Doomed to Fail - Ep 214: Terror for Peace - The Firebombing of Tokyo

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Black Snow: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb - by James M. Scott - https://www.amazon.com/Black-Snow-Curtis-Firebombing-Atomic/dp/1324002999The Brutal Bombing of Tokyo 1945 | The Deadliest Bombing in History - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-iS8ZQjr1cUnauthorized History of the Pacific War Podcast - The Firebombing of Tokyo - Episode 416 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkWVi5s85lo Today, let's talk about Operation Meetinghouse - the overnight firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945. USAAF General Curtis LeMay orchestrated hundreds of B-29 Superfortress bombers to bring thousands of pounds of incendiary bombs to Tokyo. He knew that he was targeting civilians, but believed this campaign of "terror bombing" would push Japan to surrender. It didn't. You know it didn't. The firebombing of Tokyo killed over 100,000 people, more people than the Atomic Bombs in their respective cities. Families burned to death in piles, people boiled to death in cisterns and rivers. It's a harrowing, awful story. Taylor cries. War is stupid.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A. 019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Hello, hello, Taylor. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm doing well, thank you. You're in Dallas. I'm in Dallas, yeah. I'm going to be here for a little bit, then head back home and get back to normal life. it's interesting it's it's fun for the element of seeing the family but i think there's a certain

age where you're so used to your routines and how you do things and the foods you eat and when you eat and what you do and when the quiet time comes and when the busy time i don't know it's just it's weird it's like getting harder and part to kind of flick over into being valuable to that but yeah that be sense you have your things you do um yeah well i Well, he'll be introduced us real fast. Welcome to Jim to Fail. We bring you history's most notorious disasters and epic failures. And I am Taylor joined by Fars in Dallas.

And I was just in Texas. And Fars made us a wonderful dinner. And we hung out in his pool and it was very, very fun. Thank you for having us. I don't like to brag. I'm a very humble man. But that brisked it was amazing. I'm so impressed.

I showed him my husband. He was like, Fars made that? And I was like, yeah. It was one of the better ones. was back the secret so here what i what i've done before is i try to rush the process so i'll wake up at six o'clock in the morning and then if i wake up at six o'clock of the morning it's usually ready to serve by eight but because y'all were coming over earlier like two two 30 whatever it was i put it in the night before and that gave me the chance to cook it super low like usually all

started like 250 this time i started at 220 and oh my that was incredible um so anyways Penny myself with them back. He's a great job. Thank you. It was presented, lovely. It was great. Perfect. Very good time.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I am only saying, whoof, because I'm devastated by the story I'm going to tell you. I like started crying. I started crying when I was writing this. I like, I don't even know.

It's very emotional. So no more feel good stories. No more feel good stories. Thank you for everyone who enjoyed. I feel good story, but we're not doing that today. Stucks. All right. Let's hear it. I just, I have been in deep sorrow, but I know that is like, and like maybe this is stupid, but I just all, there's, people are just so deeply flawed to continue to fight each other

in war. You know, it's just like, why are we doing this? It makes absolutely no sense. And I know that, like, that's not a profound statement, but it's just, like, hard to even, like, wrap your head around the stuff that we do to each other for, like, literally no reason you know i mean we do it for a reason it's just a question whether it is a justifiable reason exactly exactly um and i'll tell you what it is in a second but i hear all sorts of warning bells from this story that like if you terrorize a people you risk creating terrorists when you kill your enemy's children you're killing the possibility of them becoming what you're fighting against but again they're children and then also in that vein like does the worst

that a people are capable of justify killing the possibility of it expanding. Does that make sense? It's like the old, like if you went back, would you kill Hitler, the baby Hitler? Yeah, yeah. So it's, I just don't know. Yeah, but like it's a symptom of a bigger thing and all of that, you know. There's this really silly, it's like Twilight Zone with Catherine Hegel from a long time ago, where she goes back in time

specifically to kill baby Hitler but when she does it it turns out that the real baby Hitler had been like kind of sickly so her the nursemaid has switched him for like a presumably Jewish child

that was like on the street and that's the baby that Catherine Hegel killed but not the real Hitler and the real Hitler were still out there and like that was always when it happened it was just like a time travel

silly. Is this real? Well it's a real TV show no one goes back in time I know it's not real Catherine Hague, how did the, the two don't have been overlap in time. Charlie Zillian and Catherine Hig, I guess they do. One of the newer ones.

Anyway, it's Lily. But anyway, just I feel very, very heartbroken. And I'm going to talk about the deadliest bombing in history and one of the deadliest days, if not the deadliest day in human history, which is March 10th, 1945, Operation Meeting House, the fire bombing of Tokyo. Oh, okay. I'm actually going to start crying now because I'm so upset about this. This is going to be great. I'm just going to cry the whole time. Over 100,000 people died.

About 16 square miles of Tokyo were just gone. I asked Chach GPT to put that into some reference for me. Oh, I just lost it. It's like if Manhattan underneath 110th Street was just gone or just gone. Two Santa Monica is half of San Francisco. Okay. There is. Absolutely gone.

Yeah. Got it. I understand. Yeah. So I read the book, Black Snow, Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo on the Road to the Atomic Bomb by James M. Scott. And I listened to a couple of other, like, YouTube videos that I'll share in my notes. But I'll start with some history and the people involved. I'll weave in some of the plane history, like aircraft history, and then what happened after.

So we are in World War II, obviously. And we're in the Pacific. We're using airplanes in a way that has never been used before. so at this point there are generals who are saying that air warfare is the pinnacle of what humans can do to each other because you can do so much destruction and get away or do it so quickly and do it so fast i'll add to that like technological warfare and unmanned flight or i feel like our next big things that are going to be unbelievably devastating but yes like at this point like you know buying people from the air, you can create so much devastation that you never could before in the history of war. It's brand new. Right now, the Air Force is not its own branch of the U.S. military. That's how new it is still. So it is the U.S. Army Air Forces, the U.S. AAF, but not a separate branch yet. That will come later. One of the biggest cheerleaders for a separate Air Force is General Hap Arnold,

who is the commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces. And Hap Arnold, the guy who's like, we should have our own Air Force, he learned to fly from the Wright brothers. That's how fucking you do this. I know. So, wait, wait, do you know why we even needed an Air Force? Because now the Navy has an Air Force. I think the second biggest Air Force in the world outside of the U.S. Air Force

is the Navy's Air Fleet. But, like, if the Marines have, or the Army has one and the Navy has, like, why do we need a separate one? That's such a good question. I don't know. I think it's like they, like, in this case, it was like to command the, you know, the planes in a strategically, but also, like, you're right that the Navy has a huge plane contingent. So I don't know. If anyone is true, I think the Navy, the Navy is the second biggest air fleet outside of the Air Force.

Yeah, I mean, I believe you. Yeah, I don't know. Interesting. Okay. My friend, I have friends who went to the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy and my friend who went to the Air Force Academy has done like a thousand parachute jumps. I don't know what it is. cool. Those guys are so cool.

I just, it's so cool. I'm like, you should write that on a t-shirt and wear it every day. Like, I don't even understand. It's crazy. I know. It's like uniquely bad. So, like, athletes. It's really interesting. Yeah. Like, one of my friends was like, yeah, my last job, I used to jump out of helicopter and say people from the water. I'm like, you did what? I just don't have a computer.

I've never done anything. So, whatever. But no, that's a really question. I guess, but I'm never. Sort of. So, anyway, all this is wild. new, all of this airfare or air fighting is new. Up until 1945, we're obviously in the middle of World War II. A few months after Pearl Harbor, we did manage to bomb Tokyo in the Doolittle

raid, but it was hard because it was hard to get there. It took a long time and there was really nowhere to stop. So for the initial raids on Japan, we would have to stop in, I say we, the U.S., you know, the U.S., would have to stop in China or Russia to get there. So it was not easy. But once we did things that we've been talking about, like conquering those islands up in Japan, like Iwo Jima and Guam, like you were closer. So even during the firebombing of Tokyo, it took seven hours for them to get there, but they could get there because we had more, we had better planes and we were closer like we were before.

And we could turn around. So the war in Europe had escalated and, ended. So by the time of the firebombie of Tokyo, the war in Europe is over. It had ended with some insane destructions of German cities. The big one that people think about probably first is Dresden. Yeah. I've been there. It is bleak. It is a bleak gray place. It was raining, but also like, I feel like it was just like bleak because it was gone. And Dresden was the Florence of Germany. You know, it was beautiful. There, there, it had like, you know, know, palaces and churches that were centuries old. And it was gorgeous. And when Dresden was

destroyed, a lot of people were just like, can't believe that you did that. Like, it was such a beautiful place. If you look at pictures of Dresden after it was firebombed, it is a graveyard of facades. It is like big stone facades that are empty. So just like empty, empty buildings. But Tokyo is different. It's like built differently. So just, like, Just a side note. So how they planned firebombing Dresden and Tokyo, they kind of worked on them together. And the idea was they're going to burn differently. So they took U.S. architects who had lived in peace times in Germany and in Japan. And they brought them to the desert in California or Arizona, wherever. And they built cities. So like literally from my house right now, I can see a Middle Eastern city over the mountain. So I can see a over the mountain there is this white city that is built the way that like a city is built in Afghanistan and they practice bombing it all the time. They have like raids in there and things. I can always hear them bombing at the base by me. So that's what they did is they built

German cities and Japanese cities and bombed them to see what would happen because it would have to be a little bit different because they're built differently. Was the US the US due president or was that in UK? I think it was the UK but we were like very, very involved. I think it was like a together thing. Got it. We definitely like flew from, you know, it was so much easier to get there to get to Germany from, especially once you've like, once you've liberated France, I mean, you're right next door, you know, it's not.

Right, right. Not that hard. So they built the brick buildings like Dresden. They filmed them with, you know, curtains and furniture like you would have in Germany and they bombed them to see what happened. For Tokyo to prepare to bomb Japan, they built the wooden homes with straw mats and paper walls. Like, that's a traditional Japanese house. And they set them on fire and they bombed them to figure out what would happen. There are people who studied in Tokyo pre-war, came back to the U.S.,

helped build these cities to practice bombing, and then went back to Tokyo afterwards to help rebuild. Wow. Like, what a life. Like, what was a point of anything? You know what I mean? Just blows my mind. Did these pictures of the residents are, like, there's like nothing. Like this is. Wow. Tokyo, like, Dresden, there's that grave of empty, empty facades, lots of stone, but Tokyo is gone. Yeah, well, you're referring to as a picture where it's like, you can see the, like, the front side of, it's like a top-down angled view. So you can see the facade, but it's very clear because you can also look into it beyond the facade and see that it's like just rubble. Yeah, yeah, it's nothing. Totally. And like, you know, we saw that in London. And like, we see that all over, all over Europe. But there's, But the one in Dresden was like specifically meant just to destroy everything.

It didn't matter. Like there was a lot of bombing. They say like, oh, even now. Oh, we're going after a manufacturing plant. Or like, oh, we're going after this thing. But it happens to be in the middle of a civilian place, you know, whatever. Yeah. But what they're doing is what they did in Dresden was specifically meant to destroy the city.

It was called terror bombing. It was meant to make the civilian population say we have had enough and demand that it was over. So there was less pretense of like, oh yeah, we're heading, we're trying to hit this, I don't know, this engine factory. Like, no, we're going to destroy the city. We're going to kill people. We want them to be hungry. We want them to be afraid. We want them to demand that this is over. So that was like the point of it. It reminds me a little bit of like Gaza and Israel because like it's borderline war crimes. But they're done to inflict pressure on leadership. So they're inflicted on innocent civilians so they rise up basically and the question after this is like is

this a war crime like can you rise up after this also because you are starving people starve there were you know 300,000 orphans like what do you do with that you know I don't know um so now it's 1945 the war on europe is over and we want to avoid and this is again like something that we say is you want to avoid avoid a ground invasion of japan many more Americans will die. American parents don't want to send their sons. Like now we're talking about like the young guys. Like my grandpa,

I have one grandpa that was older and he was in the Navy and he never went over to Europe and he was stationed. He was like a trainer in like the Great Lakes area and he would like train guys to go over. But my dad's dad joined when he was like 15. He joined the youngest he could possibly join. And he would have gone for sure. You know, but it ended before then.

But like it was like now we have boys who were like nine like miles of age eight years old when the war started and then this war has been going on for so long I'm going to send him absolutely not you know what I mean so Americans were like we want this to be over it'll take forever

and we have this idea of the Japanese people that like I want to counter a little bit so I know like Dan Carlin says the Japanese are like everyone else only more so you know because they were like super intense about this and everything and they did very terrible things and really believe that like

God was for the emperor and would be successful and there's people like you know that guy who like lived in the woods for 30 years because he never thought that they would ever surrender that exists you know people who really thought that and we've seen things like when we went to when we like invaded Saipan all the people that jumped over that cliff do you remember that story no like the people of Japan were told the Americans were so brutal which is what we're told about the Japanese which is true on both sides that they will come in and they will kill them and they will rape their children and rape their women and torture and destroy everything. So when they got to Saipan, mothers would take their children and they all went off the cliff together. You know, and it was just horrifying for everyone involved. Like people who walked to happen and were like,

don't, don't do that. So all this is happening, we're just, please like, let this end. So a hap and his team have a new plane. It is the B-29 super fortress bomber. It is huge. It can reach Japan from the islands that we've just got, like Iwojima, etc.

It's not like, next door. It takes seven hours to fly that, to fly Tokyo and seven hours back, but it's still doable for the B-29, which is new, that a plane can do that whole round trip and be able to do it. But it's expensive. So it's a big, expensive plane. It's a huge, in, they used it in Germany to success, you know, whatever, because it can fly really high and drop a bomb and then get away. So there's not a lot of, like, chances of, like, losing the plane. Japan has, you know, wildly different weather from Europe. So the jet stream at that certain level of Japan is insane.

So there is no way to drop a bomb from that high and have a land on your target. It's just too windy. And it's also too cloudy. You can't see anything from like December through March in Japan. There's clouds constantly. So there was no way that they were going to be able to do it. They use, for example, 835 B-29s dropped over 2,000 tons of bombs on a Nakajima aircraft factory that's near Tokyo, and it was never less than 96% operational. You know, like you just didn't hit it.

You just couldn't do it. The way they were doing it. You know, it sounds like me vaguely familiar because I do recall with the reason why Nagasaki wasn't as bad was because of that, because. the jet stream pushed the bomb out of the center where it was supposed to land. And Nagasaki was even the second choice that day because they couldn't see the first choice. There you go. Yep. Yeah. So it's like

what a fucking fate, you know, just like the clouds, we can't do it. Yeah. But so the B-29, Super Fortress, huge plane, typically had a crew of 11 men. There was the aircraft commander who's a pilot, a co-pilot, a bombardier, navigator,

engineer, radio operator, radar operator, left gunner, right gutter, top gunner, and tail gunner. So it could also shoot out inside. I know, looking at a picture, it's crazy. There's like a little window, like above the vertical stabilizer with gun turrets coming out of the back of it. Nope. Like, so scary. So scary. But for the Tokyo fire bombing, they will get rid of the gunner position.

So typically they'll have about eight or nine people instead of 11. because they want to fit more bombs because there's no plan to like shoot from the plane right right so that will happen later um but classically like 11 people on on a b 29 so we have these new planes the war in europe is over technically and something needs to happen in japan the general in command of the b29 fleet which is the 21st bomber command of the pacific is brigadier general Haywood Hansel. And he was a big part of the precision bombing in Germany. And he had bombed Tokyo in November, but it was not a huge success. He hadn't really hit what he wanted to hit. And in January, 1945, he gets relieved of duty. And the job goes to our main character,

Major General Curtis E. LeMay. So he's the guy who was in charge of this whole thing. It seems really familiar. Yeah. So Curtis LeMay is like, just a very he he he did a lot let me just tell you let me just tell you he was born november 15th 1906 he would live to be 80 he died in 1990 he was born in ohio he came from a super poor family where his dad would just like go from job to job and um and they never really were stable he worked through high school he worked at a steel mill to pay his way through college he went to ohio state and he joined the air core reserves in 1929 where he learned to fly um he was short and kind of tubby he married a woman named helen mateland on june 9th 1934 a cute story is that they went on a double blind date and helen and her girlfriend looked at the window and they saw the guys coming toward them and helen said i'll take the fat one and they got married what's a double blind date mean it means like both people don't know who the person's with so you like going to date with like but you want to date with like two people but you like kind of are picking who you want to be on the date with

uh okay okay yeah yeah it's not like you're already with rachel i'm a date with juan it's like the four of you were going on a date and you like figure out who you like. Got it. Got it. You know? So anyway, she picked the fat one. They got married. They had one kid. It's true.

Yeah. But LeMay is a brutal guy. He just wanted to get it done and he would like in Europe when he was commanding forces in Europe and people, he'd be like, you have to do this. Like if you're checking out, you're going to be court martial. Like everyone has to do what I tell them to do like very, very strict. He had some hilarious nicknames. They are old iron pants, iron ass, the demon, bombs away LeMay, and the big cigar.

Because he's often seen with a cigar. After this, he would be in the cover of Time magazine. Well, actually, it's because he had Bell's palsy and half his face wasn't working. So he got Bell's palsy, which is like a disease. And it makes your face kind of droop. And he got it. And the doctor was like, well, we can like do X, Y, and Z, but it might not work. And he was like, forget it.

I have work to do. So he would often have a cigar in his mouth just to kind of like make that droop less visible. That's true smart. So later after World War II is over, he's going to be part of tactics in the Cold War. He's really, really against the Vietnam War. And he joins George Wallace for the presidential campaign. And he runs for vice president in 1968 with the American Independent Party.

They received, he wasn't a very good politician in George Wallace, like didn't like him. George Wallace, who was very famously, like, very racist, it was not going to win. but they received 13.5% of the popular vote, and they carried five states, which is a lot. I mean, Perot got 13%. Like, there was a time when independent movements actually also. And interestingly, I think it's hilarious how out of shape we've become that we call this a fat man. Like, this guy would be like an athlete in today's America.

He has a little jolly, but who isn't? It can't talk. Um, so later, he's actually going to get an award from Japan about how he, like, helped stuff afterwards, called the Order of the Rising Sun, which reminded me so much of like, remember after the Indianapolis was shot down, like a year later, they have the captain of the submarine on trial, you're like, guys, I were just talking to each other, you know, even like JFK talking to fucking, what's his face and being like, you killed my brother, but can you please build me a rocket to the moon? No, dude, they had the captain of the submarine testify against McVeigh. That's what it was. They were like, they brought him in. to like indict on American soil the American cat that's crazy wild like what what's happening we should all just like have a meal and calm down yeah but anyway so that's about that that's lemay that's his life the point I want to make but the fact that like he was brutal and like wanted this done is that he knew what he was doing he knew everything that would happen he knew the

people who would die, the types of people who would die, and he did it without remorse, just to say that, like, he knew what was going to happen. And he did it on purpose. And he did it for his reasons, which were to, you know, stop the ground invasion, stop all these things. But he was under no pretenses that, like, what he was doing was, like, trying to strategically hit factories or whatever. He was going to destroy Tokyo. We can't say he did it without remorse. We don't know what the guy was going through. Like, it reminds me of when Oppenheimer goes. to Truman and was like,

I had a lot of my hands and he's like, you didn't tell him to drop the damn bomb. I did it. It's all like, you know, like, it's like, you're stuck between a rock and all. I mean, I'm not saying he didn't. I'm just saying, like, I don't know what he was going through.

I know, but I, the, the, the stuff that I read is he was very much like, he didn't, he never, like, felt bad about it. He never said, you did. But you're right. Maybe he didn't. I don't know. Who knows.

I do have a more time sharing their feelings, especially in that time. Exactly. And just to note, I did have a note that he did not sleep that night, which he usually sleeps through bombing campaigns, but that was the one night he didn't sleep. So at least there's that. You're right. You're right. So he has very, very little time to prove himself.

It was January. They are going to fire a bomb to you in the beginning of March. So he's like, we have to do this and we have to do it now. The precision bombing isn't working. And we haven't technically tried to kill. civilians yet we've been like doing that thing like oh we're trying to hit factories or whatever and it's not like people didn't know that it might happen because japan was preparing for it um and so like they did in the UK like they sent all the kids from london to the country you know like

they were doing that all over the world they were sending children from major cities into the country to try to save them they were doing that in japan they were sending kids from Tokyo just out into the country hopefully um hoping that like they would be okay they knew they would be bombed in some way or another. In Tokyo itself, the Japanese pulled down like 300,000 buildings to create fire breaks. We've talked about a bunch in like talking about fires, talking about like other wars. Like I think I told you this, but when I went to the, um, the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima, like a lot of the children that died, what they were doing instead of going to school as they were helping pull down buildings. Because they were trying to create

fire breaks because they knew that this could happen. They were expecting something like the firebombing of Tokyo. They weren't expecting an atomic bomb, but they were expecting something and they're trying to create fire breaks. Additionally, in 1923, there was a huge earthquake in Japan and so much was destroyed. So a lot of stuff that was built was relatively new and quickly built anyway because a lot of it had been destroyed in the last 20 years. Yeah, it can be pulled down easily. Yeah. Yeah. So also they had people digging holes in their homes as like a little shelter. They would do things like sleep with their clothes next to them.

Obviously, like just to be able to get up and leave and go into like a school or someplace underground like as quickly as possible. Kids had these hoods that their moms would make them out of like old kimonos and such that you would put over your head so you could breathe. Kind of like just like a mask to be able to try to breathe through the smoke. So kids would, the children who remember it, that's what they remember. They remember waking up and like putting on their clothes really fast and putting on their hood and like running. so Lemae has an idea he says let's instead of flying super high even though the B29s can do this let's fly low so we can't so we can like cover more space and like get more stuff so he does some tests with his pilots and has them fly at like 50 feet because like if you can fly a B29 at 50 feet you could do fucking anything you know so like they were coming in different places so now it's time to do something and there are other cities that they're going to hit also after this. And I'll tell you more a little bit about them, but Tokyo is the big one.

Another thing that, like, I keep thinking that, I don't know, as I get older, Lame is 38 when he's doing this. An emperor Hirohito is only 43. So, like, what is the right age to be able to make these decisions? I feel like, as I get older, I'm like, there is no right age. Like, what is it? I don't know. Yeah, 38 seems.

Again, I think it was a little harder than, like. Yeah. it's different after you've like been through the year period of a 38 year old then is like probably like a 60 year old to us I don't know I'm sure he like looked old

you know what I mean like you know what I mean like it looks like that so it is March and we are going to firebomb Tokyo and what I mean is over 300 B-29s they're going to fly the seven hours to Tokyo at night at different altitudes and they can't see each other

so it's like being in the B-29 itself self is wild. You're there for seven hours. It's loud as shit. It's cold. And there's 299 other planes out with you. And you're all at varying levels of altitude and you can't see each other. So they just like went. They only lost about 20 B-29s in the whole rate, which is remarkable because they were like losing them fast. They sent one journalist on in all of the 300 B-29s. And he was a person who just as an aside, had survived the Coconut Grove nightclub fire and his wife had died

so that was like one of the biggest it was in Boston one of the biggest fires in U.S. history were like hundreds of people died in a nightclub and he was saved by like a man pulls him out of the rubble and then when he was in the Pacific getting ready to just like taking pictures being a journalist a man came up to him and said I'm the one who pulled you out of the rubble in Boston

not wild yeah there's just nobody around like they're just like four people there's like 20 people in the whole country and he so he was like he had big I don't give a fuck vibes because he was like I've been through shit I'll go on one way to be 29 so he did go

at that but again there is limited crew so there's no gunners they can carry more bombs and they're bopping they're dropping they're dropping in Sydney napalm bombs bombs napal bombs it's hard just for me to say which means they fall out of the sky

and they explode and like arrows of palm, which is sticky fire. And it will stick to the houses and burn. It is white hot. It is a thousand degrees when it hits the house. There's no chance of it, not just destroying everything. Yeah. They set off on March 9th.

It is very, also very dry. Obviously, like we've talked about in like many fires, like that's a big part of it. It's very dry. And the city's been like ready to, ready to burn. The first bombs hit short. shortly after midnight in the Shidamachi district. It took seven minutes for the sirens start going off. So people could hear it and smell it,

but the sirens didn't go off in the whole city for seven minutes. And it's also just really, really cold. Like, it's winter. There's some snow on the ground. There is, people remember, like, you know, they would wake up in the morning and have to, like, break the ice on their water buckets. Like, it was really cold.

When that will help later preserve the bodies and, like, other times, like, when the atomic bombs go, off it's August and you know bodies are bloating and exploding and it's just that that is on top of it but this time it's going to be easier to identify bodies even though it's hard because they're frozen in some cases yeah just like a small a small mercy of all this terrible terrible things about to happen most of the people in Tokyo are women and children and people who cannot go to war because most of the men are gone they have died they are out doing things like they they're out the Newspapers continuously said that Japan was winning, obviously.

Like, that was the propaganda was like, everything's fine. We're super close. On the street, people would whisper to each other. I don't think we're winning. But you're not allowed to say that. You know, like, you can't say that. You're going to go to jail. You can't, you can't talk about it.

So they know something's going, they know something's coming. They're kind of prepared for anything, but they're not prepared for this. There's Japanese gunners that will try to drop some of the B-29s. I mean, it's hardly any that they get. Real quick, sorry, as an aside. did herahito do we know if he actually thought that he could win i've always question the wisdom of doing the pearl harbor attack like a direct attack on the u.s it seems really unwise it's like me going up to like the biggest dude i can find and being like you

know what i'm just going to hit you in the face i think maybe i'm going to beat you later like what was the logic i know i wonder and i think there's like a little bit of like the imperial romantic to take over the world and i also feel like there's probably and this is just me making but probably a feeling that you get when your land is so like it's an island it's not any bigger you know there's not a lot of places them to go so they have to like go hard into other places where there's like a lot more space and then I also think that he's surrounded by people who are literally telling him that he's from God whether or not they believe it or not you know but they have this idea that they're like destined

chosen people yeah yeah yeah so yeah I don't I don't I don't know. I don't know. I was a four. Like, I don't know what the fuck if that would happen if the Nazis had won

because the Nazis aren't going to let them live. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Like, did you see that, would you see or read the man in the high castle?

No. So it was, the Philip K. Dick story, and I wish it was a little bit, it was a little bit like fantastical and I wish it hadn't been as fantastical because I liked the actual history of it,

but the idea was like, if we had lost, what it would look like? And in it, they separate the United States by the Rocky, mountains and so the west is owned by japan and then the east is owned by germany it's just like super interesting how like they're trying to figure it out then there's magic and you're like but

you know what would have happened eventually where would they have put me you i don't know good question they probably would have killed you oh no um so okay so okay so So the B-29s dropped 10 tons of bombs every minute for two hours, nonstop, just drop bombs. Absolute constant. People were trapped in the burning city. They did it in a way that they kind of bombed out and then the burn burned in and there was no way out. People were, people ran for their children tied to their backs. They ran, children survived under piles of dead bodies.

People were burned, the dad of carbon dioxide poisoning in their little holes that they had dug in their houses. They jumped into pools and bathtubs and water cisterns and they were boiled alive. Parents would pass out from carbon monoxide poisoning and wake up just surrounded by their dead children. All of their children are gone. People who are drowned in rivers under masses of bodies, big people are trying to run to the river because they're burning. And the river is hot and they are boiling and they are drowning. And people, they would find piles of people burned in a pile and be like how are these people burned in a pile because they were in a building trying to shield each other and the building burned down and the building is gone but the pile of

people is still there the shelters they dug were worthless um people saw babies that were just born still attached to their mothers dead like people going into labor um it's called the book i've read is called like uh black snow because then it's just like ash falling um people are dying that the fire is coming through in tunnels 70 miles per hour just like if you're if you're not if you survive you're very badly burned you're like you're nothing is good um everything everything is is is is gone they know it was coming they knew something was going to happen but they didn't expect it to be like this because up until this we've done like the really poorly precise precision bombing yeah so it was like maybe we'll be bombed once or twice but not like a constant two hour attack of napalm

constant, you know. Yeah. They couldn't have expected that. Right. They just didn't. That's where I wrote, LeMay did have trouble sleeping that night, but just that night.

He's like a baby for the night. A couple of people who were there, like that just wanted to point out there is a photographer named Ichakawa Koji. He was, he survived. He, like, at some point he passed out. He lost his car.

He was, like, running through the fire. But he did take pictures of it, so you can see his photos and I'll share some of them, just of, like, piles of dead bodies of destruction, all these things. So he was there to document it. And then in general, the Americans, like, they, a lot of them were haunted by this, you know, they could smell burning people from their airplane.

You could see the burning from up to 200 miles. And then what? They're supposed to come home and, like, be doorted or a vacuum cell in and good fathers? You know, like, I don't know how you, I don't know what you're supposed to do after that. Yeah, it's dramatic. I know that I did this. Other things that they did, it was part of a wider bombing campaign. So after this, they hit Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and then Nagoya again.

So it was five raids over nine days. They incinerated 32 square miles of Japan's four largest cities. So again, like Tokyo itself, it was like 16 square miles, which is like most of Manhattan or all of Santa Monica. If you're a California, have to say, Francisco. In that week, they killed 150,000 plus people with, like, very few American American losses. At one time, they paused because they ran out of napalm and then they did it again. They just were like, we have just used all of our thing, just everything is on fire. Yogiama, for example, was 58% burned. And then now you have millions of refugees, people who

would like walk or try to take trains to the country, where they were like, it was hard for them to find resources. Like, and before this, even before. this they were starving you know like they would be like don't think about rice because they didn't have any rice you know like they were you know very there was nothing to eat in in in most of japan so besides as people are starving and then all these like refugees come to the country where they're like we're all starving too you know um there were you know hundreds of thousands people were were wounded there were hundreds of thousands of orphans you know like if you're three years old and your whole family dies what happens to you you know like either someone has to

take you and there's stories of like the um of children like having to go to like their aunts and uncles their aunts and uncles being like we hate you for this or taking our food you know like we wish you would die too because it would have been easier you know like everyone is just like it's terrible um and then they thought like americans celebrated they didn't they didn't want to send their kids over they didn't want to know honestly the devastation they didn't have many pictures of exactly what it happened but they were like this has to be it they have to give up now you know like after this after this raid but as you know they didn't you know and it took the two atomic bombs to make them finally finally surrender um and i just like i can't believe japan still exists after all of this

i know i can't believe how how many buildings are in Tokyo and how beautiful it is and that there are trees you know like that there are trees in Tokyo i think it's a miracle and it's just like so wild that still that it's still there um and then i think afterwards you know they went in and we like tried to fix it and all of that but i think it's a real miracle that like the japanese aren't trying to start a war with us now in retaliation you know what i mean like that we didn't like i took a freaking cooking class in Tokyo with a german family and austrian family me and juan and like a japanese woman you know like that just and it's it's been like 80 years i am i have a really like i'm really bad at understanding the scale of things and i've ever been in japan but when i look at the map it looks so

tiny and i'm like everything i hear about world war two i'm like was there like anything left like was like any it seems so small it is such a miracle that there's anything left you know and like the cities that were like like we just said before like oh, we can't see this, we can't see Osaka today, so we're going to hit Hiroshima or hit Nagasaki, you know what I mean? Like, that is such a fucking crazy decision to make in the air, you know? Is Lamey the one who had his honeymoon in Kyoto and said we can't drop the bombs there? He's not, but I do know that, but there is one that has that, yeah.

I don't think he's going to say that, but there is someone who did that. You know, it's too beautiful to destroy, you know, and you're like, what the hell you guys? Like, it's just, you know. And then obviously, like, a big part of the lesson that, like, I fucking learned a devastating museum in Hiroshima is like, this is just indiscriminate bombing of civilians. You're just killing people, you know, but like more people would have died and more people would continue to die. I would keep going and I understand that. And we couldn't have let the Nazis get the atomic bomb and all these things. But like, man, dying that way is just so.

unfair you know like for anyone i mean yeah so there is like like you were saying like there's a that's the that's the that's the debate afterwards like is this a war crime is it not like what do you what do you do afterwards it was a guy named henry simpson u.s secretary of warden world war two yep it totally makes sense um so yeah that's it's just such a fucking so terrible i'm so just all of the stories that were in the book that i read are so just children remembering, you know, your parents screaming and grabbing you and trying to hide you and getting on top of you and waking up. And there's like bodies that are, there's pictures where the child has fallen off the parent's body. And the only part of the parent that isn't burned is the part where the child was on because the child was burned on top of them. You know, like just stuff like that. And then the cleanup was insane. They had to, they buried a lot of people. And then later they dug them all up and burned them together, like a lot of the bodies. And so they're in big urns in Tokyo in a museum right now with urns. And people who died in the 1923 earthquake. So just like even that had like that devastation had happened.

Then this devastation had happened. And it was just like so many people. And so I happened to show this to end. The New York Times interviewed some of some men from Japan. The youngest men in the Japanese military are still alive. They're in there like 105 and there's like four of them. and they joined when they were like 14. And the stuff that they're saying is like,

this is something that kind of made me cry. There's a man named Kenichi Ozaki. He's 97 years old. He enlisted in 1943 when he was 15. And he told the New York Times, quote, In their last breaths, no one shouted for the long life of the emperor. They called out for their mothers. And then another guy said,

Tzu Osato, he's 105. and he said they wasted our lives like pieces of scrap paper never die for emperor or country just like afterwards like why did we do that you know it just it breaks my heart yeah and we'll do it again and again and again and again forever until the earth's gone so congratulations yeah is what it is um yeah it's felt so it just feel so sad it just feel so sad for this stuff that's happening today that is so similar you know yeah well just the fear and like want to take care of your family so I've had a sad two weeks I've been very bullish on AI lately because it will decide for us what's right and that's true and how could that go wrong

how could that go wrong no when it's just the robots we'll be like well you know it's going to be funny is like in 500 years people are going to like somehow dig up and find the Terminator movies and be like oh there's a documentary about this exactly oh they knew and they did it anyway they did we did um there is at least one time per baseball season where I will hold on to the chain like fence and scream and as someone we get from and like like what are you doing imagine you turning into a skeleton that seems scared me so bad when I was a kid and I I saw that movie when she turned into a skeleton. It's terrifying.

Oh, my God. I know. And that, I mean, that's what happened to real people. I don't know. Yeah. It sucks. You know, and like, people just, most of these people, I'm thinking about these people, and I'm thinking about people in ancient wars who were like, Jesus is fucking crazy.

I just want to have, like, watch my four goats and not die, you know? And, like, not, I'm not, like, doing anything crazy. I just want to, like, not die. And you have no choice because the emperor of all emperors of all time or the general, or the dictator or whatever, it's like, I want this and this and this. And you're like, fine, I'll put a fucking pot on my head and go outside and try to do something and I'll die for this. Why? Do you know how long it was between this and when the atomic bombs were dropped?

This was in March. Those were in August. It took a month. So you had months to be like, I'm done. We're done with this. Yeah. Yeah. And they didn't.

And we were like, we're not going to do this. this. We're not going to go there by land and risk people, which, you know, I don't understand. Yeah, I think there's a problem with all of this stuff is that there's a valid argument on both sides. Actually, there's not really a valid argument on the Japanese side here.

There's a valid argument on the American side. On the Japanese side, it was like, what are you going to keep attacking us in Hawaii? And, like, what do you do? Your only alternative is to cause a mass revolt, and, you're going to, complete destruction or do that and also lose a bunch of your own people yeah anyways that was gonna happen yeah either way it's gonna be terrible so oh

that's it well that was uplifting thank you for sharing you're welcome I feel awful um and yeah all righty well um you know what maybe for my episode I'll come with something that is happy people love it so I was gonna say got two emails about, I mean, which is a lot for us, about Morgan's Wonderland, people being like, thanks for telling a nice story. So thank you, Fars. That was lovely. Yeah, it was Keith. Thank you, Keith, for writing in and for listening. And there was somebody else. Yes. I think Jason, Jason listens. Yes, very, very kind. And then Daniel wrote in saying, hey, that was really cool episode. We can get back to like the blood and gore soon.

And you did love me. Oh, yeah. Thank you. Oh, God. Yeah, you're welcome, Daniel. This is for you. It was John who emailed in and said, thank you. So thank you, John. Yeah. That's funny. Yeah, I know, I know like the, just if, fuck, if you, this was all you did. If you, this was like, just if I was the person who wrote the book that I read, just read, I feel like that's just years of your life that are just so fucking devastating, you know, like if you're, if you study any of these battles or any of these things and I'm interested in them and I do study them, you know, and I do want to learn these things.

but you just think about the humanity and you think about people and you just like it's my heartbreak because I just want to like hold all the children and be like don't let this pass on to the next generation like just try to help each other the money is here the food is here the stuff is here like why do we just

live good lives and I know we won't you know but fuck yeah I actually want to get to the bottom of why your Eito decided to attack the US I can tell you like maybe Hitler I don't know any of this but maybe like Hitler was like hey man This is getting really ugly, and you're in this with me, you've got to distract these guys.

And then he was like, cool, I'm with you, Hitler or something. I had to be something super stupid. So I, a lot of the, um, oh, it says, it wasn't, it wasn't like just a decision, but he was like, in that, whatever. I'm just like, I was Googling it. But I, my cousin just moved to Okinawa. She's in the, in the Marines. And, um, a lot of the men that I know. in town who, because we live so close to a military base, a lot of them have been to Okinawa.

And like, someone that I co-coached baseball with a couple years ago, he had been to Okinawa and he had, you know, been in the military and we were talking on like, what conspiracy theories. And I was like, do you think the FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to happen? And he was like, absolutely. Like, I think he knew that like something was going to happen. And then because the, we had just like loaned a bunch of, a bunch of battleships to the UK. And Churchill was like, you have to help us. And the United States was like, we can't help you and go in unprovoked. So they needed to be provoked to be able to go in and do it.

So, like, we were ready to go. We just, like, needed to be, we needed something to make us do it because the American people were going to be like, we're really far away from them. Let's them fight it out, you know, even though obviously it has, like, global repercussions. If, like, Hitler had one year up, like, we wouldn't be here. Like, it wouldn't, he would have figured it out. But, like, we needed a reason to join that war. And Pearl Harbor was that. Chad J.B.T. has told me that

it was due to in part reemptive strike doctrine where Japan thought that it could cripple the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and then basically have free reign over the rest of Asia and the U.S. would never recover. Which is like, man, you had some bad intelligence. Some bad advice. I know. And then I do want to

not soon because I'm so depressed, but I do want to talk to talk about like the stuff that the Japanese did in China, you know, like the terrible things they did in the Nanking and like things like that, like the brutality of, of, of those things. Yeah, they weren't. Oh, no, of course not. Yeah. No, and then, and that's what I, that's why I think about the children, like, the children

would have grown up to be a part of, for the most part, of that, of that society that was brutal, you know, so like, but they're children and they don't have to, you know, and like, And they didn't because because they lost, they didn't do that. And they're not, it's not like Japan is like brutally trying to attack things. They're just like hanging out and building things. Yeah, yeah. They're one of the most industrial countries, like, countries and technically advanced countries in the world. Yeah.

And that's, and they made the decision. So that was always an option. You know what I mean? Yeah. You can choose, you can choose goodness. You fucking assholes. People. What are Rodney King say?

all get along? Yeah, well, we can't. So, congratulations. Yeah, that's it. Thank you for listening. Thank you everybody who wrote in. If you have any other ideas, please do let us know. How do you let us know? Email us, doomed to fill a pod at gmail.com. All social is doomed to fail pod. I'm slowly putting stuff up on TikTok, etc. It takes forever. but I also did a episode this week of our business podcasts, business episodes, but let me tell you it was our real fast. I put this up online, just one of our, we have so many different topics, but there is, um,

I hope not where did it go, um, some of the ones that we did specifically about business, uh, things. A lot of them are yours as far as I did, we did the Exel, Ponzi schemes, Jucero, um, three parts. parts on the PayPal Mafia. I put Edwin Rist in there because he was selling those weird things and I'm like, what are you doing? Enzo Ferrari and Ron and then he did Action Park as well in there because it was like weird business decisions that

happened there, like lying about having insurance and stuff. So listen to those and I had linked to all of those episodes in the notes of that episode. Sweet. Well, yeah, as Taylor said, write to us, gives your feedback, good, bad, whatever.

Every time you send me an email, I forwarded to Farras with like 7,000 acclimation points because I'm so excited that someone emailed us. We get 100 emails a day, just so every you are. So Fars is like, stop forwarding me all of these, but I do it anyway. I'm going to have to upgrade my Gmail account. Yes. All right. Well, thanks, Taylor.

Anything else? That's it. Sweet. We'll go in and cut things off there. Thank you all. Bye. You know,