I’m guessing you would have been baffled. The Bomber Mafia was consumed with the potential of the Norden bombsight, a machine that used technology to redefine war, to make it more humane, to restrain the murderous impulses of generals on the battlefield. If you weren’t using human ingenuity and science to improve the way human beings conducted their ruinous affairs, then what was the point? This is what technological innovation was for.
But suddenly you were standing somewhere deep in the Utah desert, under a hard sun, observing a military exercise authorized and funded by the same US military that paid for your Norden bombsight. Except that these people are using science and ingenuity to create incendiaries, objects to be dropped from the sky with the intention of starting violent, indiscriminate fires. You had been going to elaborate pains to avoid hitting anything but the most crucial industrial targets. Now the Army was using your precision-bombing apparatus to obliterate people’s houses. Here was the government—your own military bosses back in Washington—pursuing a strategy 100 percent in violation of your principles. And that’s not even mentioning the top-secret work in the New Mexico desert, where the smartest people in the world were being given billions of dollars to create a weapon so devastating, so catastrophic in its effects, that it would change world politics forever. If firebombs were a betrayal of precision-bombing doctrine, then what was the atomic bomb? Good Lord. It was a technological Judas.
But then, after the initial outrage had passed, you might well have had a second thought. An unbidden thought. A temptation.
Because napalm would solve all the problems Haywood Hansell and all his precision bombers had had in the war thus far. Precision bombing wasn’t working. Hansell was struggling under some of the most difficult conditions faced by any combat commander in the entire air war. His planes couldn’t hit what they wanted to hit because of the high-altitude winds and the clouds over Tokyo. So maybe, the thinking went, don’t bother aiming at anything at all. Just burn everything down. The place is a tinderbox. All Haywood Hansell had to do was switch to napalm. He could carry out morale bombing against the Japanese, only with a weapon far, far deadlier than the bombs the British used on Germany. Sixty-eight percent success rate in category （a） on Japanese houses, where the fires became uncontrollable within six minutes.
In the Bible, Jesus spends forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, being tempted by Satan. Haywood Hansell launched his first air strike on Japan on November 24, 1944. His last day as head of the Twentieth Bomber Command was January 19, 1945. That’s fifty-five days in the wilderness of the Marianas when he was tempted to abandon all that he had fought for and believed in in exchange for the chance to defeat the Japanese enemy.
Over the course of those fifty-five days, the pressure on Hansell grew intense. The Army shipped thousands of napalm canisters to the Marianas. They urged Hansell to try—just try—a full-scale incendiary attack on Japan.
Hansell lost a B-29 on nearly every major mission. The margin of error for getting back to the Marianas was so slim that damaged planes would sometimes just plunge into the Pacific on the way home, never to be seen again. Morale dropped. The same General Hansell who had been almost absurdly upbeat about the prospects for precision bombing a year earlier now turned dark and angry. After yet another failed mission in which they missed the primary target entirely, one of Hansell’s key officers, Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, held a briefing for his airmen. He was trying to keep their spirits up. “Boys. It’s tough. It’s a tough mission. But I’m proud of you, and we’re doing well.” Then Hansell stood up. And blasted the room.
“I don’t agree with Rosie. I don’t think you’re earning your salt out here. And the mission. If it continues like it is…the operation will fail.” Hansell embarrassed one of his officers in front of everyone, something no commanding officer should ever do, not if he wants to maintain the respect of his men.
Historian Stephen McFarland described Hansell to me this way:
He’s kind of a tragic character in a way. His forte was thinking. He helped formulate this strategy, helped design the war plans that would lead to the bombing of Germany and Japan. He was almost philosophical. He was more of a thinker. He was more of a—I don’t want to say, pencil-neck-geek type of person.
He was not a combat officer. He was not the great leader. He spoke in terms of high ideals…He never cussed, and commanders in the war who never cursed, they weren’t much appreciated by the pilots. They wanted somebody who was down to earth, who understood what it was like.