Black Snow

April 1, 2022

After meeting 99-year-old Stella Levi at her Greenwich Village apartment to discuss the Juderia, the 500-year-old Jewish neighborhood in Rhodes where she lived until Germans deported the entire community to Auschwitz, the JQ Wingate Prize-winning Frank ended up spending One Hundred Saturdays visiting Levi to discuss her community and her resilience in the face of the Holocaust (125,000-copy first printing). Among the youngest survivors of Auschwitz still alive, 83-year-old Friedman, a retired therapist who actively campaigns against antisemitism, recounts her Holocaust experiences and the unerring instinct for survival that kept her alive in The Daughter of Auschwitz. In Bridge to the Sun, the New York Times best-selling Henderson (Sons and Soldiers) lays bare the plight of Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater even as their families back home faced racial hatred and imprisonment in concentration camps. Directly after World War II, four tough-minded Wise Gals--Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier--were instrumental in forging the CIA, and the New York Times best-selling Holt (Rise of the Rocket Girls) finally tells their story. Author of theNew York Times best-selling, multi-best-booked Agent Sonya, Macintyre relies on declassified archives, private papers, and previously unseen photos to introduce readers to the Prisoners of the Castle, that is, Colditz Castle, the high-security POW camp run by the Wehrmacht during World War II and, says Macintyre, organized according to its own officer-class structure. In Black Snow, Pulitzer Prize finalist Scott (Target Tokyo) chronicles the March 9, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo by nearly 300 U.S. B-29s, which left 16 square miles in ruins and 100,000 residents dead.

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Starred review from June 27, 2022
In this immersive, meticulously researched history, Pulitzer finalist Scott (Target Tokyo) contends that the 1945 firebombing campaign against Japan marked a moral shift in U.S. military strategy and paved the way to the use of the atomic bomb. Drawing on oral histories and survivor diaries, Scott vividly recounts the air raid on Tokyo orchestrated by Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, which incinerated one out of every four buildings in the Japanese capital and killed more than 100,000 people. LeMay continued the campaign for 159 days, targeting Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe, among other cities, destroying homes, factories, aircraft plants, and oil refineries. Scott carefully builds up to the firebombing campaign, detailing the pressure on American commanders to bring the war to a close, the capture of the Mariana Islands to be used as airfields, challenges involved in building the B-29 bomber, and Gen. Haywood Hansell Jr.’s refusal to shift strategies from high-altitude daylight precision bombing of industries to nighttime, low-altitude incendiary bombing of civilian neighborhoods. Also profiled is Army Air Forces commander Henry “Hap” Arnold, who thought that “crush Japan” would demonstrate the need for an independent air force and made the decision to replace Hansell with LeMay. Full of vivid action scenes and sharp character observations, this riveting WWII history reveals the staggering cost of obtaining peace.

Starred review from September 1, 2022

The firebombing of Tokyo by American forces in March 1945 represented a moral shift in the thinking of American military commanders in the Pacific. In this meticulously researched and finely written account, Pulitzer Prize-finalist historian Scott (Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila) details the decision to end daylight raids of industrial targets in favor of nighttime strikes against civilians to end the Japanese ability to wage war. As public pressure increased on American commanders to bring the war to an end, the demanding Curtis LeMay replaced Gen. Haywood Hansell Jr. as the heavy bomber commander in the Pacific. In order to break the will of the Japanese to continue the war, commanders switched to incendiary bombs, which would incinerate Japanese cities constructed primarily of wood and paper. They also introduced the B-29 Superfortress, which cost more than the atomic bomb. It became the ideal weapon to strike at the heart of Japan. Using witness and survivor testimony as well as troves of military records, Scott renders in compassionate detail the hell experienced by the victims of the fire-bombing. VERDICT Anyone who wants to understand the last year of the air war in the Pacific and the bomber commander's role should read this excellent book.--Chad E. Statler

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 15, 2022
Thorough study of the B-29 raids over Japan that underscores the debate over precision bombing versus firebombing at the end of World War II. In this excellent follow-up to Rampage and Target Tokyo, Scott evenhandedly examines the controversy surrounding the firebombing of Japanese cities and offers a sympathetic rendering of the devastating effects of those bombings on the civilian population. At the core of the narrative is the development of the B-29 Superfortress, a massive, expensive new bomber championed by Gen. Henry "Hap" Arnold in his advocacy for the independence of the Air Force. By late 1944, ready for action, the new bombers were assigned to the Pacific theater in an operation overseen by Gen. Haywood Hansell Jr., "one of the few leaders who still preached the idea of humane [daylight precision] bombing." As the American public clamored for an end to the war, top-level military officials made the decision to increase the use of incendiary bombs in order to break the morale of the Japanese civilian population, force surrender, and avoid a costly invasion. In the early weeks of 1945, Hansell was replaced by ace pilot and operator Curtis LeMay, who immediately instigated the firebombing system, which involved flying low at night and carpeting dense urban areas with waves of incendiaries, killing thousands. "Targeting homes was the key to societal breakdown," the generals concluded. Scott writes that LeMay's March bombing of Tokyo represented a "tremendous moral shift for the United States, which until this moment had opposed the intentional killing of civilians." This paved the way for the destruction of dozens of other Japanese cities, and after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the death toll reached 330,000, an estimate that was "likely low." Scott alternates his page-turning account of the air operations with devastating on-the-ground eyewitness reports of survivors, providing a kaleidoscopic portrait of both sides in a cataclysmic conflict. A top-shelf World War II history told with meticulous research and considerable heart.

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