Black Snow Audiobook Libro.fm

Description

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10 1945 nearly 300 American B29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2800 degrees liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100000 men women and children were killed

Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay who famously remarked If we lose the war well be tried as war criminals James M Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night and describes the development of the B29 the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields and the change in strategy from highaltitude daylight precision bombing to lowaltitude nighttime incendiary bombing Most importantly the raid represented a significant moral shift for America marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilianswhich helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later

Drawing on firstperson interviews with American pilots and bombardiers and Japanese survivors air force archives and oral histories never before published in English Scott delivers a harrowing and gripping account and his most important and compelling work to date