Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

were not yet available for precision bombing at night. The USAAF wanted to end the war with air power before an Army and Navy invasion of Japan. LeMay worked out a radical change in strategy, ordered his B-29s stripped of armament to increase their carrying capacity, had 325 planes loaded with ten thousand pounds each of jellied- gasoline firebomb clusters and sent them over Tokyo on the night of March 10, 1945, staggered at from five to nine thousand feet, with pathfinder B-29s going ahead of them to mark out huge Xs in flame at their designated aiming points. LeMay's subsequent mission report emphasized that the object of the attack “was not to bomb indiscriminately civilian populations. The object was to destroy the industrial and strategic targets concentrated” in the Tokyo urban area. The firebombing successfully destroyed or damaged “twenty-two industrial target[s]… and many other unidentified industries.” But the destruction that first windy night was in fact indiscriminate to the point of atrocity, as LeMay himself understood: 16.7 square miles of the Japanese capital burned to the ground, 100,000 people killed and hundreds of thousands injured in one night. “The physical destruction and loss of life at Tokyo,” LeMay quotes from the official Air Force history of the Second World War, “exceeded that at Rome… or that of any of the great conflagrations of the western world — London, 1666… Moscow, 1812… Chicago, 1871… San Francisco, 1906… Only Japan itself, with the earthquake and fire of 1923 at Tokyo and Yokohama, had suffered so terrible a disaster. No other air attack of the war, either in Japan or Europe, was so destructive of life and property.” With such compelling evidence that the new bombing strategy worked, LeMay laid on firebombings night after night against city after Japanese city until his supply depots ran out of bombs; resupplied, he pursued the firebombing campaign relentlessly through the spring and summer of 1945 until the end of the war, by which time sixty-three Japanese cities had been totally or partially burned out and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians killed, at a total cost to the Air Forces, as LeMay would lecture later, of “485 B- 29s” and “approximately 3,000 combat crew personnel.” Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived to be atomic-bombed only because Washington had removed them from Curtis LeMay's target list.

Long after the war, a dauntless cadet asked LeMay “how much moral considerations affected his decisions regarding the bombing of Japan.” LeMay, as hard a man as Ulysses S. Grant, answered with his usual bluntness:

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me. So I wasn't worried particularly about how many people we killed in getting the job done. I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side. Incidentally, everybody bemoans the fact that we dropped the atomic bomb and killed a lot of people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That I guess is immoral; but nobody says anything about the incendiary attacks on every industrial city in Japan, and the first attack on Tokyo killed more people than the atomic bomb did. Apparently, that was all right…

I guess the direct answer to your question is, yes, every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

At the Japanese surrender ceremonies on the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, LeMay's B-29s, nearly five hundred of them, had roared overhead in salute while LeMay stood on the deck watching Douglas MacArthur stern at the table where the Japanese foreign minister grimly signed the surrender. LeMay was thinking of the boys who had died to get them there, he wrote later, thinking “that if I had done a better job we might have saved a few more crews.” That was the overriding message Curtis Emerson LeMay took with him from the long, bloody war: preparation. “I think the main experience that I wouldn't want to repeat is the war experience that I had,” he told the same cadets who heard his opinion of killing Japanese. “There is nothing worse that I've found in life than going into battle ill-prepared or not prepared at all.” To the lesson of that elemental experience he would attribute the massive work he would accomplish postwar of building up a strategic air force.

“Like many other folks” at the end of the war, he writes, he was “pretty tired.” He took time to fly up and down the Japanese coast to view the results of his firebombing, then returned to his headquarters on Guam. His aide-de-camp notes on September 3 that “General LeMay spent the night at General Spaatz's house — a last stand all night poker game. The game broke up at 0600 hours the morning of the fourth.” Spaatz was LeMay's boss, Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, commanding general of the Strategic Air Force in the Pacific; who won the poker game, the aide doesn't record.

At the end of August, LeMay had heard through Spaatz that Washington had asked General James Doolittle, the air pioneer and Eighth Air Force commander, to lead a flight of three B-29s nonstop from Tokyo to Washington, and that Doolittle had recommended including LeMay. “Offhand,” says LeMay, “I would guess that this flight was dreamed up to demonstrate and dramatize… the long-range capability of the [B-]29 to the American people and to the world at large.” To make the long flight — nearly seven thousand miles — the bomb bays of the aircraft would need to be fitted with extra fuel tanks. Doolittle on Okinawa had studied the matter and concluded that six tanks would give the B-29s a gross takeoff weight of 142,800 pounds. “The trip can be made,” Doolittle had messaged Spaatz by courier, provided they could find an airfield in Japan long enough and with enough bearing capacity to handle the load.

Spaatz replied on September 5 that “there are no fields in Japan suitable for take off at gross weight necessary… Flight is not feasible.” Never one to take no for an answer, Doolittle flew to Guam three days later to confer with LeMay. “We got together,” writes LeMay, “and talked the thing over; we examined photographs and charts. The only field which might accommodate the B-29's was Mizutani, up on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido… Trouble was, we didn't have any troops in there as yet… There was nobody of whom we could make inquiry concerning the runways.” LeMay sent one of his commanders to scout Hokkaido in a B-17. The Japanese naval officers at Mizutani had heard their emperor's surrender broadcast and didn't shoot him. The runways, the man reported, would do.

LeMay ordered three B-29s stripped of spare equipment and outfitted with bomb-bay tanks. In the meantime, Doolittle was called ahead to Washington. Lieutenant General Barney Giles, commander of the Central Pacific Air Forces, took over Doolittle's place in the lead plane; LeMay and Brigadier General Emmett “Rosie” O'Donnell, Jr., would fly the other two. The three B-29s left Guam on Sunday, September 16, fueled at Iwo Jima and flew to Hokkaido, where they topped off their tanks with drum gasoline flown in on C-54s. “That night we slept in a barracks with three thousand polite Japanese sailors surrounding us,” LeMay recalls. “No sweat.” The trio of generals with their eleven-man crews took off for North America at 0600 hours on Wednesday, September 19, flew a Great Circle route northeast, crossed the International Date Line into the Western Hemisphere's Wednesday, made radio contact with Nome, reached their halfway point over Whitehorse in the Yukon at nine a.m. Eastern War Time and approached the northern Middle West late that afternoon. They had bucked headwinds most of the way that slowed their average speed to less than 250 knots and ate up their fuel. LeMay wanted to take a chance on making it to Washington, where the weather was reported marginal, but Giles and O'Donnell opted to refuel in Chicago. “I went on awhile,” writes LeMay nonchalantly, “then received another Washington report. This time the weather was really marginal, and that didn't seem to make very good sense, with the small reserve of gas I'd have. I turned around and went back.” From Chicago they flew on to Washington the same night and landed at National Airport just before nine to the clangor of a brass band the Air Forces had deployed for the occasion. Curtis LeMay, too, had come home.

The Chicago Tribune thought “the only significance” of the intercontinental nonstop flight of three US heavy bombers was “that it is going to be possible very soon to fly from here to Tokyo in 24 hours by commercial airliner.” The Army Air Forces saw further significance in intercontinental flight. A document titled A Strategic Chart of Certain Russian and Manchu-rian Urban Areas had gone to Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, the head of the atomic-bomb project, already on August 30, 1945; the document identified the important cities of the Soviet Union and Manchuria and charted their area, population, industrial capacities and target priority. Thus Moscow was estimated to have a population of four million, an area of 110 square miles, priorities of 1 for industry and 3 for oil and was estimated to supply 13 percent of Soviet plane output, 43 percent of truck output, 2 percent of steel and 15 percent of copper, machine-building, oil refinery and ballbearing output. Baku produced 61 percent of the Soviet Union's oil, Gorki 45 percent of its guns, Chelyabinsk 44 percent of its zinc. The list descended to cities of only 26,000 population, but was then refined to selections of “15 key Soviet cities” — Moscow, Baku, Novosibirsk, Gorki, Sverdlovsk, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Kuibyshev, Kazan, Saratov, Molotov, Magnitogorsk, Grozny, Stalinsk, Mishni Tagil — and “25 leading Soviet cities.” An appendix estimated how many