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feet. My boys weren’t too happy about that, thought the Jap anti-aircraft fire would chew them to bits. But I knew better. Coming in that low, a few planes at a time, would catch the yellow bastards with their pants down. They wouldn’t know what the hell to do. For whatever reason, they don’t seem to have the kind of ack-ack the Germans threw at us, don’t seem able to adapt to different attack altitudes. I had to convince my boys that the advantages outweighed the risk. Even persuaded them to make room for more payload by reducing weight. Thought it would be a good idea to remove most of the machine guns, and the gunners too. Jap fighters haven’t done much damage to us in night raids, so what the hell do we need all that extra weight for? The boys weren’t too keen on that, but I convinced them.”
    Nimitz thought, you didn’t convince anybody of anything. You just ordered them to do whatever the hell you wanted.
    LeMay continued.
    “The low altitude gave the B-29s a greater bomb capacity, and I loaded up those sons of bitches with incendiaries. No more of this high-altitude tiddlywinks, playing hit-and-miss with targets that are too far below us to pinpoint. This time we didn’t need to pinpoint anything. Thetarget was the whole damn city. Hard to miss that one.” He slapped a folder of papers against his leg. “It worked too. We should have been doing this to those Nip bastards from the beginning. We’ve gutted Germany’s war machine, and now we’re doing it to the Japs. But this is even better. You know what their damn cities are made out of? Paper and wood. I wish I’d have seen it myself, especially at night. Had to settle for the recon reports, but I’ve got ’em right here. In the last ten days, we’ve incinerated what looks to be fifteen or sixteen square miles of the Japanese capital.
Incinerated. Gone
. Flat damn ground. We have to assume that the number of enemy casualties is in the high tens of thousands, maybe double that. They’re not likely to give us that information on their own. But dammit, Admiral, this is how the war ought to be fought. It worked in Germany and it’s working here. Problem is, I’m having trouble getting an adequate supply of incendiaries from the mainland. Damn pestiferous supply bastards keep telling me that the factories can’t produce them as quick as I’m dropping them. What a load of crap. Some asses back home need to be kicked.”
    LeMay tossed the file on the table, reached for his cigar, resting on the nearby ashtray. He jabbed the cigar in his mouth, sat back with a self-satisfied grin, a rarity.
    “Learning to smoke these things. Not bad. Prefer a pipe, but can’t keep the mold off ’em out here in this tropical hellhole.”
    Nimitz ignored the cigar smoke, pulled the folder close, opened, saw the reports, the number of sorties each night, the bomb loads, and then high-altitude recon photos of the aftermath, the enormous city showing a great gray stain, as though one large hand had simply wiped it away. My God, he thought. How many civilians? He knew LeMay wouldn’t listen to any lecture about casualties, and Nimitz had already heard intelligence reports about Japanese factories spread all through civilian neighborhoods. LeMay knows that too, he thought. So, who do we blame? He’s right on that count. They are
all
the enemy.
    LeMay seemed to wait for the pat on the back, and Nimitz sat back in the chair, sipped the bourbon.
    “Amazing. Impressive.”
    “You bet your ass it’s impressive. I don’t know what the hell’s going on in Washington, rather not know. But Hap Arnold needs to shove this report and these photos under every face in the War Department, maybegive FDR a good look too. I’m so damn sick of …” He paused, seemed to catch himself.
    “Sick of what, General?”
    LeMay’s face curled into a hard, silent growl.
    “You know as well as I do that we should have passed by the damn Philippines and put all our energy right into