Overview

Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 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, we'll be tried as war criminals."" James M. Scott reconstructs in granular detail that horrific night, and describes the development of the B-29, the capture of the Marianas for use as airfields, and the change in strategy from high-altitude daylight ""precision"" bombing to low-altitude nighttime incendiary bombing. Most importantly, the raid represented a significant moral shift for America, marking the first time commanders deliberately targeted civilians which helped pave the way for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki five months later. Drawing on first-person 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.

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9781324002994

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Reviews

"""Black Snow brilliantly vivifies the horrific reality of the most destructive air attack in history, against Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. James Scott deftly employs sharply etched portraits of individuals of all stations and nationalities to survey the global, technological, and moral backdrop of the cataclysm, including the searing experiences of Japanese trapped in a gigantic firestorm. This riveting account illuminates an historical moment of profound contemporary relevance."" -- Richard B. Frank, author of Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 ""The firebombing of Japan is one of the most gut-wrenching and controversial chapters in modern history. James M. Scott’s Black Snow is a brilliant, fast moving, utterly absorbing, and devastating account of the full price of victory in the Pacific."" -- Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of Against All Odds ""James M. Scott brings to life with painstaking detail and humanity the terror and plight and hopes of Japanese citizens in their cities, and US pilots in the air—their duties, their misgivings, their conflicted reactions, their sense of victory, and their moral survival off that victory. You realize you’ve never read this story before in this way, with these long views of history and such collar-grabbing intensity. Black Snow raises profound questions about how peace is made during one of America’s most turbulent periods on the world stage, and it speaks clearly to us today. You won’t put it down."" -- Doug Stanton, #1 New York Times best-selling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers"

Black Snow brilliantly vivifies the horrific reality of the most destructive air attack in history, against Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. James Scott deftly employs sharply etched portraits of individuals of all stations and nationalities to survey the global, technological, and moral backdrop of the cataclysm, including the searing experiences of Japanese trapped in a gigantic firestorm. This riveting account illuminates an historical moment of profound contemporary relevance. -- Richard B. Frank, author of Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 The firebombing of Japan is one of the most gut-wrenching and controversial chapters in modern history. James M. Scott's Black Snow is a brilliant, fast moving, utterly absorbing, and devastating account of the full price of victory in the Pacific. -- Alex Kershaw, New York Times best-selling author of Against All Odds James M. Scott brings to life with painstaking detail and humanity the terror and plight and hopes of Japanese citizens in their cities, and US pilots in the air-their duties, their misgivings, their conflicted reactions, their sense of victory, and their moral survival off that victory. You realize you've never read this story before in this way, with these long views of history and such collar-grabbing intensity. Black Snow raises profound questions about how peace is made during one of America's most turbulent periods on the world stage, and it speaks clearly to us today. You won't put it down. -- Doug Stanton, #1 New York Times best-selling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers

A book as valuable as it is engrossing.... An account filled with sharp detail that never slows the headlong narrative pace. Black Snow is at once an adventure story, a technological thriller, and a harrowing reminder of the human cost of total war in our modern age.--Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II The firebombing of Japan is one of the most gut-wrenching and controversial chapters in modern history. James Scott's Black Snow is a brilliant, fast moving, utterly absorbing, and devastating account of the full price of victory in the Pacific.--Alex Kershaw, author of The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II

A book as valuable as it is engrossing.... An account filled with sharp detail that never slows the headlong narrative pace. Black Snow is at once an adventure story, a technological thriller, and a harrowing reminder of the human cost of total war in our modern age.--Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II Long buried and forgotten, the deliberate firebombing of Japan's main cities in 1945 was as gruesome as the dropping of the atomic bomb that followed. Now, 77 years later, renowned WWII historian James Scott has told the true and complete story for the first time, from both sides of the vengeful coin.... Without sparing the suffering of its Japanese victims, Scott narrates in Black Snow the real and remorseless saga, from the drawing board in Seattle to the runways of revenge in the Pacific. Scott's prodigious research, his interviews and oral histories of survivors--American and Japanese--as well as his mastery of the telling detail, will make this a classic history of war: a tale of fantastic military hubris and its ultimate, catastrophic cost to a people who had literally sown the whirlwind. Unputdownable.--Nigel Hamilton, author of the FDR at War trilogy: Master of the Battlefield, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace The firebombing of Japan is one of the most gut-wrenching and controversial chapters in modern history. James Scott's Black Snow is a brilliant, fast moving, utterly absorbing, and devastating account of the full price of victory in the Pacific.--Alex Kershaw, author of The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II

Author Information

James M. Scott is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Black Snow, Rampage, Target Tokyo, The War Below, and The Attack on the Liberty, and coauthor with Jack Carr of Targeted: Beirut. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

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