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BLACK SNOW: Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo and the Road to the Atomic Bomb. By James M. Scott. Norton. 448 pages. $35.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945 may have ended the war with Japan, but it was the firebombing of Tokyo, five months earlier, that likely won it.

Neither decision came lightly, obviously. It was President Truman, four months into his presidency, who made the call to unleash “the force from which the sun draws its power.”

But the decision to firebomb Tokyo — the most destructive air attack in history — was made by a lower-tier general named Curtis LeMay, stationed on Guam.

LeMay gets something of the Hamilton treatment in James M. Scott’s excellent "Black Snow." As with Alexander Hamilton, it’s not really fair to say LeMay has been forgotten — a cursory survey by this writer indicates he still has name recognition among the Baby Boom generation. But he’s no Patton, Eisenhower or MacArthur.

After World War II, Lemay coordinated the Berlin Airlift, and during the Vietnam War he became notorious for the quote “Bomb them back into the Stone Age.” He may have been the inspiration for an unflattering portrait in the movie "Dr. Strangelove." His last major act on the public stage was a 1968 run for vice president on the George Wallace ticket.

But late 1944 was a very different time. America was winning the war, had established bases on islands within striking distance of Japan, thanks to the expensive, long-awaited B-29 Superfortress airplane. And yet the Japanese resilience was extraordinary. Kamikaze pilots were dive-bombing ships, and MacArthur’s slog in the Philippines signaled that an amphibious invasion of Japan might make D-Day look like a day at the beach.

Scott, a former Post and Courier reporter and Neiman fellow, is a self-described research junky who has spent countless hours poring through archives, so the level of detail here is no surprise. What’s truly excellent about this book is the arc of it, the well-plotted background behind the method and the madness of the decision to firebomb civilians.

We meet Hap Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Forces, who’d learned to fly from Orville and Wilbur Wright themselves. Arnold wanted to win the war by air power and establish the Air Force as an independent branch. It was Arnold who willed the B-29 Superfortress into existence, a plane so massive its 141-ft wingspan was 20 feet longer than the Wright Brothers first flight.

We meet Haywood Hansell, LeMay’s predecessor on Guam, also his foil. A classical theorist to LeMay’s brutal pragmatist, Hansell steadfastly held that daytime precision bombing of military and industrial sites was both the most humane and most effective method.

The problem was that it wasn’t working. Japan was often covered in clouds, and onboard radar still was often ineffective.

While Hansell held out against firebombing, back home the military was making other plans. Scientists had developed a new jellied form of gasoline: napalm. And while Americans of Japanese descent were interned in camps in California, the military built another secret "Japanese village" in the desert of Utah. But this city was empty; it was made entirely to practice firebombing. A Frank Lloyd Wright disciple with knowledge of Tokyo’s construction methods designed the wooden houses, complete with furniture and tatami mats.

All this set the stage for LeMay to take over in Guam in early 1945. LeMay was from a working-class upbringing and had scraped his way to the top, earning a reputation as a no-nonsense leader who got results. In his previous station in China, he negotiated with Mao and even bought opium to make security deals with tribesmen. (The Army accountant balked at putting opium on the expense report so it was listed as “fertilizer.”)

LeMay put the crews through rigorous training, working them around the clock. After trying to continue with the high-altitude precision bombing he eventually felt he was out of options and made the order to burn Tokyo. Just after midnight on March 10, 1945, 279 B-29s roared over the city and dropped enough bombs to burn 16 square miles, killing 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless.

Part of the rationale for the firebombing was that the Japanese military-industrial complex was made up not just of big factories but also thousands of home-based cottage industries. Imagine crews in garages all over Mount Pleasant making engine parts for the Boeing plant.

But of course there were millions of civilians who were not enemy combatants, and the debate still churns as to whether or not the firebombing was a war crime. Scott, through personal interviews and archival research, tells the stories: a 6-year-old looking forward to her birthday party the next morning, a boy who thought the worst part of his night was getting up to break the ice on the family fire tank.

Scott shows the terror-filled scrambles through packed streets to escape the flames, Tokyo residents jumping in freezing rivers, a child who survives only because she’s concealed under a pile of people. The heat was was so great the updrafts pushed the American bombers thousands of feet up in the air. Garbage and leaflets carried high into the sky because of the attack blew into some of the airplanes.

The descriptions of the burning are so intense and relentless that after a point you begin to feel the smoke in your lungs, the book itself seems like a hunk of charred paper.

"Black Snow" is Scott’s fourth book on the Pacific theater. In "Target Tokyo," the Doolittle Raiders avenge Pearl Harbor, pushing their aviation skills to extraordinary limits. In "The War Below," the U.S. submarine fleet decimates the enemy supply chains. The atrocities of the Battle of Manila make "Rampage" a cautionary tale for a land invasion of Japan.

While there are certainly more aspects of World War II which would benefit from Scott’s gifts, this feels like a well-earned culmination.

Reviewer Jonathan Sanchez is a writer and owner of Blue Bicycle Books.

James Scott will discuss and sign copies of "Black Snow" 6-7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 8, at the Charleston Library Society, 164 King St. The event is co-presented by Buxton Books. Tickets are $10 for Library Society members, $15 for nonmembers. Go to charlestonlibrarysociety.org/event/black-snow. For more information, call 843-723-9912.

Adam Parker has covered many beats and topics for The Post and Courier, including race and history, religion, and the arts. He is the author of "Outside Agitator: The Civil Rights Struggle of Cleveland Sellers Jr.," published by Hub City Press.

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