But LeMay’s firebombing campaign unfolded with none of that deliberation. There was no formal plan behind his summer rampage, no precise direction from his own superiors. To the extent that the war planners back in Washington conceived of a firebombing campaign, they thought of hitting six Japanese cities, not sixty-seven. By July, LeMay was bombing minor Japanese cities that had no strategically important industry at all—just people, living in tinderboxes. The historian William Ralph calls LeMay’s summer bombing campaign “improvised destruction”：
It is striking that such a lethal campaign…sprang from the commander in the field. How was it permitted to originate this way? How could a decision laden with such ethical and political consequences be handed to a young field commander? Where was the personal responsibility and active involvement from above?
But up above, people like Stimson and Stilwell could not—or would not—wrap their minds around what LeMay was doing. They struggled not just with the scale of the destruction LeMay planned and inflicted on Japan that summer but also with the audacity of it. A man, out there in the Marianas, falls in love with napalm, comes up with an improvised solution to get around the weather. And then he just keeps going and going.
3.
The ground invasion of Japan—which both the Japanese and American militaries dreaded—never had to happen. In August of 1945, Japan surrendered. This was exactly the outcome LeMay had hoped for that night in March, after he sent his first armada of B-29s to Tokyo. He had sat in his car with St. Clair McKelway and said, “If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten this war.” You wage war as ferociously and brutally as possible, and in return, you get a shorter war.
The historian Conrad Crane told me:
I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.”
That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.”
In other words, this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were.
Crane added,
The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is that by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan…I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.
He is referring to General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted the Japanese emperor’s surrender.
Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible. In 1964, the Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. “Bygones are bygones,” the premier of Japan said at the time, dismissing the objections of his colleagues in the Japanese parliament. “It should be but natural that we reward the general with a decoration for his great contribution to our Air Self-Defense Units.”
Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I’m sure he wondered why he didn’t get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.
But if Curtis LeMay won the war and the prizes, why is it that Haywood Hansell’s memory is the one that moves us? Romantic, idealistic Haywood Hansell, who loved Don Quixote, who identified with the delusional gallant knight who tilted helplessly at windmills. We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose. That is what the Bomber Mafia tried to do—even as their careful plans were lost in the clouds over Europe and blown sideways over the skies of Japan. They persisted, even in the face of technology’s inevitable misdirection, even when abandoning their dream offered a quicker path to victory, even when Satan offered them all the world if only they would renounce their faith. Without persistence, principles are meaningless. Because one day your dream may come true. And if you cannot keep that dream alive in the interim, then who are you?