![]() ![]() In 1945, 250,000 people were dying from the effects of the war in Asia every month. Like Germany, Japan went on a genocidal tear across an entire continent, killing practically everything in its path. Many were slaughtered in the most brutal ways imaginable. Upwards of 17 million people – men, woman and children – died in the Pacific Theatre of War, a war that Japan started in 1937. There was a second holocaust in the Second World War that most Westerners know little about. So allow me to answer that question, which Gladwell chose to ignore, because it is key to the entire story. Why, in God’s name, some might wonder, would their civilians have been targeted like this? Since 1945, Japan, as well as its war partner Germany, have been among the most responsible countries on earth. And for anyone under the age of 80, it might be hard to understand why these bombings took place at all. A poem, written by one of the survivors, is read aloud as an indictment: “What reason can one have to kill innocent people?”įor listeners who know only the most minimal history of a conflagration that engulfed the entire world and killed more than 60-million people, that sounds like a reasonable question. The series ends with a visit to a museum in Tokyo dedicated to the firebombing. “The problems facing a combat commander,” Nutter went on to say, “Are very different from those of philosophers in the comfort of the library.” I would add podcast hosts to that group as well. ![]() ![]() Nutter once tried to explain LeMay with an obscure opinion by Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter: “The language of the picket line is very different from the language of the boardroom.” Ralph Nutter’s politics were antithetical to LeMay’s views, but he understood the absolute necessity of winning that war and came to have the greatest respect for his commander. I met a Harvard trained lawyer and retired judge who served under LeMay during the Second World War. “LeMay didn’t get tried as a war criminal,” Gladwell tells us, “He got promoted.” And then, Gladwell offers a greater philosophical quandary: “If you kill half-a-million people, something should happen … shouldn’t it?” At worst, he comes across as a brutal thug. LeMay is, at best, depicted as unfeeling, focused only on getting the job done with little concern for collateral damage. The chemists who created napalm are depicted as men more fascinated with fire than its repercussions, although Gladwell tells us that after the war, out of guilt, they went on to save, perhaps, even more lives with the creation of fire retardants and, in one case, a miracle cancer drug. ![]() Firestorms were then created in 64 Japanese cities that burned everything in their path – factories, homes and civilians. Gladwell focuses on two major events in the War – the creation of napalm by Harvard chemists and its use over Japan, beginning with the Tokyo firebombing on March 10, 1945. If Gladwell did this on purpose, he joins a long list of revisionists from Howard Zinn’s distorted history of America to, most recently, the New York Times 1619 Project. While factually correct, he conveniently ignored the wider context and by doing so, he turns not just LeMay, but, by extension, the entire Allied war effort, into a dark, ominous crusade of destruction. LeMay was also very controversial, being the architect of the firebomb raids that killed between 350-and-500,000 Japanese.īut, as I listened to each episode, I became more and more concerned that I was hearing a very popular author altering an important part of our history to impose his own personal morality. Recently, I was excited to hear that Gladwell had devoted four episodes of his podcast series, Revisionist History, to Curtis LeMay, the US Air Force general, who helped create the victorious bombing campaign in the Second World War, built the Strategic Air Command during the Cold War, and served on the Joint Chiefs. ![]()
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