest rated non sports television event in history.
Speaker 1: The night the last episode was shown, we watched it
Speaker 1: on a big screen at the studio, and then we
Speaker 1: went out to dinner to celebrate.
Speaker 2: I talked to Alan Alda about it. He played Hawkeye,
Speaker 2: the show's central character.
Speaker 1: And on the way to the restaurant, Loretta Stwood was
Speaker 1: in the car with me, and I said, Loretta, look,
Speaker 1: the streets are empty, and it suddenly dawned on us
Speaker 1: that a lot of people were probably home watching the
Speaker 1: show at that time. And what I read in the
Speaker 1: paper the next day was that in New York the
Speaker 1: waterworks were threatened because everybody went to the bathroom at
Speaker 1: the same time during the commercial break.
Speaker 2: The final episode runs two hours. It is beautiful and moving.
Speaker 2: I remember where I was when I watched it, packed
Speaker 2: into the basement TV room at my college in Toronto
Speaker 2: with what must have been one hundred other people. So
Speaker 2: after all those years, I went back and watched it
Speaker 2: again because I remembered that this was the episode that
Speaker 2: finally dealt with Napon. It comes just after the halfway
Speaker 2: point in the show, at the one hour and seven
Speaker 2: minute mark.
Speaker 9: Colonel look at that sunset.
Speaker 11: What a beautiful ending for a beautiful day.
Speaker 2: Corporal Clinger is looking up at the sky when Colonel Potter,
Speaker 2: the Mash unit's commanding officer, walks by.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it'd be a nice sunset of it were setting
Speaker 11: over there. What do you mean? Ever since I've been around,
Speaker 11: the sun's always set in the west. And what's that?
Speaker 11: What saw that same kind of glow in the yard
Speaker 11: end forest? Next day? There wasn't any forest left. You
Speaker 11: better get on the phone, die car. That fire is
Speaker 11: headed this way. We're headed out.
Speaker 2: Klinger runs back to the barracks. Potter stands and watches
Speaker 2: the sky. We see the fire start to rage, rabbits
Speaker 2: running for safety.
Speaker 11: It was started by incendiary bombs. It's coming straight at us.
Speaker 15: Butt out.
Speaker 10: All personnel but out.
Speaker 2: The mass Unit has to evacuate because of a nearby
Speaker 2: napalm attack. I asked Alan Alda about that plot point
Speaker 2: in the show. He directed the episode and was one
Speaker 2: of its writers.
Speaker 1: I had a.
Speaker 2: Very specific question with that episode, and that is when
Speaker 2: you have to evacuate the camp because of the fire. Yeah,
Speaker 2: from vincendier bombs. It's left unstated whose bombs they are.
Speaker 1: I got a call on a Saturday morning that a
Speaker 1: fire had raged through the canyon where we were shooting
Speaker 1: and the whole shed had burned down. So I put
Speaker 1: the phone down and calmly went about writing what we
Speaker 1: called the bugout. I think they called it a bug
Speaker 1: out in those days. When the mass unit had to
Speaker 1: move and we moved to another location, so I had
Speaker 1: to put a fire into the script to justify the move,
Speaker 1: but I forgot what the justification was was that a
Speaker 1: bomb had caused the fire.
Speaker 2: Scendiary bombs. Radar says, there's a fire on the way
Speaker 2: from incendiary bombs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you wonder which side they're from. Well, it
Speaker 1: kind of doesn't matter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's right, absolutely right. The great moral innovation of
Speaker 2: MASH was that it spoke out against war without taking sides.
Speaker 2: But all I could think about is that this show
Speaker 2: is what's left of America's memory of the Korean War.
Speaker 2: And when MASH finally comes around to mentioning napalm, the
Speaker 2: weapon that reduced North Korea to ashes, it gets history
Speaker 2: exactly backwards. It has Americans as Napalm's victims, not the Koreans,
Speaker 2: and the show doesn't mention where the napalm came from
Speaker 2: as if it could as easily have come from anywhere,
Speaker 2: when in truth it could only have come from the
Speaker 2: US Air Force dropping their Harvard engineered payloads from high
Speaker 2: in the sky. Later in the episode, Colonel Potter returns
Speaker 2: to the mash camp after it's been destroyed by napalm.
Speaker 2: The MASH unit is packing up, The doctors and nurses
Speaker 2: are all going home.
Speaker 16: It is now two PIM. In exactly eight hours, the
Speaker 16: Korean War will be officially over. It's a time for
Speaker 16: a summing up, and these are the most up to
Speaker 16: date figures we have. The cost of the war to
Speaker 16: the United States has been placed at twenty two billion dollars.
Speaker 15: Oh, look at me, I only get three hundred a month.
Speaker 2: Potter goes one last time to the place they had
Speaker 2: lived for so many years and wanders among the ashes.
Speaker 2: Wreckage is still smoking. Potter takes off his helmet and
Speaker 2: looks around in shock. He bends over, picks up a
Speaker 2: blackened bottle, stands up again.
Speaker 11: Okay, let's get to work.
Speaker 2: That's it, We're done, let's move on. I was one
Speaker 2: of millions of viewers who choked up at that moment,
Speaker 2: But if I were North Korean, I would have thrown
Speaker 2: a brick at the television. General Curtis LeMay disapproved of
Speaker 2: the way the Pentagon fought the war in Korea. He
Speaker 2: was in charge of the Strategic Air Command by that point,
Speaker 2: a step removed from day to day control of the war.
Speaker 2: But they were using his tactic and his warhorse to
Speaker 2: be twenty nine, along with his incendiary weapon of choice, napon.
Speaker 2: So he had opinions. He thought the whole business on
Speaker 2: the Korean Peninsula dragged on for far too long.
Speaker 15: Going in the war as a serious business, a serious decision.
Speaker 15: If you have a responsibility for doing it, you better
Speaker 15: buy God makes them careful evaluation before you come to
Speaker 15: the conclusion that war is the illness solution to your problems.
Speaker 2: This is le May in retirement, holding forth on how
Speaker 2: he thought the Korean War ought to have been handled.
Speaker 15: I once you come to bus solusion that you'd better
Speaker 15: be ready to go all the way. It's im moral
Speaker 15: not to use too much if you have the capability
Speaker 15: of winning, and winning rapidly because you saved life, property, destruction, suffering,
Speaker 15: and the quicker you're going to.
Speaker 2: End the war cold blooded, hyperrational very Curtis to May,
Speaker 2: and he thought the Pentagon botched it in Korea, dragged
Speaker 2: it out too long, didn't come in hard and fast enough.
Speaker 15: So we kind of slipped the note under the door
Speaker 15: under the Pentagon and said, look, why don't we well
Speaker 15: burned down four or five of those towns up in
Speaker 15: North Korea, and I mean, they'll stopped this nonsense, only
Speaker 15: mean business. And the answer came back under the door.
Speaker 15: This is too horrible. He knock off a bunch of
Speaker 15: women and children, non combatants.
Speaker 4: Too horrible.
Speaker 2: The Pentagon couldn't stomach it. Now there are one hundred
Speaker 2: ways to tell the story of the Korean War. This
Speaker 2: is the Curtis le May version. The military ignored his suggestion,
Speaker 2: and so what should have been an intense summer fire
Speaker 2: bombing campaign stretched out over many years.
Speaker 15: We burned down every town in North Korea and South
Speaker 15: Korea too, every one of them. Now, during all this time,
Speaker 15: and what we do kill off twenty percent of the
Speaker 15: Korean population through direct casualties of war, are indirect due
Speaker 15: to exposure, disease and malnutrition and so forth. Now, over
Speaker 15: a period of four and a half years, all of
Speaker 15: these highly moral people are willing to kill off twenty
Speaker 15: percent of the Korean population over this period of time.
Speaker 15: But it's immoral to kill off a few people to
Speaker 15: start with to save life, property and suffering. In the
Speaker 15: long run, that's im moral kill a few people to
Speaker 15: prevent that.
Speaker 2: Curtis the May on his high horse. If you spend
Speaker 2: enough time with le May, you start to see things
Speaker 2: his way. Yes, Japan was better off for being fire bummed.
Speaker 2: It spared them starvation in the Soviets. Yes, and maybe
Speaker 2: a summer of intense pain in Korea would have made
Speaker 2: more sense than dragging things out of a four years.
Speaker 2: There's a reason LeMay rose as far and fast as
Speaker 2: he did in the US military. He could be awfully
Speaker 2: persuasive when he needed to be. But then comes Vietnam,
Speaker 2: and what does LeMay want the Air Force to do?
Speaker 2: More napalm, more bombing.
Speaker 8: Military police contain the crowd, but clashes soon break out.
Speaker 8: Federal Marshall's arrest several who attempt to break through the
Speaker 8: protective line.
Speaker 2: There were anti war protests in the streets about the
Speaker 2: Air Force's use of napalm and Vietnam. From his laboratory
Speaker 2: at Harvard, the chemist Louis Feeser sent a horrified letter
Speaker 2: to President Nixon, it seems to me desirable. The co
Speaker 2: inventor of napalm wrote to try to promote an international
Speaker 2: agreement to outlaw further use of napalm or napalm type munitions.
Speaker 2: LeMay would have none of it. In his memoirs, published
Speaker 2: just before his retirement in nineteen sixty five, he wrote
Speaker 2: this about how to defeat North Vietnam. Quote. My solution
Speaker 2: to the problem would be to tell them, frankly, that
Speaker 2: they've got to draw in their horns and stop their regression,
Speaker 2: or we're going to bomb them back into the stone age.
Speaker 2: Le Maay was saying the same thing in the nineteen
Speaker 2: sixties about Vietnam that he did in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 2: about Korea and the nineteen forties about Japan. Heavy bombing
Speaker 2: could lead to unconditional surrender, and unconditional surrenders save lives
Speaker 2: in the long run, even though, of course, the great
Speaker 2: lesson of Vietnam was that bombing didn't work, that air
Speaker 2: power could not defeat a determined guerrilla force in an
Speaker 2: underdeveloped country. Le May was a problem solver, but he
Speaker 2: could not conceive of solutions that did not involve bombs
Speaker 2: and airplanes. Remember, what le May wrote about seeing his
Speaker 2: first airplane as a little boy in Ohio. Suddenly in
Speaker 2: the air above me appeared a flying machine. It came
Speaker 2: from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it.
Speaker 2: And then he goes on, children can muster enormous strength
Speaker 2: in ideal and idea, in all their effort to grasp
Speaker 2: the trophy they desire. And nobody was holding me back.
Speaker 2: No one was standing closed to say, Look, you're just
Speaker 2: a little child. That airplane is away up there in
Speaker 2: the air, and no matter how fast you run, you
Speaker 2: can't keep up with it. You can't reach high enough
Speaker 2: to seize it. Little Curtis ran across neighbors, backyards, vacant lots,
Speaker 2: down sidewalks, then it was gone. It's wonderful sound and
Speaker 2: force and the freakish illusion of the thing, a thing
Speaker 2: made of wood and metal piercing the air, that in
Speaker 2: fact satuation carried LeMay all the way from working class
Speaker 2: Columbus to the command of the US Air Force. But
Speaker 2: leaders need at a certain point to move beyond their infatuations.
Speaker 2: And the great tragedy of Curtis LeMay is that he
Speaker 2: could not.
Speaker 15: I hate this word strategy.
Speaker 2: That's le May in nineteen seventy one. By strategy, he meant,
Speaker 2: all of those things that you do when you're not
Speaker 2: dropping bombs from a plane.
Speaker 15: Sure you should do some planning, and you should do
Speaker 15: some thinking, lots.
Speaker 5: Of it.
Speaker 15: About what might happen when you get into war. But
Speaker 15: anyone who thinks that he can set down and with
Speaker 15: a few learned individuals plan a strategy for the country
Speaker 15: that's going to keep them all the trouble and win
Speaker 15: the wars as well as in Lexi, it's not going
Speaker 15: to happen, So don't defend on strategy and all depend
Speaker 15: on planking a lot.
Speaker 2: And then he says, instead of strategy, instead of thinking,
Speaker 2: what you really need is some hardware to back you up,
Speaker 2: a thing made of wood and metal piercing the air.
Speaker 2: I said way back in the first installment of this
Speaker 2: story that Curtis le May was a type, a prototype
Speaker 2: of the modern problem solver, the unshakable belief in technology,
Speaker 2: the narrowness of focus, the ironclad self confidence. You can
Speaker 2: find versions of le May everywhere these days, all equally
Speaker 2: well intentioned, all equally successful in their chosen field of battle,
Speaker 2: all equally applauded by the world around them. I applaud
Speaker 2: them too sometimes and profit from their victories as much
Speaker 2: as you do. It's just that I would have thought
Speaker 2: that the events of March ninth and tenth, nineteen forty
Speaker 2: five would have given us pause just a little. Curtis
Speaker 2: May died in nineteen ninety of a heart attack. He's
Speaker 2: buried in the US Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs,
Speaker 2: where he belongs alongside his fellow airmen.
Speaker 4: So it's an exact photo after Tokyo air raid.
Speaker 1: This is it.
Speaker 4: It's Asa, and so here it's a summita river, and
Speaker 4: so this area is a Hondo, and this area and
Speaker 4: so here it is Asa.
Speaker 2: In East Tokyo, on the edge of the Fukugawa District,
Speaker 2: there's a small museum. It's called the Center of the
Speaker 2: Tokyo Raids and War Damage. It's on a side street,
Speaker 2: two stories brick, looks like there should be a dentist
Speaker 2: office in it. You walk in and there's a little
Speaker 2: gift shop to the side, more like a few bookshelves,
Speaker 2: and what looks like a classroom with a bunch of
Speaker 2: folding chairs where an introductory video.
Speaker 3: Plays stops the str name Jeraskara.
Speaker 1: Tokyo are.
Speaker 2: The museum is the only permanent memorial that tells the
Speaker 2: story of the devastation of Tokyo on March ninth, nineteen
Speaker 2: forty five, one of the deadliest nights in human history.
Speaker 2: There's a scale model of a B twenty nine hanging
Speaker 2: from the ceiling and an M sixty nine bomb casing
Speaker 2: opened for display, and maps. Maps showing where the bombs
Speaker 2: fell and where people ran, and which way the winds
Speaker 2: blew and where the bodies were found.
Speaker 4: So many people escaped to the elementary school and Osamo
Speaker 4: High School.
Speaker 2: Our guide caru Ito, talked about one of the spots
Speaker 2: on a map. There was an elementary school in the
Speaker 2: heart of the area bomb that night, one of the
Speaker 2: only concrete buildings in the district. So people ran there
Speaker 2: because they thought they would be safer than in the
Speaker 2: wooden buildings on fire all around them.
Speaker 4: They escaped to the concrete the brooding, but so inside
Speaker 4: it was a birding, so they also carried the Pisa sheet.
Speaker 2: They were killed by the heat from the burning nape bomb. Outside.
Speaker 2: A concrete structure in the midst of a firestorm becomes
Speaker 2: an oven. Then Ito told us the story of one
Speaker 2: of the few survivors that night. He was a teacher
Speaker 2: at the school, and he had been manning the front gate,
Speaker 2: but so many people rushed in that he was knocked down, trampled.
Speaker 2: There were people on top of him. He heard screaming.
Speaker 2: He passed out. Then hours later came two.
Speaker 4: So he noticed many people so done into the cab
Speaker 4: on him, like like.
Speaker 2: The people who had trampled him had turned the carbon.
Speaker 4: People on him. So tye into the cab, so with
Speaker 4: our sheet and a fire and so only him.
Speaker 2: She survived under a mound of carbon.
Speaker 6: Thank you, Oh that was left to a brick. There's
Speaker 6: no greater suddenness.
Speaker 2: The teacher later became an artist. He made a scroll
Speaker 2: to memorialize what happened that night. It hangs on the
Speaker 2: wall of the Tokyo Raids Museum. You're hearing a recitation
Speaker 2: of it.
Speaker 6: The survivors who were despondent, you're able to find neither voice.
Speaker 6: What reason can one have to kill innocent people?
Speaker 2: If you are ever in Tokyo, you should go see
Speaker 2: the scroll. Even if you haven't made up your mind
Speaker 2: about everything you've just heard about the things done in
Speaker 2: the name of problem solving.
Speaker 6: So could I need t How could I have a
Speaker 6: wipe from my memoriness, the cries, the agony of men,
Speaker 6: women and children I had at that time.
Speaker 2: M Revision's history is produced by Meila Belle and Leeman Gestou,
Speaker 2: with Jacob Smith, Alouise Linton and Annaim. Our editor is
Speaker 2: Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flon Williams,
Speaker 2: fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin
Speaker 2: Crew Hedefane, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Maya k Nick, Maggie Taylor,
Speaker 2: Jason Gambrel, and of course Jacob Weisberg. Special thanks also
Speaker 2: to our voice actor Yoshia Mao Jesse money Hunt for
Speaker 2: his help with Japanese translation, the Science History Institute, the
Speaker 2: Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Texas,
Speaker 2: Special Collections, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Air
Speaker 2: Force Academy, Oral History Project at the Oral History of
Speaker 2: Archives at Columbia University, McDermott Library at the US Air
Speaker 2: Force Academy, and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. Thank you
Speaker 2: for listening. I'm Malcolm Gaba.