LeMay Takes Command and the Napalm Tests — James M. Scott — Scott profiles Curtis LeMay as a "hardscrabble" problem solver and pragmatist who financed his university education through brutal labor in steel mills, contrasting sharply with the aristocratic intellectual background of Hansell. Scott characterizes LeMay as a pragmatist willing to circumvent bureaucratic procedures and institutional constraints to achieve military objectives, including the unorthodox practice of utilizing opium to compensate native tribes for rescuing downed American airmen behind Japanese lines. Scott details the American military's systematic preparation for urban firebombing operations through development of napalm incendiary weapons and intensive testing conducted on a meticulously constructed mock Japanese village in the Utah desert, complete with traditional tatami mats and wooden structures representative of Japanese residential architecture, to validate incendiary weapon effectiveness against wooden urban construction. Scottdocuments that LeMay systematically concludes that Hansell's high-altitude precision bombing doctrine represents an "unsolvable equation" doomed to perpetual failure, prompting LeMay to contemplate radical tactical reorientation.
1934 TOKYO