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 this 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 eldest 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.i Military historian Ronald Schaffer writes in his book Wings of Judgment,
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.ii