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It's July 1961, an official ceremony at the White House. President Kennedy stands at the microphone, dark suit, white shirt, thin black tie. Next to him is a second man, shorter, wide to the chest, large square head, hair parted triumphantly just off the middle, a thicket of decorations on the left breast of his uniform. I want to express our great pleasure at...
The assumption of this responsibility by General LeMay. Curtis Emerson LeMay. He was one of the most distinguished combat commanders in World War II. He played a most instrumental role in developing SAC into its present high peak as the great shield of the United States in the free world. So generally, we want to say that speaking personally and also...
As president, it's a great pleasure to welcome you as the new chief of staff of the United States Air Force and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The old cliche says that history is written by the victors. And that line of Kennedy's, he was one of the most distinguished combat commanders of World War II, is Exhibit A. Distinguished refers to the events of 1945 when LeMay ordered a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths of half a million Japanese civilians.
In a candid moment, LeMay once told one of his subordinates, "If we lose this war, we'll be tried as war criminals." Which is almost certainly true. But they didn't lose. They won. After the war, LeMay joined the Strategic Air Command, SAC, where he was responsible for most of America's nuclear arsenal at a time when war with the Soviet Union seemed imminent.
Then, in 1961, he became head of the whole Air Force, standing next to Kennedy on the podium. Mr. President, I appreciate very much taking the time out from your busy schedule to participate in this ceremony. I'm sure you realize that a member of the armed services becoming chief of staff of the service is the highest honor that can come to him. LeMay didn't get tried as a war criminal. He got promoted.
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This is the fourth and final installment in my miniseries about Curtis LeMay and the superweapon known as Napalm. I never intended to devote four episodes to this story.
I was originally going to do just one, then one episode became two, and two became three, and then I was at four, because I kept expecting the story to come to some kind of appropriate resolution, and it didn't. I mean, if you kill half a million civilians, something should happen, shouldn't it? And then, in the middle of everything, I went to Tokyo for another reason entirely, and decided to visit a little private museum off a side street.
The only museum in the world dedicated entirely to the bombing campaign that burned Tokyo in 1945. And upstairs, in a plain room with linoleum floors that looks like a public school classroom, there's a long scroll on the wall. Beautiful Japanese calligraphy that broke my heart. "All that's left is bricks. The damage is unbearable. The survivors are in a state of abdication. Their voices and tears are unbearable.
The clear-eyed military rationale for the firebombing of Tokyo goes something like this. The United States had no better option, nor did Japan. There was only one alternative to LeMay's long summer of burning down the cities of Japan with napalm. That would have been a ground invasion of Japan by American troops that fall. And that would have been worse, far worse. I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience. And, uh,
At the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, he said, in the end, he said, we must thank you Americans for the firebombing and the atomic bombs. This is the military historian Conrad Crane. That kind of took me aback. And then he explained, he said, we would have surrendered eventually anyway. But he said the impact of the massive firebombing campaign, atomic bombs, was that we surrendered in August.
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 like Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were. And the other thing that would have happened is there would have been millions of Japanese that would have starved to death in the winter. Because what happens is when they, by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually
feed Japan. General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific. He was the one who accepted the Japanese Emperor's surrender. I mean, that's one of MacArthur's great successes, bringing in massive amounts of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945. Much later, in 1964, the Japanese government accorded LeMay one of its highest honors, the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, for his help rebuilding their air force after the war.
There was a debate in the Japanese parliament about whether the award was a good idea, but none of it centered on his campaign to burn Japanese cities with napalm. The Japanese government had moved on. Everyone moved on. Remember Hoyt Hoddle from the second episode in this series? He's the MIT scientist Washington brought in to manage the bomb bake-off to find the very best possible firebomb to use against the Japanese.
Hoddle put together a committee of the biggest names in chemistry to create the world's greatest incendiary. And after the war, they scattered. It's amazing how fast people wanted to get out. They were fed up on war. Fire was still Hoddle's passion, but not burning things down. Not anymore. Now his passion became stopping things from burning down. I...
was so saturated with fire as a weapon of destruction. When I was asked to be on a peacetime fire research committee by the Army, I was happy to say yes. The mandate of the fire research committee was to prevent, and I'm quoting, large urban fires and forest fires. Hoddle ran that committee for 11 years until his retirement.
And what about Louis Fieser? He was the winner of the Bake Off, the co-inventor of napalm. He went back to Harvard and resumed his duties, trained the next generation of American chemists, wrote the definitive college chemistry textbook with his wife. As for his fellow inventor E.B. Hirschberg, the wizard of the laboratory, Hirschberg went to work for the Shearing Corporation, a pharmaceutical company in New Jersey.
My father was not a violent person. He was a pacifist. He didn't believe in war, I'm quite sure. It was to be avoided. Robert Hirschberg, E.B.'s son, also a scientist. He would call his father every evening, and they would talk about their day in the laboratory. What would your father have, when he looked across his entire career, what would he have considered his finest accomplishment? Without doubt, I think it would be prednisone and prednisolone.
Prednisone. It's an anti-inflammatory agent and immunosuppressant. One of the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. I don't know how to quantify how many lives have been saved by that drug. Hundreds of thousands. It was a crucial part of the very first breakthrough in drug therapy for cancer. Emil Freireich's defeat of childhood leukemia in the 1960s. A combination therapy using methotrexate, 6-MP, vincristine, and prednisone.
E.B. Hirschberg led the team that developed it. Was prednisone Hirschberg's atonement for napalm like Hoyt Hoddle's work on the Fire Research Committee? Maybe. But no one seems to have discussed it or considered it. A few years ago, the historian Robert Neer went searching for a definitive account of the birth of the world's most powerful incendiary. So I started looking.
And it was with a kind of growing sense of disbelief that I discovered that actually there was no history of napalm. And the more research that I did on it, the more I discovered that actually, really, it was true. There was no, not even an article that was, there was no like even a sort of academic journal article that was, this is a comprehensive history of napalm. Robert Neer would go to the Widener Research Library at Harvard, one of the great libraries in the world.
He would see shelves of books on atomic weapons, the glamorous bomb built at great expense by the smartest people in the world. But this particular weapon, there was no history background about it at all. He would end up writing that history himself. It's called Napalm, an American Biography.
What's even stranger, of course, was that he was looking for a history of napalm in the Harvard Library and didn't find anything. Because Harvard was where napalm was invented. Robert Neer took me to the place on campus where napalm was born, we think. This is the Converse Laboratory right here, which is where they did the initial experiments in the basement window wells with napalm.
gelled incendiaries. I assumed there would be some indication of which of the labs along the basement hallway had belonged to Louis Fieser. But no. We peered in one window after another and had to guess. It's all a very chemical lab here. Like a zillion pipes in the ceiling. There aren't really window wells on this side. No. So it is this side.
Assuming that it hasn't ever been dramatically changed, but I think we're quite close in the spiritual sense at least. Absolutely. There are long lists of things Harvard is eager to take credit for. The transgenic mouse, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, the pacemaker, defibrillators, all important.
But on the weapon that played a decisive role in the biggest war of the 20th century, that burned close to half a million Japanese alive in the summer of 1945, it's not on the list. There's not even a plaque. And at Harvard, I'll point out, they'll put a name on anything. There are multiple buildings at Harvard named in honor of the Sackler family, whose drug company gave the world OxyContin. So it's not like Harvard is squeamish just about napalm. Napalm has simply disappeared.
And that is the final of Napalm's many crimes, because it didn't actually disappear. Quite the opposite. Five years after the end of the Second World War, after the surrender of Japan, the communist-backed government of North Korea invaded South Korea, June 25, 1950. The United Nations condemned the invasion and responded with a show of force led by the United States.
And what was the strategy adopted by the U.S. Air Force in Korea? Basically, the strategy pioneered by Curtis LeMay over Japan. Firebomb the North Koreans with napalm until they surrender. Napalm again. Hot as the living hinges. This is a newsreel the Navy put out in the middle of the war called This Is Korea, directed by the legendary John Ford. Fry them out. Burn them out. Cook them.
Fry them, burn them, cook them. Korea in three sentences. If you go through oral history archives, you'll find countless interviews with pilots who remember what that bombing campaign was like. A lot of napalm dropped, which it was supposed to be top secret. The flight crews came up with the idea of strapping canisters of napalm to wooden pallets, then pushing them out the back of the airplane on rollers.
And then the parachutes would open up and the stuff would descend to where you were trying to drop it. This is a pilot named Robert Billion, interviewed in 1995 for the Rutgers Oral History Archive. What they did is they went after personnel centers where they congregated the troops in North Korea. And they come over and they would let go with 36 times 50, 50-gallon drums. And they figured they killed thousands of North Korean soldiers.
Not burning them. They suffocated them because it burned all the oxygen up in the immediate area. Napalm was engineered to burn down Japanese houses, which had allowed for the pretense that it was intended to destroy buildings, not people. In Korea, that pretense was dropped. It turned out napalm was very good at destroying people. The North Koreans were such vicious enemies and so brutal, but violent.
We took care of them, and air power in that war was predominant. This is Bill Sinclair, Korean war pilot interviewed in 2004 by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project. I will warn you, the story he tells is not pleasant. I remember a particular mission when we caught a mixed Chinese and North Korean division in the open, and...
We just attacked them with napalm and we killed hundreds and hundreds of Chinese and North Korean soldiers. I couldn't see how they could possibly stand in the midst of all this conflagration. I remember distinctly one soldier standing under a little tree and around him was just devastation, bodies everywhere. And here's an interview with a pilot named Leonard Laconia from the Korean War Legacy Foundation.
But it worked. It worked well. Did you see people, the Chinese, burning with that napalm? Yeah, yeah. It'll just hit and it just spreads. Well, we were close enough that when we called, you could feel the heat from the napalm. And if you get too close, you don't have to be right in it. But if you get too close, it burns the oxygen out of the air. You can't breathe. These stories go on and on. There's one so graphic I'm not going to play it for you.
It's about a US pilot carrying a load of napalm who crashes before he can drop it on someone else. And his fellow airmen run up to the crash site and can only watch as he burns to death. In the end, the Air Force in Korea ran out of targets. Literally. They had nothing left to bomb because they had burned down and bombed out virtually everything that could be burned down and bombed out. The destruction on a North Korean urban structure is massive.
Historian Conrad Crane says the consequences of that bombing campaign were enormous. And at some extent, that's, I think, a legacy we're dealing with today because part of the motivation for the North Korean pursuit of nuclear weapons is to have some kind of deterrent to make sure that never happens again. We've heard a lot in the West about how the North Koreans are duplicitous, distrustful, irrational, secretive.
Not so much about how, in three short years, the United States reduced their country to an ash heap. But then again, we've never talked much about napalm in the Korean War. We've never talked much about the Korean War, period. It was all pushed aside. In fact, the most significant monument to that war was probably a television show: the sitcom MASH. MASH ran for 11 seasons on CBS, 1972 to 1983.
It was about a mobile medical unit on the front lines of the Korean War. If you're old enough, you'll remember the names of the characters: Hawkeye Pierce, Colonel Potter, Trapper John, Radar O'Reilly, Hot Lips Houlihan, Klinger. It was one of the most remarkable television shows in history. Funny, dark, moving. So what does MASH have to say about Napalm, I wondered. Very little, it turns out, with one exception.
The most famous smash episode of all, the series finale. February 28th, 1983, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen was watched by 106 million Americans. The highest rated non-sports television event in history. The night the last episode was shown, we watched it on a big screen at the studio. And then we went out to dinner to celebrate it.
I talked to Alan Alda about it. He played Hawkeye, the show's central character. And on the way to the restaurant, Loretta Swit was in the car with me and I said, "Loretta, look, the streets are empty." And it suddenly dawned on us that a lot of people were probably home watching the show at that time.
And what I read in the paper the next day was that in New York, the waterworks were threatened because everybody went to the bathroom at the same time during the commercial break. The final episode runs two hours. It is beautiful and moving. I remember where I was when I watched it, packed into the basement TV room of my college in Toronto with what must have been a hundred other people.
So after all those years, I went back and watched it again because I remembered that this was the episode that finally dealt with Napalm. It comes just after the halfway point in the show, at the one hour and seven minute mark. Colonel, look at that sunset.
What a beautiful ending for a beautiful day. Corporal Klinger is looking up at the sky when Colonel Potter, the MASH unit's commanding officer, walks by. Yeah, it'd be a nice sunset if it was setting over there. What do you mean? Ever since I've been around, the sun's always set in the west. Then what's that? Once saw that same kind of glow in the Arden forest. Next day, there wasn't any forest left. You better get on the phone to I-Corps. If that fire's headed this way, we're headed out.
Klinger runs back to the barracks. Potter stands and watches the sky. We see the fire start to rage. Rabbits running for safety. It was started by incendiary bombs. It's coming straight at us. All personnel! The M.A.S.H. unit has to evacuate because of a nearby napalm attack. I asked Alan Alda about that plot point in the show.
He directed the episode and was one of its writers. I had a very specific question about that episode, and that is when you have to evacuate the camp because of the fire from incendiary bombs, it's left unstated whose bombs they are. I got a call on a Saturday morning that a fire had raged through the canyon where we were shooting and the whole set had burned down.
So I put the phone down and calmly went about writing what we called the bug out. I think they called it a bug out in those days when the mash unit had to move and we moved to another location. So I had to put a fire into the script to justify the move.
But I forgot what the justification was. Was that a bomb had caused the fire? Incendiary bombs. Radar says there's a fire on the way from incendiary bombs. Yeah, so you wonder which side they're from. Well, it kind of doesn't matter. Yeah. He's right. Absolutely right. The great moral innovation of MASH was that it spoke out against war without taking sides.
But all I could think about is that this show is what's left of America's memory of the Korean War. And when MASH finally comes around to mentioning napalm, the weapon that reduced North Korea to ashes, it gets history exactly backwards. It has Americans as napalm's victims, not the Koreans. And the show doesn't mention where the napalm came from, as if it could as easily have come from anywhere.
when in truth, it could only have come from the U.S. Air Force dropping their Harvard-engineered payloads from high in the sky. Later in the episode, Colonel Potter returns to the MASH camp after it's been destroyed by napalm. The MASH unit is packing up. The doctors and nurses are all going home.
It is now 2 p.m. In exactly eight hours, the Korean War will be officially over. It's a time for a summing up, and these are the most up-to-date figures we have. The cost of the war to the United States has been placed at $22 billion. Don't look at me. I only get $300 a month. Potter goes one last time to the place they had lived for so many years and wanders among the ashes. The wreckage is still smoking. Potter takes off his helmet and looks around in shock.
He bends over, picks up a blackened bottle, stands up again. Okay, let's get to work. That's it. We're done. Let's move on. I was one of millions of viewers who choked up at that moment. But if I were North Korean, I would have thrown a brick at the television. General Curtis LeMay disapproved of the way the Pentagon fought the war in Korea.
He was in charge of the Strategic Air Command by that point, a step removed from day-to-day control of the war. But they were using his tactics and his warhorse, the B-29, along with his incendiary weapon of choice, napalm. So he had opinions. He thought the whole business on the Korean peninsula dragged on for far too long. Going into war is a serious business, a serious decision.
If you have a responsibility for doing it, you better by God make some careful evaluations before you come to the conclusion that war is the only solution to your problems. This is LeMay in retirement, holding forth on how he thought the Korean War ought to have been handled. Once you've come to this conclusion, then you better be ready to go all the way. It's immoral not to use too much if you have the capability of winning and winning rapidly.
because you save life, property, destruction, suffering, and the quicker you can end the war. Cold-blooded, hyper-rational, very Curtis LeMay. And he thought the Pentagon botched it in Korea, dragged it out too long, didn't come in hard and fast enough.
So we kind of slipped the note under the door into the Pentagon and said, "Look, why don't we go up there and burn down four or five of those towns up in North Korea? Maybe they'll stop this nonsense. Don't we mean business?" And the answer came back under the door, "This is too horrible. You knock off a bunch of women and children, noncombatants. Too horrible." The Pentagon couldn't stomach it. Now, there are a hundred ways to tell the story of the Korean War. This is the Curtis LeMay version.
The military ignored his suggestion, and so what should have been an intense summer firebombing campaign stretched out over many years. We burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too, every one of them. Now, during all this time, what did we do? Kill off 20% of the Korean population through direct casualties of war or indirect due to exposure, disease, and malnutrition and so forth. Now,
Over a period of four and a half years, all these highly moral people are willing to kill off 20% of the Korean population over this period of time, but it's immoral to kill off a few people to start with to save life, property, and suffering in the long run. That's immoral. Kill a few people to prevent that. Curtis LeMay on his high horse.
If you spend enough time with LeMay, you start to see things his way. Yes, Japan was better off for being firebombed. It spared them starvation in the Soviets. Yes, and maybe a summer of intense pain in Korea would have made more sense than dragging things out over four years. There's a reason LeMay rose as far and fast as he did in the U.S. military. He could be awfully persuasive when he needed to be. But then comes Vietnam, and what does LeMay want the Air Force to do?
More napalm, more bombing. Military police contain the crowd, but clashes soon break out. Federal marshals arrest several who attempt to break through the protective line. There were anti-war protests in the streets about the Air Force's use of napalm in Vietnam. From his laboratory at Harvard, the chemist Louis Fieser sent a horrified letter to President Nixon.
"It seems to me desirable," the co-inventor of napalm wrote, "to try to promote an international agreement to outlaw further use of napalm or napalm-type munitions." LeMay would have none of it. In his memoirs published just before his retirement in 1965,
He wrote this about how to defeat North Vietnam. Quote, My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. LeMay was saying the same thing in the 1960s about Vietnam that he did in the 1950s about Korea and the 1940s about Japan. Heavy bombing could lead to unconditional surrender and unconditional surrender save lives in the long run.
Even though, of course, the great lesson of Vietnam was that bombing didn't work, that air power could not defeat a determined guerrilla force in an underdeveloped country. LeMay was a problem solver, but he could not conceive of solutions that did not involve bombs and airplanes. Remember what LeMay wrote about seeing his first airplane as a little boy in Ohio?
And then he goes on.
That airplane is a way up there in the air, and no matter how fast you run, you can't keep up with it. You can't reach high enough to seize it. Little Curtis ran across neighbors' backyards, vacant lots, down sidewalks. Then it was gone, its wonderful sound and force and the freakish illusion of the thing, a thing made of wood and metal, piercing the air.
That infatuation carried LeMay all the way from working class Columbus to the command of the U.S. Air Force. But leaders need, at a certain point, to move beyond their infatuations. And the great tragedy of Curtis LeMay is that he could not. I hate this word strategy. That's LeMay in 1971. By strategy, he meant all of those things that you do when you're not dropping bombs from a plane.
Sure, you should do some planning and you should do some thinking, lots of it, about what might happen when you get into a war. But anyone who thinks that he can sit down and with a few learned individuals plan a strategy for the country that's going to keep them out of trouble and win wars is whistling Dixie. It's not going to happen. So don't depend on strategy and don't depend on thinking a lot.
And then he says, instead of strategy, instead of thinking, what you really need is some hardware to back you up. A thing made of wood and metal, piercing the air. I said way back in the first installment of this story that Curtis LeMay was a type, a prototype of the modern problem solver. The unshakable belief in technology, the narrowness of focus, the ironclad self-confidence. You can find versions of LeMay everywhere these days.
All equally well-intentioned, all equally successful in their chosen field of battle, all equally applauded by the world around them. I applaud them too sometimes and profit from their victories as much as you do. It's just that I would have thought that the events of March 9th and 10th, 1945 would have given us pause, just a little. Curtis LeMay died in 1990 of a heart attack.
He's buried in the U.S. Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs, where he belongs, alongside his fellow airmen. This is it. It's Asakusa. And so here is the Sumida River. And so this area was Honjo and Fukagawa, this area. And so here is Asakusa.
Tokyo is our goal.
The museum is the only permanent memorial that tells the story of the devastation of Tokyo on March 9th, 1945, one of the deadliest nights in human history. There's a scale model of a B-29 hanging from the ceiling and an M-69 bomb casing open for display, and maps, maps showing where the bombs fell,
and where people ran, and which way the winds blew, and where the bodies were found. So many people escaped to the elementary school and some high school. Our guide, Karu Ito, talked about one of the spots on a map. There was an elementary school in the heart of the area bombed that night, one of the only concrete buildings in the district. So people ran there because they thought they would be safer than in the wooden buildings on fire all around them.
Did they survive? Yes, they escaped to the concrete building. But inside of the building, they were also killed by the heat. They were killed by the heat from the burning napalm outside. A concrete structure in the midst of a firestorm becomes an oven. Then Ito told us the story of one of the few survivors that night. He was a teacher at the school, and he had been manning the front gate. But so many people rushed in that he was knocked down, trampled.
There were people on top of him. He heard screaming. He passed out. Then hours later came two. So he noticed many people turn into the carbon on him, like that. The people who had trampled him had turned to carbon. People on him turn into the carbon with heat and fire. And so only him.
The teacher later became an artist. He made a scroll to memorialize what happened that night. It hangs on the wall of the Tokyo Raids Museum. You're hearing a recitation of it.
The survivors were despondent, unable to find neither voice nor tear. Oh, what reason can one have to kill innocent people? If you are ever in Tokyo, you should go see the scroll, even if you haven't made up your mind about everything you've just heard about the things done in the name of problem solving. 倉庫内にて聞きし
How could I ever wipe from my memory the cries of agony of men, women, and children I had at that time?
Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Lee Mangistu, with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Ana Naim. Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew, Heather Fane, Eric Sandler, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg.
Special thanks also to our voice actor, Yoshiya Mao, Jesse Moneyhun for his help with Japanese translation,
the Science History Institute, the Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Texas Special Collections, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Air Force Academy Oral History Project at the Oral History Archives at Columbia University, McDermott Library at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. Thank you for listening. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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