'Black Snow' by James M. Scott
The atom bombs that levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible weapons, but nearly as terrible was the March 1945 “conventional” air raid on Tokyo by American forces. U.S. aircraft dropped incendiary bombs by the ton without regard for choosing military targets, igniting a firestorm that liquified asphalt, vaporized people and killed more than 100,000 (mostly civilians) in a single stroke.
Black Snow provides numerous back stories to that event, bringing to life the personalities of the Americans who led the airway in the Pacific, their rivalries and the looming politics of splitting the Air Force from the Army as a separate branch of the military. Key to this was the troubled development of a new long-range bomber, Boeing B-29 Superfortress, a massive aircraft for its time that failed repeatedly in test flights until most of the glitches were fixed. Gen. Curtis LeMay was the architect of the relentless air raids that pounded Japan in the months before Hiroshima according to his own harsh philosophy of war. His predecessor Gen. Haywood Hansell, “had fought with a scalpel,” trying to hit military targets. “LeMay had wielded a sledgehammer,” determined to destroy Japan’s will to fight.
