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Goodbye, Farewell and Amen · Revisionist History

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.
0:22
Speaker 2: It's July nineteen sixty one, an official ceremony at the
0:26
Speaker 2: White House. President Kennedy stands at the microphone. Dark sued
0:30
Speaker 2: white shirt, thin black tie. Next to him is a
0:35
Speaker 2: second man, shorter, wide through the chest, large square head,
0:40
Speaker 2: hair parted triumphantly just off the middle, a thicket of
0:44
Speaker 2: decorations on the left breast of his uniform.
0:47
Speaker 3: I want to express our great pleasure at the assumption
0:54
Speaker 3: of this responsibility by General.
0:55
Speaker 2: Le May Curtis Emerson LeMay.
0:59
Speaker 3: He was one of the or distinguished combat commanders in
1:03
Speaker 3: World War Two. He played a most instrumental role in
1:07
Speaker 3: developing who its present death. I pete as the great
1:14
Speaker 3: shield of the United States in the free world. So, General,
1:17
Speaker 3: you want to say that, speaking personally and also as president,
1:21
Speaker 3: that it's a great pleasure to welcome you as the
1:25
Speaker 3: new Chief of Staff the United States Air Force and
1:27
Speaker 3: member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
1:33
Speaker 2: The old cliche says that history is written by the victors,
1:36
Speaker 2: and that line of Kennedy's he was one of the
1:39
Speaker 2: most distinguished combat commanders of World War II is exhibit A.
1:44
Speaker 2: Distinguished refers to the events of nineteen forty five when
1:48
Speaker 2: LeMay ordered a bombing campaign that resulted in the deaths
1:51
Speaker 2: of half a million Japanese civilians. In a candid moment,
1:55
Speaker 2: LeMay once told one of his subordinates, if we lose
1:58
Speaker 2: this war, we'll be tried as war criminals, which is
2:02
Speaker 2: almost certainly true. But they didn't lose.
2:05
Speaker 4: They won.
2:07
Speaker 2: After the war, LeMay joined the Strite Air Command Sack,
2:11
Speaker 2: where he was responsible for most of America's nuclear arsenal
2:14
Speaker 2: at a time when war with the Soviet Union seemed imminent.
2:18
Speaker 2: Then in nineteen sixty one, he became head of the
2:21
Speaker 2: whole Air Force. Standing next to Kennedy on the podium.
2:26
Speaker 5: I surprised. I appreciate very much they're taking a time
2:30
Speaker 5: out from your busy schedule to participate them and this ceremony.
2:35
Speaker 5: I'm sure you realize that a number beyond services, I've
2:40
Speaker 5: become a Chief assaff as his service as the highest
2:42
Speaker 5: honor that can come to him.
2:45
Speaker 2: LeMay didn't get tried as a war criminal. He got promoted.
2:55
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
2:58
Speaker 2: my podcast about things Overlooked and Misunderstood. This is and
3:10
Speaker 2: final installment in my miniseries about Curtis le May and
3:14
Speaker 2: the super weapon known as Napalm. I never intended to
3:18
Speaker 2: devote four episodes to this story. I was originally going
3:22
Speaker 2: to do just one. Then one episode became two, and
3:26
Speaker 2: two became three, and then I was at four because
3:29
Speaker 2: I kept expecting the story to come to some kind
3:31
Speaker 2: of appropriate resolution and it didn't. I mean, if you
3:36
Speaker 2: kill half a million civilians, something should happen, shouldn't it.
3:46
Speaker 2: And then in the middle of everything, I went to
3:49
Speaker 2: Tokyo for another reason entirely and decided to visit a
3:53
Speaker 2: little private museum off a side street, the only museum
3:58
Speaker 2: in the world dedicated entirely to the bombing campaign that
4:01
Speaker 2: burned Tokyo in nineteen forty five. And upstairs, in a
4:06
Speaker 2: plain room with linoleum floors that looks like a public
4:09
Speaker 2: school classroom, there's a long scroll on the wall, beautiful
4:14
Speaker 2: Japanese calligraphy that broke my heart.
4:22
Speaker 6: Sank.
4:35
Speaker 2: The clear eyed military rationale for the fire bombing of
4:39
Speaker 2: Tokyo goes something like this. The United States had no
4:43
Speaker 2: better option, nor did Japan. There was only one alternative
4:48
Speaker 2: to le Maay's long summer of burning down the cities
4:50
Speaker 2: of Japan. With napalm. That would have been a ground
4:53
Speaker 2: invasion of Japan by American troops that fall, and that
4:56
Speaker 2: would have been worse, far worse.
4:59
Speaker 7: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary
5:03
Speaker 7: bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the
5:07
Speaker 7: end of the presentation at one of the your Japanese
5:09
Speaker 7: historians there stood up and said he said, in the end,
5:12
Speaker 7: he said, we must thank you Americans for the firebombing
5:15
Speaker 7: and the atomic bombs.
5:17
Speaker 2: This is the military historian Conrad Crane.
5:20
Speaker 7: That kind of took me aback, and then he explained,
5:23
Speaker 7: he said, we would have surrendered eventually anyway, but he
5:27
Speaker 7: said the impact of the massive firebombing campaign atomic bombs
5:31
Speaker 7: was that we surrendered in August.
5:33
Speaker 2: No fire bombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese
5:37
Speaker 2: don't surrender, and if they don't surrender, the Soviets invade,
5:41
Speaker 2: and then the Americans invade and Japan gets carved up
5:44
Speaker 2: just like Germany and the Korean Peninsula eventually were.
5:47
Speaker 7: And the other thing that would have happened is there
5:49
Speaker 7: would have been millions of Japanese that would have starved
5:51
Speaker 7: to death in the winter because what happens is when
5:55
Speaker 7: by surrendering on August, that gives MacArthur time to come
5:57
Speaker 7: in with his occupation forces and actually feed.
6:02
Speaker 2: Japan General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme Allied commander in the Pacific.
6:07
Speaker 2: He was the one who accepted the Jetjapanese Emperor's surrender.
6:10
Speaker 7: I mean, that's one of MacArthur's great successes, bringing in
6:13
Speaker 7: massive amount of foods to avoid starvation in the winter
6:16
Speaker 7: of nineteen forty five.
6:18
Speaker 2: Much later, in nineteen sixty four, the Japanese government accorded
6:22
Speaker 2: le May one of its highest honors, the Grand Cordon
6:25
Speaker 2: of the Order of the Rising Sun, for his help
6:27
Speaker 2: rebuilding their air force after the war. There was a
6:30
Speaker 2: debate in the Japanese parliament about whether the award was
6:33
Speaker 2: a good idea, but none of it centered on his
6:36
Speaker 2: campaign to burn Japanese cities with napalm. The Japanese government
6:40
Speaker 2: had moved on. Everyone moved on. Remember Hoyt Hoddel from
6:47
Speaker 2: the second episode in this series. He's the MIT scientist
6:51
Speaker 2: Washington brought in to manage the bomb bakeoff. To find
6:54
Speaker 2: the very best possible fire bomb to use against the Japanese.
6:58
Speaker 2: Hoddle put together a committee of the biggest names in
7:01
Speaker 2: chemistry to create the world's greatest incendiary And after the
7:06
Speaker 2: war they scattered.
7:09
Speaker 8: Amazing how fast people wanted to get out. They were
7:14
Speaker 8: fed up on war.
7:17
Speaker 2: Fire was still Hoddle's passion, but not burning things down,
7:21
Speaker 2: not anymore. Now his passion became stopping things from burning down.
7:27
Speaker 8: I was so saturated with fire as a weapon of destruction.
7:35
Speaker 8: When I was asked to be on a peacetime fire
7:40
Speaker 8: research committee by the Army, I was happy to say yes.
7:47
Speaker 2: The mandate of the fire Research Committee was to prevent
7:50
Speaker 2: an unquoting large urban fires and forest fires. Hoddle ran
7:56
Speaker 2: that committee for eleven years until his retirement. And what
8:00
Speaker 2: about Louis Feezer. He was the winner of the bakeoff,
8:03
Speaker 2: the co inventor of napalm. He went back to Harvard
8:07
Speaker 2: and resumed his duties, trained the next generation of American chemists,
8:12
Speaker 2: wrote the definitive College Chemistry textbook with his wife. As
8:17
Speaker 2: for his fellow inventor, Eb Hirschberg, the wizard of the laboratory,
8:21
Speaker 2: Hirshburg went to work for the Shearing Corporation, a pharmaceutical
8:25
Speaker 2: company in New Jersey.
8:27
Speaker 9: My father was not a violent person, he's a pacifist.
8:30
Speaker 9: He didn't believe in war.
8:31
Speaker 7: Uh.
8:32
Speaker 9: I'm quite sure it is to be avoided.
8:35
Speaker 2: Robert Hirschberg, Eb's sun also a scientist. He would call
8:40
Speaker 2: his father every evening and they would talk about their
8:42
Speaker 2: day in the laboratory. What would your father have when
8:46
Speaker 2: he looked across his entire career, what would he have
8:49
Speaker 2: considered his finest accomplishment.
8:52
Speaker 9: Without doubt, I think it would be prednisone and prinis
8:55
Speaker 9: alone pregmozone.
8:57
Speaker 2: It's an anti inflammatory agent and amino suppressant, one of
9:02
Speaker 2: the most widely prescribed drugs in the world. I don't
9:05
Speaker 2: know how to quantify how many lives have been saved
9:07
Speaker 2: by that drug, hundreds of thousands. It was a crucial
9:10
Speaker 2: part of the very first breakthrough in drug therapy for cancer,
9:14
Speaker 2: Amo Freireich's defeat of childhood leukemia in the nineteen sixties,
9:18
Speaker 2: a combination therapy using methachrekx eight six mp vin Christine
9:24
Speaker 2: and prednozone. Eb Hirschberg led the team that developed it
9:33
Speaker 2: was prednazone, Hirschberg's atonement for napalm. Like Hoyt Hoddle's work
9:38
Speaker 2: on the Fire Research Committee. Maybe, but no one seems
9:42
Speaker 2: to have discussed it or considered it. A few years ago,
9:47
Speaker 2: the historian Robert nir went searching for a definitive account
9:51
Speaker 2: of the birth of the world's most powerful incendiary.
9:54
Speaker 10: So I started looking, and it was with a kind
9:58
Speaker 10: of growing sense of disbelief that I discovered that actually
10:02
Speaker 10: there was no history of napalm. And the more research
10:04
Speaker 10: that I did on it, the more I discovered that actually,
10:06
Speaker 10: really it was true. There was no not even an
10:10
Speaker 10: article that was There was no like even a sort
10:12
Speaker 10: of academic journal article that was this is a comprehensive
10:16
Speaker 10: history of napalm.
10:17
Speaker 2: Robert Near would go to the Widner Research Library at Harvard,
10:21
Speaker 2: one of the great libraries in the world. He would
10:23
Speaker 2: see shelves of books on atomic weapons, the glamorous bomb,
10:27
Speaker 2: built a great expense by the smartest people in the world.
10:31
Speaker 10: But this particular weapon, there was no history background about
10:36
Speaker 10: it at all.
10:37
Speaker 2: He would end up writing that history himself. It's called Napalm,
10:41
Speaker 2: an American Biography. What's even stranger, of course, was that
10:46
Speaker 2: he was looking for a history of napalm in the
10:48
Speaker 2: Harvard library and didn't find anything. Because Harvard was where
10:52
Speaker 2: napalm was invented. Robert Neir took me to the place
10:57
Speaker 2: on campus where napalm was born.
10:59
Speaker 10: We think this is the converse laboratory right here, which
11:03
Speaker 10: is where they did the initial experiments in the basement
11:06
Speaker 10: window wells with Jeldenson.
11:09
Speaker 1: We're looking at them.
11:10
Speaker 2: I assumed there would be some indication of which of
11:13
Speaker 2: the labs along the basement hallway have belonged to Louis Feeser,
11:17
Speaker 2: But no. We peered in one window after another and
11:20
Speaker 2: had to guess. It's all very chemical lab here, like
11:26
Speaker 2: a zillion pipes and the ceiling. There don't really window
11:30
Speaker 2: wells on this side. No, so it is this side.
11:33
Speaker 10: Were close, assuming that it hasn't ever been, you know,
11:36
Speaker 10: dramatically changed. But I think we're quite close in the
11:38
Speaker 10: spiritual sense at least absolutely.
11:40
Speaker 8: Yeah.
11:44
Speaker 2: There are long lists of things. Harvard is eager to
11:47
Speaker 2: take credit for the transgenic mouse, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging,
11:53
Speaker 2: the pacemaker defibrillators, all important, But on the weapon that
11:58
Speaker 2: played a decisive role in the biggest war of the
12:00
Speaker 2: twentieth century that burned close to half a million Japanese
12:03
Speaker 2: alive in the summer of nineteen forty five, it's not
12:07
Speaker 2: on the list. It's not even a plaque. And at Harvard,
12:12
Speaker 2: I'll point out, they'll put a name on anything. There
12:15
Speaker 2: are multiple buildings at Harvard named in honor of the
12:17
Speaker 2: Sackler family, whose drug company gave the world OxyContin. So
12:21
Speaker 2: it's not like Harvard is squeamish just about napalm. Napalm
12:27
Speaker 2: has simply disappeared. And that is the final of napalm's
12:31
Speaker 2: many crimes, because it didn't actually disappear. Quite the opposite.
12:45
Speaker 2: Five years after the end of the Second World War,
12:48
Speaker 2: after the surrender of Japan, the communist back government of
12:52
Speaker 2: North Korea invaded South Korea June twenty fifth, nineteen fifty.
12:58
Speaker 2: The United Nations condemned the invasion and responded with a
13:01
Speaker 2: show of force led by the United States. And what
13:06
Speaker 2: was the strategy adopted by the US Air Force in Korea.
13:09
Speaker 2: Basically the strategy pioneered by Curtis le May over Japan.
13:13
Speaker 2: Firebomb the North Koreans with napalm until they surrender.
13:19
Speaker 3: Napalm again, how does the living engines.
13:24
Speaker 2: This is a newsreel the Navy put out in the
13:26
Speaker 2: middle of the war called this is Korea, directed by
13:29
Speaker 2: the legendary John Ford.
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Speaker 11: Fry them out, burn them out, cook them, fry them,
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Speaker 11: burn them, cook them Korea in three sentences.
13:43
Speaker 2: If you go through oral history archives, you'll find countless
13:47
Speaker 2: interviews with pilots who remember what that bombing campaign was like.
13:51
Speaker 12: Oh, a lot of napalm dropped, which it was supposed
13:55
Speaker 12: to be top secret.
13:57
Speaker 2: The flight crews came up with the idea of strapping
13:59
Speaker 2: canisters of napalm to wooden pallets, then pushing them out
14:03
Speaker 2: the back of the airplane on rollers.
14:05
Speaker 12: And then the parachutes would open up the stone of
14:09
Speaker 12: descent to where you were trying to drop it.
14:12
Speaker 2: This is a pilot named Robert Billion, interviewed in nineteen
14:15
Speaker 2: ninety five for the Rutgers Oral History Archive.
14:19
Speaker 12: What they did. They went after personnel centers where they
14:22
Speaker 12: congregated the troops in North Korea when they come over,
14:27
Speaker 12: and they would let go with thirty six times fifty
14:31
Speaker 12: fifty gallon drops, and they figured they killed thousands North
14:36
Speaker 12: Korean not burning them, they suffocated them because it burned
14:39
Speaker 12: all the oxygen up in the mediate area.
14:43
Speaker 2: Napalm was engineered to burn down Japanese houses, which had
14:46
Speaker 2: allowed for the pretense that it was intended to destroy buildings,
14:50
Speaker 2: not people. In Korea. That pretense was dropped. It turned
14:54
Speaker 2: out napalm was very good at destroying people.
14:58
Speaker 13: The North Koreans were such vicious enemies and so brutal,
15:05
Speaker 13: but we took care of them, and power in that
15:11
Speaker 13: war was predominant.
15:13
Speaker 2: This is Bill Sinclair, Korean War pilot, interviewed in two
15:16
Speaker 2: thousand and four by the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.
15:21
Speaker 2: I will warn you the story he tells is not pleasant.
15:25
Speaker 13: I remember a particular mission when we caught a mixed
15:34
Speaker 13: Chinese and North Korean division in the open, and we
15:41
Speaker 13: just attacked them with napalm, and we killed hundreds and
15:45
Speaker 13: hundreds of Chinese and North Korean soldiers. I couldn't see
15:49
Speaker 13: how they could possibly stand in the midst of all
15:52
Speaker 13: this conflagration. I remember distinctly one soldier standing under a
16:00
Speaker 13: little tree, and around him was just devastation. Bodies everywhere.
16:06
Speaker 2: And here's an interview with a pilot named Leonard Lee
16:09
Speaker 2: Conia from the Korean War Legacy Foundation.
16:12
Speaker 4: But it worked, it worked well.
16:14
Speaker 14: The burning, yeah, yeah, it'll just hit and then it
16:19
Speaker 14: just spreads. Well, we were close enough that when we
16:23
Speaker 14: call it, you could feel the heat from the from
16:25
Speaker 14: the nap bomb and if you get too close. You
16:29
Speaker 14: don't have to be right in it, but if you
16:31
Speaker 14: get too close it burns the oxygen out of the air.
16:34
Speaker 15: You can't breathe.
16:38
Speaker 2: These stories go on and on. There's one so graphic
16:41
Speaker 2: I'm not going to play it for you. It's about
16:44
Speaker 2: a US pilot carrying a load of napalm who crashes
16:47
Speaker 2: before he can drop it on someone else, and his
16:50
Speaker 2: fellow airman run up to the crash site and can
16:53
Speaker 2: only watch as he burns to death. In the end,
16:58
Speaker 2: the Air Force in Korea ran out of targets. Literally,
17:03
Speaker 2: they had nothing left to bomb because they'd burned down
17:06
Speaker 2: and bombed out virtually everything that could be burned down
17:09
Speaker 2: a bombed out.
17:15
Speaker 7: The destruction on a North Korean the urban structure is massive.
17:21
Speaker 2: Historian Conrad Crane says the consequences of that bombing campaign
17:25
Speaker 2: were enormous.
17:26
Speaker 7: And in some extent that's I think a legacy we're
17:29
Speaker 7: dealing with today because part of the motivation for the
17:31
Speaker 7: North Korean pursuit of nuclear weapons is to have some
17:35
Speaker 7: kind of deterrent to make sure that never happens again.
17:38
Speaker 2: We've heard a lot in the West about how the
17:40
Speaker 2: North Koreans are duplicitous, distrustful, irrational, secretive. Not so much
17:46
Speaker 2: about how in three short years the United States reduced
17:49
Speaker 2: their country to an ash heap. But then again, we've
17:53
Speaker 2: never talked much about napalm and the Korean War. We've
17:56
Speaker 2: never talked much about the Korean War period. It was
18:00
Speaker 2: all pushed aside. In fact, the most significant monument of
18:04
Speaker 2: that war was probably a television show, the sitcom Mash.
18:14
Speaker 2: Mash ran for eleven seasons on CBS nineteen seventy two
18:18
Speaker 2: to nineteen eighty three. It was about a mobile medical
18:22
Speaker 2: unit on the front lines of the Korean War. If
18:25
Speaker 2: you're old enough, you'll remember the names of the characters,
18:28
Speaker 2: Hawkeye Pierce, Colonel Potter, Trapper, John Rader, O'Reilly hot Lips,
18:33
Speaker 2: Hulihan Clinger. It was one of the most remarkable television
18:37
Speaker 2: shows in history. Funny, dark, moving. So what does Mash
18:44
Speaker 2: have to say about napalm? I wondered very little, it
18:48
Speaker 2: turns out, with one exception. The most famous Smash episode
18:52
Speaker 2: of all, the series finale, February twenty eighth, nineteen eighty three, Goodbye, Farewell,
18:58
Speaker 2: and Amen, was watched by one hundred and six million Americans,
19:03
Speaker 2: the highest rated non sports television event in history.
19:07
Speaker 1: The night the last episode was shown, we watched it
19:11
Speaker 1: on a big screen at the studio, and then we
19:13
Speaker 1: went out to dinner to celebrate.
19:17
Speaker 2: I talked to Alan Alda about it. He played Hawkeye,
19:21
Speaker 2: the show's central character.
19:22
Speaker 1: And on the way to the restaurant, Loretta Stwood was
19:28
Speaker 1: in the car with me, and I said, Loretta, look,
19:30
Speaker 1: the streets are empty, and it suddenly dawned on us
19:35
Speaker 1: that a lot of people were probably home watching the
19:38
Speaker 1: show at that time. And what I read in the
19:41
Speaker 1: paper the next day was that in New York the
19:44
Speaker 1: waterworks were threatened because everybody went to the bathroom at
19:48
Speaker 1: the same time during the commercial break.
19:52
Speaker 2: The final episode runs two hours. It is beautiful and moving.
19:57
Speaker 2: I remember where I was when I watched it, packed
20:00
Speaker 2: into the basement TV room at my college in Toronto
20:03
Speaker 2: with what must have been one hundred other people. So
20:08
Speaker 2: after all those years, I went back and watched it
20:10
Speaker 2: again because I remembered that this was the episode that
20:14
Speaker 2: finally dealt with Napon. It comes just after the halfway
20:18
Speaker 2: point in the show, at the one hour and seven
20:20
Speaker 2: minute mark.
20:23
Speaker 9: Colonel look at that sunset.
20:27
Speaker 11: What a beautiful ending for a beautiful day.
20:31
Speaker 2: Corporal Clinger is looking up at the sky when Colonel Potter,
20:35
Speaker 2: the Mash unit's commanding officer, walks by.
20:38
Speaker 11: Yeah, it'd be a nice sunset of it were setting
20:40
Speaker 11: over there. What do you mean? Ever since I've been around,
20:44
Speaker 11: the sun's always set in the west. And what's that?
20:48
Speaker 11: What saw that same kind of glow in the yard
20:50
Speaker 11: end forest? Next day? There wasn't any forest left. You
20:54
Speaker 11: better get on the phone, die car. That fire is
20:56
Speaker 11: headed this way. We're headed out.
20:58
Speaker 2: Klinger runs back to the barracks. Potter stands and watches
21:02
Speaker 2: the sky. We see the fire start to rage, rabbits
21:06
Speaker 2: running for safety.
21:07
Speaker 11: It was started by incendiary bombs. It's coming straight at us.
21:10
Speaker 15: Butt out.
21:14
Speaker 10: All personnel but out.
21:18
Speaker 2: The mass Unit has to evacuate because of a nearby
21:21
Speaker 2: napalm attack. I asked Alan Alda about that plot point
21:25
Speaker 2: in the show. He directed the episode and was one
21:28
Speaker 2: of its writers.
21:29
Speaker 1: I had a.
21:31
Speaker 2: Very specific question with that episode, and that is when
21:35
Speaker 2: you have to evacuate the camp because of the fire. Yeah,
21:40
Speaker 2: from vincendier bombs. It's left unstated whose bombs they are.
21:46
Speaker 1: I got a call on a Saturday morning that a
21:49
Speaker 1: fire had raged through the canyon where we were shooting
21:53
Speaker 1: and the whole shed had burned down. So I put
21:56
Speaker 1: the phone down and calmly went about writing what we
22:01
Speaker 1: called the bugout. I think they called it a bug
22:04
Speaker 1: out in those days. When the mass unit had to
22:06
Speaker 1: move and we moved to another location, so I had
22:13
Speaker 1: to put a fire into the script to justify the move,
22:20
Speaker 1: but I forgot what the justification was was that a
22:24
Speaker 1: bomb had caused the fire.
22:25
Speaker 2: Scendiary bombs. Radar says, there's a fire on the way
22:30
Speaker 2: from incendiary bombs.
22:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you wonder which side they're from. Well, it
22:35
Speaker 1: kind of doesn't matter.
22:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's right, absolutely right. The great moral innovation of
22:45
Speaker 2: MASH was that it spoke out against war without taking sides.
22:50
Speaker 2: But all I could think about is that this show
22:52
Speaker 2: is what's left of America's memory of the Korean War.
22:56
Speaker 2: And when MASH finally comes around to mentioning napalm, the
22:59
Speaker 2: weapon that reduced North Korea to ashes, it gets history
23:03
Speaker 2: exactly backwards. It has Americans as Napalm's victims, not the Koreans,
23:10
Speaker 2: and the show doesn't mention where the napalm came from
23:13
Speaker 2: as if it could as easily have come from anywhere,
23:16
Speaker 2: when in truth it could only have come from the
23:19
Speaker 2: US Air Force dropping their Harvard engineered payloads from high
23:23
Speaker 2: in the sky. Later in the episode, Colonel Potter returns
23:30
Speaker 2: to the mash camp after it's been destroyed by napalm.
23:34
Speaker 2: The MASH unit is packing up, The doctors and nurses
23:38
Speaker 2: are all going home.
23:41
Speaker 16: It is now two PIM. In exactly eight hours, the
23:44
Speaker 16: Korean War will be officially over. It's a time for
23:47
Speaker 16: a summing up, and these are the most up to
23:49
Speaker 16: date figures we have. The cost of the war to
23:52
Speaker 16: the United States has been placed at twenty two billion dollars.
23:56
Speaker 15: Oh, look at me, I only get three hundred a month.
24:00
Speaker 2: Potter goes one last time to the place they had
24:02
Speaker 2: lived for so many years and wanders among the ashes.
24:09
Speaker 2: Wreckage is still smoking. Potter takes off his helmet and
24:13
Speaker 2: looks around in shock. He bends over, picks up a
24:16
Speaker 2: blackened bottle, stands up again.
24:21
Speaker 11: Okay, let's get to work.
24:26
Speaker 2: That's it, We're done, let's move on. I was one
24:32
Speaker 2: of millions of viewers who choked up at that moment,
24:37
Speaker 2: But if I were North Korean, I would have thrown
24:39
Speaker 2: a brick at the television. General Curtis LeMay disapproved of
24:57
Speaker 2: the way the Pentagon fought the war in Korea. He
25:01
Speaker 2: was in charge of the Strategic Air Command by that point,
25:04
Speaker 2: a step removed from day to day control of the war.
25:07
Speaker 2: But they were using his tactic and his warhorse to
25:10
Speaker 2: be twenty nine, along with his incendiary weapon of choice, napon.
25:16
Speaker 2: So he had opinions. He thought the whole business on
25:20
Speaker 2: the Korean Peninsula dragged on for far too long.
25:24
Speaker 15: Going in the war as a serious business, a serious decision.
25:31
Speaker 15: If you have a responsibility for doing it, you better
25:33
Speaker 15: buy God makes them careful evaluation before you come to
25:39
Speaker 15: the conclusion that war is the illness solution to your problems.
25:43
Speaker 2: This is le May in retirement, holding forth on how
25:46
Speaker 2: he thought the Korean War ought to have been handled.
25:49
Speaker 15: I once you come to bus solusion that you'd better
25:52
Speaker 15: be ready to go all the way. It's im moral
25:55
Speaker 15: not to use too much if you have the capability
25:58
Speaker 15: of winning, and winning rapidly because you saved life, property, destruction, suffering,
26:05
Speaker 15: and the quicker you're going to.
26:06
Speaker 2: End the war cold blooded, hyperrational very Curtis to May,
26:12
Speaker 2: and he thought the Pentagon botched it in Korea, dragged
26:15
Speaker 2: it out too long, didn't come in hard and fast enough.
26:19
Speaker 15: So we kind of slipped the note under the door
26:22
Speaker 15: under the Pentagon and said, look, why don't we well
26:25
Speaker 15: burned down four or five of those towns up in
26:28
Speaker 15: North Korea, and I mean, they'll stopped this nonsense, only
26:31
Speaker 15: mean business. And the answer came back under the door.
26:36
Speaker 15: This is too horrible. He knock off a bunch of
26:38
Speaker 15: women and children, non combatants.
26:41
Speaker 4: Too horrible.
26:43
Speaker 2: The Pentagon couldn't stomach it. Now there are one hundred
26:47
Speaker 2: ways to tell the story of the Korean War. This
26:49
Speaker 2: is the Curtis le May version. The military ignored his suggestion,
26:54
Speaker 2: and so what should have been an intense summer fire
26:57
Speaker 2: bombing campaign stretched out over many years.
27:00
Speaker 15: We burned down every town in North Korea and South
27:04
Speaker 15: Korea too, every one of them. Now, during all this time,
27:09
Speaker 15: and what we do kill off twenty percent of the
27:11
Speaker 15: Korean population through direct casualties of war, are indirect due
27:16
Speaker 15: to exposure, disease and malnutrition and so forth. Now, over
27:22
Speaker 15: a period of four and a half years, all of
27:26
Speaker 15: these highly moral people are willing to kill off twenty
27:29
Speaker 15: percent of the Korean population over this period of time.
27:33
Speaker 15: But it's immoral to kill off a few people to
27:35
Speaker 15: start with to save life, property and suffering. In the
27:39
Speaker 15: long run, that's im moral kill a few people to
27:44
Speaker 15: prevent that.
27:47
Speaker 2: Curtis the May on his high horse. If you spend
27:53
Speaker 2: enough time with le May, you start to see things
27:56
Speaker 2: his way. Yes, Japan was better off for being fire bummed.
28:00
Speaker 2: It spared them starvation in the Soviets. Yes, and maybe
28:04
Speaker 2: a summer of intense pain in Korea would have made
28:06
Speaker 2: more sense than dragging things out of a four years.
28:09
Speaker 2: There's a reason LeMay rose as far and fast as
28:12
Speaker 2: he did in the US military. He could be awfully
28:15
Speaker 2: persuasive when he needed to be. But then comes Vietnam,
28:19
Speaker 2: and what does LeMay want the Air Force to do?
28:23
Speaker 2: More napalm, more bombing.
28:25
Speaker 8: Military police contain the crowd, but clashes soon break out.
28:29
Speaker 8: Federal Marshall's arrest several who attempt to break through the
28:32
Speaker 8: protective line.
28:34
Speaker 2: There were anti war protests in the streets about the
28:36
Speaker 2: Air Force's use of napalm and Vietnam. From his laboratory
28:40
Speaker 2: at Harvard, the chemist Louis Feeser sent a horrified letter
28:43
Speaker 2: to President Nixon, it seems to me desirable. The co
28:47
Speaker 2: inventor of napalm wrote to try to promote an international
28:51
Speaker 2: agreement to outlaw further use of napalm or napalm type munitions.
28:57
Speaker 2: LeMay would have none of it. In his memoirs, published
29:00
Speaker 2: just before his retirement in nineteen sixty five, he wrote
29:04
Speaker 2: this about how to defeat North Vietnam. Quote. My solution
29:08
Speaker 2: to the problem would be to tell them, frankly, that
29:10
Speaker 2: they've got to draw in their horns and stop their regression,
29:14
Speaker 2: or we're going to bomb them back into the stone age.
29:21
Speaker 2: Le Maay was saying the same thing in the nineteen
29:23
Speaker 2: sixties about Vietnam that he did in the nineteen fifties
29:27
Speaker 2: about Korea and the nineteen forties about Japan. Heavy bombing
29:31
Speaker 2: could lead to unconditional surrender, and unconditional surrenders save lives
29:36
Speaker 2: in the long run, even though, of course, the great
29:39
Speaker 2: lesson of Vietnam was that bombing didn't work, that air
29:42
Speaker 2: power could not defeat a determined guerrilla force in an
29:46
Speaker 2: underdeveloped country. Le May was a problem solver, but he
29:51
Speaker 2: could not conceive of solutions that did not involve bombs
29:55
Speaker 2: and airplanes. Remember, what le May wrote about seeing his
29:59
Speaker 2: first airplane as a little boy in Ohio. Suddenly in
30:05
Speaker 2: the air above me appeared a flying machine. It came
30:08
Speaker 2: from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it.
30:15
Speaker 2: And then he goes on, children can muster enormous strength
30:20
Speaker 2: in ideal and idea, in all their effort to grasp
30:24
Speaker 2: the trophy they desire. And nobody was holding me back.
30:28
Speaker 2: No one was standing closed to say, Look, you're just
30:31
Speaker 2: a little child. That airplane is away up there in
30:35
Speaker 2: the air, and no matter how fast you run, you
30:37
Speaker 2: can't keep up with it. You can't reach high enough
30:40
Speaker 2: to seize it. Little Curtis ran across neighbors, backyards, vacant lots,
30:47
Speaker 2: down sidewalks, then it was gone. It's wonderful sound and
30:54
Speaker 2: force and the freakish illusion of the thing, a thing
30:58
Speaker 2: made of wood and metal piercing the air, that in
31:08
Speaker 2: fact satuation carried LeMay all the way from working class
31:12
Speaker 2: Columbus to the command of the US Air Force. But
31:16
Speaker 2: leaders need at a certain point to move beyond their infatuations.
31:21
Speaker 2: And the great tragedy of Curtis LeMay is that he
31:25
Speaker 2: could not.
31:27
Speaker 15: I hate this word strategy.
31:29
Speaker 2: That's le May in nineteen seventy one. By strategy, he meant,
31:33
Speaker 2: all of those things that you do when you're not
31:36
Speaker 2: dropping bombs from a plane.
31:38
Speaker 15: Sure you should do some planning, and you should do
31:42
Speaker 15: some thinking, lots.
31:44
Speaker 5: Of it.
31:47
Speaker 15: About what might happen when you get into war. But
31:52
Speaker 15: anyone who thinks that he can set down and with
31:56
Speaker 15: a few learned individuals plan a strategy for the country
32:00
Speaker 15: that's going to keep them all the trouble and win
32:02
Speaker 15: the wars as well as in Lexi, it's not going
32:06
Speaker 15: to happen, So don't defend on strategy and all depend
32:12
Speaker 15: on planking a lot.
32:15
Speaker 2: And then he says, instead of strategy, instead of thinking,
32:19
Speaker 2: what you really need is some hardware to back you up,
32:23
Speaker 2: a thing made of wood and metal piercing the air.
32:31
Speaker 2: I said way back in the first installment of this
32:33
Speaker 2: story that Curtis le May was a type, a prototype
32:37
Speaker 2: of the modern problem solver, the unshakable belief in technology,
32:43
Speaker 2: the narrowness of focus, the ironclad self confidence. You can
32:47
Speaker 2: find versions of le May everywhere these days, all equally
32:51
Speaker 2: well intentioned, all equally successful in their chosen field of battle,
32:56
Speaker 2: all equally applauded by the world around them. I applaud
32:59
Speaker 2: them too sometimes and profit from their victories as much
33:03
Speaker 2: as you do. It's just that I would have thought
33:07
Speaker 2: that the events of March ninth and tenth, nineteen forty
33:10
Speaker 2: five would have given us pause just a little. Curtis
33:21
Speaker 2: May died in nineteen ninety of a heart attack. He's
33:24
Speaker 2: buried in the US Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs,
33:29
Speaker 2: where he belongs alongside his fellow airmen.
33:42
Speaker 4: So it's an exact photo after Tokyo air raid.
33:45
Speaker 1: This is it.
33:46
Speaker 4: It's Asa, and so here it's a summita river, and
33:49
Speaker 4: so this area is a Hondo, and this area and
33:53
Speaker 4: so here it is Asa.
33:55
Speaker 2: In East Tokyo, on the edge of the Fukugawa District,
33:58
Speaker 2: there's a small museum. It's called the Center of the
34:02
Speaker 2: Tokyo Raids and War Damage. It's on a side street,
34:06
Speaker 2: two stories brick, looks like there should be a dentist
34:09
Speaker 2: office in it. You walk in and there's a little
34:12
Speaker 2: gift shop to the side, more like a few bookshelves,
34:15
Speaker 2: and what looks like a classroom with a bunch of
34:18
Speaker 2: folding chairs where an introductory video.
34:20
Speaker 3: Plays stops the str name Jeraskara.
34:28
Speaker 1: Tokyo are.
34:30
Speaker 2: The museum is the only permanent memorial that tells the
34:34
Speaker 2: story of the devastation of Tokyo on March ninth, nineteen
34:38
Speaker 2: forty five, one of the deadliest nights in human history.
34:42
Speaker 2: There's a scale model of a B twenty nine hanging
34:45
Speaker 2: from the ceiling and an M sixty nine bomb casing
34:48
Speaker 2: opened for display, and maps. Maps showing where the bombs
34:53
Speaker 2: fell and where people ran, and which way the winds
34:56
Speaker 2: blew and where the bodies were found.
34:59
Speaker 4: So many people escaped to the elementary school and Osamo
35:05
Speaker 4: High School.
35:06
Speaker 2: Our guide caru Ito, talked about one of the spots
35:10
Speaker 2: on a map. There was an elementary school in the
35:13
Speaker 2: heart of the area bomb that night, one of the
35:15
Speaker 2: only concrete buildings in the district. So people ran there
35:19
Speaker 2: because they thought they would be safer than in the
35:21
Speaker 2: wooden buildings on fire all around them.
35:24
Speaker 4: They escaped to the concrete the brooding, but so inside
35:28
Speaker 4: it was a birding, so they also carried the Pisa sheet.
35:33
Speaker 2: They were killed by the heat from the burning nape bomb. Outside.
35:36
Speaker 2: A concrete structure in the midst of a firestorm becomes
35:40
Speaker 2: an oven. Then Ito told us the story of one
35:44
Speaker 2: of the few survivors that night. He was a teacher
35:48
Speaker 2: at the school, and he had been manning the front gate,
35:51
Speaker 2: but so many people rushed in that he was knocked down, trampled.
35:56
Speaker 2: There were people on top of him. He heard screaming.
35:59
Speaker 2: He passed out. Then hours later came two.
36:06
Speaker 4: So he noticed many people so done into the cab
36:10
Speaker 4: on him, like like.
36:16
Speaker 2: The people who had trampled him had turned the carbon.
36:22
Speaker 4: People on him. So tye into the cab, so with
36:27
Speaker 4: our sheet and a fire and so only him.
36:34
Speaker 2: She survived under a mound of carbon.
36:50
Speaker 6: Thank you, Oh that was left to a brick. There's
36:54
Speaker 6: no greater suddenness.
36:57
Speaker 2: The teacher later became an artist. He made a scroll
37:01
Speaker 2: to memorialize what happened that night. It hangs on the
37:04
Speaker 2: wall of the Tokyo Raids Museum. You're hearing a recitation
37:07
Speaker 2: of it.
37:12
Speaker 6: The survivors who were despondent, you're able to find neither voice.
37:20
Speaker 6: What reason can one have to kill innocent people?
37:28
Speaker 2: If you are ever in Tokyo, you should go see
37:30
Speaker 2: the scroll. Even if you haven't made up your mind
37:34
Speaker 2: about everything you've just heard about the things done in
37:37
Speaker 2: the name of problem solving.
37:41
Speaker 6: So could I need t How could I have a
37:46
Speaker 6: wipe from my memoriness, the cries, the agony of men,
37:51
Speaker 6: women and children I had at that time.
38:08
Speaker 2: M Revision's history is produced by Meila Belle and Leeman Gestou,
38:15
Speaker 2: with Jacob Smith, Alouise Linton and Annaim. Our editor is
38:19
Speaker 2: Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flon Williams,
38:24
Speaker 2: fact checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin
38:28
Speaker 2: Crew Hedefane, Eric Sandler, Carl Migliori, Maya k Nick, Maggie Taylor,
38:34
Speaker 2: Jason Gambrel, and of course Jacob Weisberg. Special thanks also
38:41
Speaker 2: to our voice actor Yoshia Mao Jesse money Hunt for
38:45
Speaker 2: his help with Japanese translation, the Science History Institute, the
38:50
Speaker 2: Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Texas,
38:53
Speaker 2: Special Collections, the Air Force Historical Research Agency, the Air
38:58
Speaker 2: Force Academy, Oral History Project at the Oral History of
39:01
Speaker 2: Archives at Columbia University, McDermott Library at the US Air
39:06
Speaker 2: Force Academy, and the Rutgers Oral History Archive. Thank you
39:14
Speaker 2: for listening. I'm Malcolm Gaba.