Word: lemay
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...good: large-scale night fire-bombing of Japan's cities. The top planning had been done in Washington under Brigadier General Lauris O. ("Swede") Norstad, chief of staff of the worldwide Twentieth Air Force. Then the details were left to Major General Curtis E. ("Old Ironpants") LeMay, who had the field command and with it, the tactical responsibility, as head of the 21st Bomber Command in the Marianas...
...technique had caught the Japs by surprise in the first all-incendiary assault on Tokyo, and LeMay wanted to give them no time to recover. It was near-miraculous that two-thirds of the Tokyo raiders were serviced and in shape to lash at Nagoya within 48 hours; as a rule, half the heavy bombers used on a strike are ready to fly again four days later. It was downright miraculous that a high proportion of the Superfortresses used in the first two strikes were ready for use again at Osaka, again at Kobe, and in a repeat raid...
Never before had there been an incendiary attack of comparable scale. The Luftwaffe's "great fire raid" on the City of London (Dec. 29, 1940), made with a maximum of 200 tons of incendiaries, burned not more than one square mile. Major General Curtis E. LeMay's Marianas firebirds were in another league...
Emergency Roost. Cautious LeMay waited until pictorial proof was in before he issued his report: "This fire left nothing but twisted, tumbled-down rubble in its path. . . . The area totally destroyed . . . covers a total of 422,500,000 square feet, which is approximately 9,700 acres, or 15 square miles." Half a dozen key installations such as railroad stations and oil plants were destroyed, as well as "hundreds of small business establishments directly concerned with the war industry, many important administrative buildings and other thousands of home industries...
...single airstrip had a potential nuisance value. Last week, for the second time, Vice Admiral Marc Andrew Mitscher took the famed fast carrier Task Force 58 into Japanese home waters, and sent off air strikes against airfields around Tokyo. This time coordination with Major General Curtis E. ("Old Ironpants") LeMay's 21st Bomber Command was closer: hot on the vapor trails of Mitscher's planes came more than 200 B-29s with more than 1,000 tons of bombs to batter the Tokyo area and secondary targets, further isolating the battlefield...