James M. Scott (3)

Scott has written a number of dadly WW2 histories. I own and read a few, and they are consistently solid. Black Snow covers one of the more shameful moments in American military history; the campaign to obliterate Japan via firebombing during WW2.

The B-29 was the single most expensive weapon project of the war, more expensive than the Manhattan project. A solid generation ahead of the B-17s and B-24s that had devastated Germany, the B-29 was designed for high-altitude precision bombing. show more However, these early missions had no effect, with the jet stream scattering bombs, weather cutting out raids, and many planes lost to Japanese air defenses and accidents. The genial General Haywood Hansell, in charge of the operation, was wedded to doctrine and didn't have the guts to force a tactical change. He was dismissed and replaced with Lemay, an iron-hard veteran of Europe and the fiasco of bombing from China.

Lemay ran the numbers and switched from high altitude bombing to low-level incendiary raids. Japan's tightly packed wooden cities were tinderboxes, their night fighters lacking, and napalm cluster bombs could easily hit a target the size of a city. The results were catastrophic. The first raid killed perhaps 100,000 people in a single night. Subsequent raids killed tens of thousands. Lemay's bombers hit a city a night, limited only by the ability of the US Navy to keep shipping in incendiaries.

This book is at its best drawing from translated Japanese oral histories, a comprehensive account of survivors recorded in the 1970s. The raids were sheer horror, entire families dying by flame, smoke, heat, spontaneous combustion. Numbers can only say so much, stories of parents running from the flames, only to find their children roasted to death on their backs, say so much more. This is a hard book, and a necessary one.

Sherman was right. War is hell. show less

This is a tough book to read, because the extensive, almost unbelievable cruelty of this campaign toward civilians is described in horrifying, sickening detail. Yet as time passes, the importance of books like these in helping us bear witness and remember becomes ever greater.

I wasn’t familiar with this campaign nor especially the legal aftermath. I felt pride as an American in learning of the vigor with which the Japanese Army commanding general was defended by Americans in his war crimes show more trial - not because I disagree with the verdict, but because it’s a measure of the greatness of our legal traditions at their best.

As a side note, General MacArthur, as one knows to expect if one studies history, comes off as gifted but arrogant in the extreme. Declaring Manila retaken before the fighting had even flared up fully was really something, even for him. show less

In Rampage, James Scott reminds us that the Holocaust was not the only atrocity of World War II. During the liberation of Manilla, the Japanese military displayed extreme barbarity towards the population: beheading or bayoneting men and boys who may become guerillas, gang-rape of teenage girls, mass burning of trapped people... It's almost too bad there wasn't a third atomic bomb.

All you can ask for in a book like this. Scott tells the story in a fairly evenhanded way although you are in no doubt as to who the bad guys and who the good guys were. The story is peppered with lots of very intimate details to bring the take to life and illicit empathy for the characters. Well written account of an amazing feat.