General Lauris Norstad stood next to him and said, “It’s all ashes—all that and that and that.”iv
Footnotes
i Even in letters home to his wife, LeMay was remarkably unemotional. On March 12, two days after the attack on Tokyo, he mentioned the mission only in passing: “We had a good mission to Tokyo the other day. I sent a message home to have you notified about the Army Hour program. I hope it gets there in time. I’m glad you liked the evening bag. I’m sure I spoil you. I can remember the time when that would have paid the grocery bill for a month.”
ii Having left his position at The New Yorker, McKelway served as a lieutenant colonel in the Army. As a public relations officer, his role included censoring reports that would be damaging to his military colleagues and superiors. His postwar reporting has been sharply criticized, including at The New Yorker itself, for unreliable narratives and whitewashing war crimes.
iii As environmental historian David Fedman points out, military maps of the Tokyo attack reveal that crowded working-class civilian areas were intentionally targeted. Why? The homes of the poor were easy to light on fire: “That the more densely populated regions of the city correspond to the incendiary zone is no accident: war planners sought to exploit the vulnerability of this section of the city, composed as it was of flammable ‘paper and ply-board’ structures.”
iv Despite the incalculable loss of life, there remains no government-sanctioned memorial in Japan to the March 9 attack. Survivors of that night, who call themselves “memory activists,” have struggled to commemorate the Tokyo raid in the face of political and public apathy. Eventually they funded their own memorial—the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. In his forthcoming documentary, Paper City, director Adrian Francis interviews survivors of the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo to preserve their stories and their fight for remembrance.
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 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.