Buckley vs. Vidal. Frost Vs. Nixon.
Smith vs. Murray?
Everyone is still talking about the extended debate between Libertarian comic Dave Smith and author Douglas Murray on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
The Spotify superstar set the chat in motion, knowing the two had extremely different views that would make for a compelling exchange. It’s a sad sign of the times when a debate between two well-meaning adults is increasingly rare in pop culture.
The chat did more than let both pundits share their views. It reminded Rogan of an old saw that Uncle Ben taught a budding web-slinger long ago.
With great power comes great responsibility.
<div id="attachment_909815" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah6kirkSwTg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-909815" class="size-large wp-image-909815" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-23-PM-2662-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience #2303. Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. PowerfulJRE. YouTube.com" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-23-PM-2662-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-23-PM-2662-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-23-PM-2662-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-23-PM-2662-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-23-PM-2662-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience #2303. Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. PowerfulJRE. YouTube.com</div>
The underlying message in the chat? Rogan’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ah6kirkSwTg" target="_blank" rel="noopener">hugely popular show</a> has been letting some cranks share his podcast microphone. That might not have mattered a few years ago, but now “The Joe Rogan Experience” has the power to shape the political landscape.
Many pundits suggest Donald Trump’s appearance on the show, along with Kamala Harris’ unwillingness to do the same, played a role in the real estate mogul’s victory.
Letting “historians” in Rogan’s studio who resist that label, spread erroneous facts, and refuse to take on their critics, may not be the best way to flex his podcast muscle.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/joe-rogan" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Rogan</a> has played podcast footsie with conspiracy monger Alex Jones for some time. Now, he’s expanding that practice to the format’s detriment. Think Ian Carroll and Darryl Cooper as two recent examples.
The latter called Winston Churchill, <a href="https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/cooper-koureas/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“The chief villain of World War II.”</a>
“I feel you’ve opened the door to quite a lot of people who now got a big platform, who have been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind,” Murray said early in the conversation. “These guys are not historians. They’re not knowledgeable about anything.”
“I just think, ‘I’d like to talk to that person.&#8217;” Rogan said of his guest choice.
The far-Left Hollywood Reporter, sensing a weakness in Rogan’s podcasting armor, called the podcaster’s recent tilt, “Dangerous.” That’s overstating it, but <a href="https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/politics-news/joe-rogan-douglas-murray-podcast-1236192416/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">it’s neither healthy nor helpful.</a>
A week later, Darryl Cooper arrived to perform his act, which can be described as offering outrageous provocations he then half walks back so he can repeat them all again tomorrow. In September, Cooper had appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast to say that Churchill was the real villain in World War II and that Nazis didn’t want to kill Jews in concentration camps; Jews only “ended up dead” because Germany didn’t have the resources to take care of them.
Murray and Smith didn’t name call or insult one another during the often-tense exchange. Rogan proved an avuncular host, trying to keep the parties on an even keel. The two sparred over foreign policy, the Ukraine war, and, most passionately, the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Murray’s silky-smooth delivery and impeccable grasp of the facts mattered. Smith brought an Everyman’s perspective to the party, often appearing overmatched in the dustup.
<div id="attachment_909817" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-909817" class="size-large wp-image-909817" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-13-PM-5832-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience #2303. Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. PowerfulJRE. YouTube.com" width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-13-PM-5832-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-13-PM-5832-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-13-PM-5832-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-13-PM-5832-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-13-PM-5832-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Screenshot: Joe Rogan Experience #2303. Dave Smith and Douglas Murray. PowerfulJRE. YouTube.com</div>
Who “won” depends partly on who you were rooting for prior to the exchange. Both landed some blows, from Murray detailing the horrors of October 7 to Smith sharing the devastation in Gaza from the extended conflict.
It’s increasingly rare to watch these kinds of debates play out on the pop culture landscape. Hollywood’s near total domination by the Left means there’s little appetite for these healthy exchanges. 
Consider today’s late-night hosts. They all sing from the same progressive hymnal and invite progressive guests on to nod along with the audience. The host of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” just raged against President Donald Trump in a Rolling Stone interview. Here’s part of his <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/jimmy-kimmel-trump-late-night-future-interview-1235315906/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">jeremiad against all things GOP</a>.
&#8220;There’s no decency. It’s just a bunch of animals [emphasis added], and it’s disgusting… I mean, on the Fourth of July, I still put up a flag, and I’m never going to stop doing that, because I’m never going to let them have that symbol.&#8221;
Does that sound like someone willing to host a free and fair debate on his platform? Why can’t Kimmel invite someone like Dr. Jordan Peterson or Greg Gutfeld on his show for a civil conversation? It would make for compelling TV and might boost the show’s ratings.
Plus, audiences might take away something valuable from it beyond demonizing those with whom they disagree. It’s increasingly clear folks on the Left aren’t interested in that kind of exchange.
There is an exception, though. Classical liberal Bill Maher, both on his HBO talk show and “Club Random” podcast, routinely invites Right-leaning guests to talk out their differences. Think Dave Rubin, Kid Rock, and actor Zachary Levi, to name just three.
<div id="attachment_909819" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-909819" class="size-large wp-image-909819" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-36-PM-7260-1024x576.jpg" alt="Screenshot: YouTube/Club Random Podcast. " width="1024" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-36-PM-7260-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-36-PM-7260-300x169.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-36-PM-7260-768x432.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-36-PM-7260-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/04/MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-36-PM-7260-2048x1152.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Screenshot: YouTube/Club Random Podcast.</div>
Rogan probably didn’t like to hear someone like Murray, well-regarded in many circles, dressing him down on his own show. He needed to hear it all the same. It’s reminiscent of another pivotal moment from the show’s past.
Rogan invited then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on his show for what appeared to be a tepid chat that let Dorsey slink away from his platform’s censorious ways. Rogan got an earful from his fans who felt he had let the CEO off too easily. So he invited Dorsey back on the show, but brought backup.
He added journalist gadfly <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Tim Pool to the conversation</a>. Pool brought some unflattering receipts, and the exchange proved far more illuminating than the first interview.
Perhaps Rogan needed a reminder of why his show matters and the consequences of having one of the biggest podcasts in the country.
Uncle Ben would be proud if he took that lesson seriously.
* * *
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic and editor of <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

MixCollage-18-Apr-2025-04-07-PM-2073

Joe Rogan’s Smith-Murray Debate Shows The Power And Risk Of Platforming

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Marines Attacking on Okinawa

OKINAWA, THE FINAL BATTLE, Part Four: Conquering ‘Hell’s Cesspool’

OKINAWA, THE FINAL BATTLE, Part Four: Conquering 'Hell's Cesspool'

Japan

Marines

U.S. Army

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USS Bunker Hill hit by two kamikaze pilots.

OKINAWA, THE FINAL BATTLE, Part Three: ‘Floating Chrysanthemums’

OKINAWA, THE FINAL BATTLE, Part Three: 'Floating Chrysanthemums'

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American Assault On Okinawa

OKINAWA, THE LAST BATTLE, Part Two: Facing The Shuri Line 

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Marine Charging During Battle of Okinawa

OKINAWA, THE LAST BATTLE, Part One: Operation Iceberg

American History

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth vowed on Saturday to strengthen the United States&#8217; alliance with Japan as he spoke at a memorial service in honor of those who died in the World War II battle at Iwo Jima.
Hegseth joined other senior United States and Japanese officials in commemorating the 80th anniversary of the battle, which was fought between February 19, 1945, to March 26, 1945, in what the Department of Defense describes as &#8220;some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the entire war.&#8221;
&#8220;I&#8217;m humbled to pilgrim — there&#8217;s no other way to put it — to this hallowed ground,&#8221; Hegseth said. &#8220;Over 80,000 Marines, soldiers, and sailors from our two countries fought at Iwo Jima.  More than 26,000 died here. Today, we revere their courage. Today, we remember their valor and sacrifice.&#8221;
<div id="attachment_899923" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/valor-and-sacrifice-pete-hegseth-travels-to-japan-to-honor-those-who-died-at-iwo-jima/japan-us-diplomacy-history-wwii" rel="attachment wp-att-899923"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-899923" class="wp-image-899923 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206813114-865x576.jpg" alt="" width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206813114-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206813114-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206813114-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206813114.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" /></a>A joint US-Japan memorial service for the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima near the end of World War II is held in the village of Ogasawara on Iwo Jima island, some 1,250 kilometres (780 miles) from Tokyo on March 29, 2025.  (Photo by JAPAN POOL/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images)</div>
The Defense Secretary dwelt on the bravery of those who fought at Iwo Jima, saying: &#8220;Today, in their everlasting memory, we recommit ourselves to faith and belief in our Alliance — and to peace. You see, Iwo Jima embodies our shared warrior ethos; our shared devotion to nation and to duty; and our shared reverence for the men of valor who preceded us.&#8221;
He also praised the current alliance between the United States and Japan.
&#8220;The U.S.-Japan Alliance shows those brave men of 1945 how yesterday&#8217;s enemy has become today&#8217;s friend,&#8221; said Hegseth. &#8220;Our Alliance has been, and remains the cornerstone of freedom, prosperity, security, and peace in the Indo-Pacific. And it will continue.&#8221;
&#8220;As we remember the many who gave their lives here for the peace we now enjoy, let us recommit ourselves to our friendship and to our Alliance,&#8221; Hegseth said. &#8220;Our unity and our shared purpose is what strengthens us. They strengthen us as together we strive to provide a peaceful future for our children and for our grandchildren.&#8221;
Hegseth told those gathered that he was grateful to be present with &#8220;this incredible group of men and allies here today&#8221; and &#8220;humbled to be in the presence of such heroes.&#8221;
<div id="attachment_899927" style="width: 875px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/valor-and-sacrifice-pete-hegseth-travels-to-japan-to-honor-those-who-died-at-iwo-jima/japan-us-diplomacy-history-wwii-3" rel="attachment wp-att-899927"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-899927" class="wp-image-899927 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206835555-865x576.jpg" alt="" width="865" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206835555-865x576.jpg 865w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206835555-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206835555-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-2206835555.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 865px) 100vw, 865px" /></a>Japan&#8217;s Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba (front R) visits Mount Suribachi following a joint US-Japan memorial service to mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Iwo Jima near the end of World War II, in the village of Ogasawara on Iwo Jima island, some 1,250 kilometres (780 miles) from Tokyo on March 29, 2025.  (Photo by JAPAN POOL/JIJI Press/AFP via Getty Images)</div>
&#8220;Humbled to think,&#8221; he added, &#8220;I have a 14-year-old son, my oldest son. That in just four years, he could have been one of those men asked to do such a thing. And I ask myself, could he? Would he? Do we raise such men? And together, may we commit ourselves to raising such men. That at a tender young age, we&#8217;ll stand up and choose to fight. Choose to fight for freedom.&#8221;
&#8220;We are all proud to bear brief witness to the bravery, courage, and sacrifice that occurred on this battlefield,&#8221; the Defense Secretary said. &#8220;Heroes were forged here.  Their memory reminds us of the horrors and the costs of war. Their brave example inspires us and steels our resolve.&#8221;
If these heroes could serve so selflessly, Hegseth said, &#8220;so can we.&#8221;
&#8220;Sweat running down my forehead, imagine how it felt there, those days, on this island 80 years ago,&#8221; he reflected. &#8220;If they could summon the courage to face a fearsome foe, so can we. If they could so completely dedicate themselves to their countries, to their families, and to each other, so can we.&#8221;
He concluded: &#8220;We are fortunate to stand here together, shoulder to shoulder as friends and as allies, living their legacy of honor. May almighty God bless our allies. And may almighty God, and the grace and mercies of our savior Jesus Christ always surround our American warriors.&#8221;

JAPAN-US-DIPLOMACY-HISTORY-WWII

‘Valor And Sacrifice’: Pete Hegseth Travels To Japan To Honor Those Who Died At Iwo Jima

Global Politics

Pete Hegseth

World

By 2:30 a.m. on March 10, 1945, the bombers had all disappeared over the glowing horizon and the “all clear” sounded across a shattered Tokyo. 
While back on Guam, Gen. LeMay and his staffers were breathing a collective sigh of relief, over a million suddenly homeless Japanese wandered the smoldering lunar landscape of their devastated capital city like bewildered phantasms. When the smokey dawn arrived, the grey, muted sunlight revealed badly burned survivors stumbling into what medical centers remained while others returned to ash heaps that were once their neighborhoods searching for family members separated from them in the chaos of the night before. Ishikawa Iwao came upon the charred remains of his wife and two girls. One young girl would recall having to push her way through the dead bodies with her feet. In the Tokyo subway, thousands of naked and seared humanoid figures were piled into the narrow confines. If it was not hell itself, LeMay’s bombers had come as close as the human race could to replicating it on this earth.
Although there were attempts soon after the raid to arrive at a reliable casualty figure, it was guesswork. Many of the Tokyo officials who would have tallied the corpses and presented a body count to the emperor, whose palace had been spared, were either dead, injured, searching for loved ones, or scrounging for food. Various historians, as well as subsequent Japanese and U.S. records, put the death toll at anywhere from 87,000 to over 110,000 with another 40,000 injured. Respected researchers like Edwin Hoyt, however, argued that even the high estimates of fatalities are a gross undercount given the population of the area that was scorched, and that these figures only represent actual counted dead along with approximations based on fragments of clothing, bones, jewelry, and the like. He would actually put the number at over 200,000. We will never know for sure. But what we do know is that, with the possible exception of Hiroshima, the March 9-10, 1945, firebombing of Tokyo was the most lethal single act of war in human history, and certainly tops anything conventional weapons had ever achieved before or since.
<div id="attachment_888437" style="width: 971px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888437" class="size-large wp-image-888437" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-568885031-961x576.jpg" alt="Tokyo residents who lost their homes as a result of the U.S. bombings. 10th March 1945. The Operation Meetinghouse air raid of 9-10 March 1945 was later estimated to be the single most destructive bombing raid in history. It was part of a series of firebombing raids, conducted by the United States Army Air Forces during the Pacific campaigns of World War II. Photo: Kouyou Ishikawa, officer of the Metropolitan Police Department. Tokyo, Japan. (Photo By Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)" width="961" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-568885031-961x576.jpg 961w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-568885031-300x180.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-568885031-768x461.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-568885031.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 961px) 100vw, 961px" />Tokyo residents who lost their homes as a result of the U.S. bombings. 10th March 1945. Photo: Kouyou Ishikawa, officer of the Metropolitan Police Department. Tokyo, Japan. (Photo By Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images)</div>
Despite the mass killing they’d just unleashed, LeMay and his bomber crews were ebullient. Losses hadn’t been 70% as some predicted but rather just 4%: 14 bombers and 96 crewmen lost. This in exchange for reducing over 16 square miles of the enemy’s capital city to ash. The Superfortresses incinerated 63% of the commercial district, wiped out 18% of Tokyo’s industry, and burned to the ground roughly a quarter million buildings and homes, which was 25% of the city.
Flying at low altitude, it turned out, was less taxing on the B-29’s temperamental engines as well as more fuel-efficient. So low-level nighttime fire bombings would be LeMay’s template going forward. In effect, America’s strategy for winning the war was to simply dump burning gasoline over Japan until they finally came to their senses. In fact, over the next six months the B-29s would proceed to burn out one Japanese city after another, including several return trips to embattled Tokyo, effectively hammering a nation already teetering due to critical shortages to its knees. In fact, LeMay was confident that by putting every Japanese city to the torch, his B-29s could compel Japan to surrender without ever having to invade, or drop an atomic bomb. And, as <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Flyboys-Story-Courage-James-Bradley/dp/0316105848/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">post-war surveys</a> revealed, of all the reasons Japanese civilians believed their nation had no choice but to end the war, the air raids topped the list.
And no wonder. As historian and author James Bradley writes: “Curtis [LeMay] was clearly much more effective than the American bombers had been in Europe. Bombing destroyed seventy-nine square miles of Germany’s urban area. Curtis destroyed more than twice as much urban area in Japan. 178 square miles…In fact, the damage in just two Japanese cities, Tokyo (56.3 square miles) and Osaka (16.4 square miles) nearly equaled all the damage done to all German cities put together.” And these were just two of nearly 70 cities the B-29s burned out between March and August 1945.
<div id="attachment_888441" style="width: 727px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888441" class="size-large wp-image-888441" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556154-717x576.jpg" alt="Aerial view of Tokyo razed by American bombing carried out on the evening of March 9th by 334 B-29 Super Flying Fortresses. Tokyo, March 1945 (Photo by Mondadori via Getty Images)" width="717" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556154-717x576.jpg 717w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556154-300x241.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556154-768x617.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556154.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 717px) 100vw, 717px" />Aerial view of Tokyo razed by American bombing carried out on the evening of March 9th by 334 B-29 Super Flying Fortresses. Tokyo, March 1945 (Photo by Mondadori via Getty Images)</div>
Indeed, even after the atomic bombs vaporized Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing continued; the last Japanese city to be put to the torch was Akita, on August 14, 1945, five days after Nagasaki and just hours before Japan announced its capitulation.
The morality of firebombing or “area bombing” has been a subject of intense debate ever since. Certainly in the modern age where nations like Israel are castigated in the court of global opinion for “disproportionate” responses to acts of war, one is hard-pressed to find proportionality in a bombing campaign that, in ostensible retaliation for 2,400 dead at Pearl Harbor, eventually burned to death over a half million old men, women, and children and rendered over eight million homeless.
To be sure, some in the military did question the ethics of such indiscriminate killing. Brig. Gen. Charles Bonner Feller condemned the Tokyo raid as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all of history.” LeMay himself candidly <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Second-World-Wars-Global-Conflict/dp/0465066984" target="_blank" rel="noopener">conceded</a>, “I suppose if we’d lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminals.”
But when it comes to the bombing of Japan especially, there are two factors to consider before handing down judgement ex post facto. First, 34% of Japanese industrial workers were jammed into her six largest cities. And many of those who did not work on the factory floor were directly involved in contributing to the war effort through the cottage industry of making parts for nearby factories in their home workshops. As one 1944 report to the White House argued, “each factory was like a tree radiating a web of roots throughout the surrounding living areas from which it drew both workers and parts.” In other words, an argument could be made that every Japanese dwelling was a legitimate military target. And thusly, “de-housing”, to use Churchill’s antiseptic phrase, was considered to be justified.
Feller’s rare dissent aside, we are speaking of what the Germans called “terror bombing” and the Japanese “slaughter bombing” with the advantage of decades of hindsight and reflection. Today we know that by March 1945 the war was barely six months away from concluding. But U.S. planners back then certainly could not know this. As far as they were concerned the ferocious battles of Peleliu, Manila, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa amply demonstrated that, if anything, Japanese resistance was stiffening, and growing ever more fanatical. In 1945, Germany may have been on the ropes, but Japan was showing no hint of surrender. The trusted journalist Ernie Pyle wrote, “The closer we get to Japan, the harder it will be. To me it looks like trying days for us in the years ahead.” As Bradley points out, Pyle said years, not months.
It was with this backdrop of frustration with an enemy who, though clearly beaten, still refused to give up, combined with the brutality of the Japanese themselves — especially their sadistic conduct towards civilians and POWs that was well-known by then — that erased any moral qualms from the nation’s collective conscience. The growing consensus both inside the War Department as well as Main Street, USA, was that this madness had to end. And if it took burning all of Japan back into the stone age to stop our boys from coming home in coffins or maimed and mutilated, then so be it. Who are we, basking in the eighth decade of the hard-won Pax Americana, to judge those who saw nothing but a human catastrophe looming before them? As the war inexorably moved towards what would have been its inevitable gory climax, all that lay ahead was an invasion of the home islands with literally millions of Allied, and most likely tens of millions of Japanese, casualties to pay the price.
As for the men who carried out the burning of Tokyo that night, once the euphoria of surviving a mission so many expected to be their last wore off, they no doubt pondered the ethics of dumping napalm on defenseless people below. But training, discipline, and war-weariness had instilled in most of them a sense of clinical detachment. They just wanted to get in, execute the mission, and get out of there in one piece. As LeMay would offer unapologetically, “Every soldier thinks about the moral aspect of what he is doing. But all war is immoral, and if you let that bother you, you’re not a good soldier.”
On August 6, 1945, the uranium bomb “Little Boy” destroyed Hiroshima. Three days later the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” obliterated Nagasaki. But Japan’s most stalwart militarists, who were more than prepared to sacrifice their entire population to thwart an Allied invasion, viewed atomic weapons as more of a gradual rather than quantum leap in escalation. After all, as with the M69, the atomic bombs killed most of their victims with fire.
Russia’s invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria on August 8, 1945, certainly removed another piece of their wobbly Jenga tower. One and a half million Red Army troops attacked the emperor’s three quarter of a million warriors in the Chinese province and, along with vengeful Manchus, engaged in the mass killing, looting, and rape of thousands of Japanese “pioneers,” and sent 700,000 captives to Stalin’s gulags.
Even the intrepid U.S. submariners effectively sinking the Japanese Merchant Marine did not alone end Japan’s war effort. Dai Nippon’s commanders still ate well, drank good sake, and ravished enslaved “comfort women” while their starving people subsisted on grasshoppers and sawdust cakes.
Morality aside, a strong case can be made that, of all the factors that led to Japan’s ultimate surrender, it was the firebombing that weighed most heavily in Hirohito’s decision to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/07/obituaries/a-leader-who-took-japan-to-war-to-surrender-and-finally-to-peace.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">compel his nation</a> to “bear the unbearable, and “endure the unendurable.” In fact, it is quite conceivable to imagine eventual U.S. victory over Japan through “slaughter bombing” alone. In a meeting with Gen. Arnold, LeMay informed him that by September 1945 there would be no more Japanese targets left to bomb. “And with the targets gone we couldn’t see much of any war going on.” According to Prince Fumimaro Konoe, “…the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29.” It makes one wonder if Hiroshima and Nagasaki ever needed to occur. Although others would argue that the atom bombs were, in fact, the essential wake-up call demonstrations of the awesome power arrayed against Japan. In a post-war interview, Prime Minister Suzuki Kantaro stated, “The atom bomb didn’t end the war, but it prompted the emperor to make a decision.” The debate continues.
<div id="attachment_888479" style="width: 790px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888479" class="size-large wp-image-888479" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3208513-1-780x576.jpg" alt="2nd September 1945: Japanese Imperial Headquarters representative General Yoshijiro Umezu (foreground, right) signing Japanese Instrument of Surrender while General MacArthur (foreground, centre) watches, aboard the USS Missouri, Tokyo Bay. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="780" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3208513-1-780x576.jpg 780w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3208513-1-300x221.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3208513-1-768x567.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3208513-1.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 780px) 100vw, 780px" />Hulton Archive/Getty Images</div>
Again, these are questions revisited today through the clear lens of decades of hindsight. At the time, the U.S. government, seeing no end in sight, had a solemn obligation to the American people to do whatever was necessary to end the costliest war in human history. Still, no matter what ultimately prompted Japan’s leaders to accept defeat, the countdown to that defeat began on a terrible March night over Tokyo, eighty years ago, when the B-29s came in force, and the night sky rained fire. And the hellfire of total war finally came home to Japan.
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Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw02hy-lB4UuAlHo7FfD_FIQ">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tokyo-inferno-operation-meetinghouse-the-deadliest-air-raid-in-history-part-1?row=0&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;author=Brad+Schaeffer&amp;title=Tokyo+Inferno%3A+Operation+Meetinghouse%2C+The+Deadliest+Air+Raid+In+History%2C+Part+1&amp;category=News" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED: Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 1</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tokyo-inferno-operation-meetinghouse-the-deadliest-air-raid-in-history-part-2?row=0&amp;elementPosition=1&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;author=Brad+Schaeffer&amp;title=Tokyo+Inferno%3A+Operation+Meetinghouse%2C+The+Deadliest+Air+Raid+In+History%2C+Part+2&amp;category=News" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED: Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 2</a>

Aerial View Of Tokyo After The Bombing

Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 3

If God ever decided to create a city that would be most vulnerable to a mass napalm attack, He would construct 1945 Tokyo. Estimates vary, but at that stage of the war the city’s population was roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, as opposed to around 3.5 million Berliners. Although the two Axis capitals had roughly the same overall average population density of between 8,000 to 10,000 per square mile, certain areas in Tokyo like the Asakusa workers district crammed 130,000 people into the same space. And, unlike Berlin, many of Tokyo’s houses, shops, and other structures were built of wood and featured paper walls. To make matters worse, even though Japan’s leaders understood the ominous threat posed by the now-in-range B-29s to the home islands due to the loss of the Marianas, they prioritized production over protecting their citizenry.
As such, there were only 18 concrete air raid shelters in all of Tokyo, capable of only shielding approximately 5,000 of the city’s 6.5 million inhabitants. The rest made do with shallow backyard dugouts and other makeshift shelters. In the entire city a mere 8,000 firefighters along with citizens practiced in forming bucket brigades were all that stood between them and $200 million-worth of a mighty industrial power’s most advanced war machines coming in low to dump over three million pounds of flaming gel onto their city. And as if Tokyo wasn’t exposed enough, the night of March 9-10, 1945, was cold with howling winds gusting at up to 50 mph, creating an ideal environment for fanning the flames. 
In short, the stage was set for what would be the single most lethal day in the history of conventional warfare.
<div id="attachment_888383" style="width: 697px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888383" class="wp-image-888383 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-104421219-1-687x576.jpg" alt="IN FLIGHT - JANUARY 02: The Bomber Boeing B-29 Superfortress On Assignment Between 1943 And 1945. Put Into Service In 1943, It Was Used By Great Britain And The Usa. (Photo by Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)" width="687" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-104421219-1-687x576.jpg 687w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-104421219-1-300x251.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-104421219-1-768x644.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-104421219-1.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 687px) 100vw, 687px" />Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images</div>
A little after midnight, just as Radio Tokyo was signing off and the air-raid sirens began to whine, the first group of pathfinder B-29s roared over the city. Flying in at right angles to each other, their mission was to paint a flaming “X” on the target area with incendiaries. Once the pathfinders did their work, the rest of the bombers appeared overhead in groups of three and began dropping their payloads onto their assigned quadrants. Residents would later recall how, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Flyboys-Story-Courage-James-Bradley/dp/0316105848/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">in the words</a> of Hashimoto Yoshiko, the bombers did not appear as they usually did as “dots in the sky with a tail.” This night was different. “They were flying so low,” she said, “I wondered if they would hit the utility poles…They were so big.”
The B-29 had a device called an intervalometer, which dropped a bundled cluster of M69s each weighing 500 pounds every 50 feet; the timing was such as to cover an area roughly 350 by 2,000 feet. Once they dropped to an altitude of 2,000, the clusters burst and showered the area with the incendiary pipe bombs; they floated to the ground like a “silver waterfall” as many observers <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Flyboys-Story-Courage-James-Bradley/dp/0316105848/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;sr=" target="_blank" rel="noopener">commonly described</a> the scene. A German priest watching from the Jesuit Sophia University perched on a hill overlooking the city remarked that it reminded him of “the silver tinsel we hung from Christmas trees in Germany…and where these silver streamers would touch the ground, a fire would erupt.”
With each detonation, a fountain of burning goo would shoot out in all directions and devour everything it touched. The high winds at ground level whipped the flames sending them spreading out rather than up. And when the fires merged, the wind gusts fanned the conflagration into a raging firestorm racing through the narrow streets, incinerating thousands of Japanese who realized too late their shallow dugouts were no protection from this rapidly advancing cataclysm consuming their city.
Within fifteen minutes of the first fires, Tokyo’s firefighters were completely overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and violence of the spreading inferno, with one <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/hellfire-earth-operation-meetinghouse" target="_blank" rel="noopener">declaring</a> “Hellfire is upon us!” Many would die in heroic, if futile, attempts to contain the conflagration that resulted from 8,519 clusters of M69s weighing 500 pounds, each bursting over their city and cascading down on them like a flaming deluge. One pilot recalled seeing burned out corpses of firefighters huddled around their engine that had melted like wax.
Succeeding waves of fliers had no problem spotting their targets. The flames were so bright, said one pilot, “the whole area was lighted as if it was broad daylight when we entered the drop zone.” Martin Sheridan, a correspondent for The Boston Globe, hitched a ride with the B-29 Patches, which was farther back in the bomber stream. He would write: “The navigator didn’t have to give the pilot bearings towards Tokyo because 40 miles from the blacked-out city we could see the reddish glow of the burning capital on the horizon.” Once over the target, Sheridan would report, “The area below me was a sea of flame.”
<div id="attachment_888493" style="width: 478px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888493" class="wp-image-888493 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/image-1-468x576.png" alt="Credit: S. Smisek. Colorized image from a B-29." width="468" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/image-1-468x576.png 468w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/image-1-244x300.png 244w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/image-1.png 720w" sizes="(max-width: 468px) 100vw, 468px" />Credit: S. Smisek. Colorized image from a B-29.</div>
The fires were so strong they sent updrafts whooshing thousands of feet into the air, tossing the giant Superfortresses through the demonic orange sky like leaves in the wind. Several bombers were flipped over on their backs; crewmen not firmly buckled in their seats went tumbling wildly through their fuselages. Although the updrafts posed a very real danger and pushed pilots’ skills to the limit, enemy action was barely a factor. Anti-aircraft gunners, confused by the darkness and unexpected low altitudes, tried to put their spotlights on bombers above them while frantically adjusting their barrels to intercept the speeding machines but with little success. The B-29 crews reported back to LeMay: “Bombing the target visually. Flak moderate. Fighter opposition: nil.”
LeMay’s gamble had paid off. It turned out the enemy had plenty of small caliber guns that could reach up to 5,000 feet, and heavier flak cannons ranging between 10,000 and 30,000, but the window through which the general sent over 300 of his nation’s most expensive hardware and thousands of highly trained crewmen was wide open. After all, who would be mad enough to fly bombers in at that altitude? Although his commander would wait for follow-up reconnaissance photos the next day to assess the damage, one staffer on Guam that night remembered the taciturn LeMay chomping his cigar and saying, “It looks pretty good.” He even managed a hint of a smile.
<div id="attachment_888413" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888413" class="size-large wp-image-888413" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Norstad_LeMay_Power-864x576.jpg" alt="From left: General Lauris Norstad, Twentieth Air Force Chief of Staff, General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command commander, General Thomas S. Power, 314th Bomb Wing commander. The three senior USAAF officers review reports from the Tokyo raid of March 9-10, 1945. U.S. Government (National Archives), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Norstad_LeMay_Power-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Norstad_LeMay_Power-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Norstad_LeMay_Power-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Norstad_LeMay_Power.jpg 960w" sizes="(max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />National Archives. Public domain.</div>
No one caught in the fiery cauldron below, however, was smiling. Fueled by the ferocious winter winds, the firestorm ripped through the city like a red hot cyclone. <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/03/08/japan/society/tokyo-fire-bombing-anniversary/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20left%20my%20house%20(in,night%20of%20March%209%2C%201945." target="_blank" rel="noopener">Recalled</a> Matsumoto Yoshio, just fifteen at the time, “I left my house (in Chuo district) and looked east. All of Sumida district and Koto district was engulfed in red.” Survivors would remember seeing people stumbling through the streets while fiery tentacles flailed at them, setting them ablaze. Teenager Ono Kimei was running for her life through the conflagration when she saw a fleeing mother carrying her small child ahead of her. “Suddenly the firestorm swept out a finger to lick them, and in a second the mother and child burst into flames…Their clothes afire, they staggered and fell to the ground.”
The inferno soon spread well beyond LeMay’s chosen target area. The firestorm not only created hurricane-force winds of flames, but the intense heat reached an astounding 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit in some areas, blowing liquified glass into the air which then rained down on people like a searing hot shower. Even those who managed to escape incineration by direct exposure to the fires cried out in agony as the intense heat alone was enough to burn their clothes off their bodies. Thousands more suffocated as the firestorm greedily devoured any oxygen.
In desperation to escape the hellfire, panicked mobs of Tokyo residents stampeded towards any water they could find, such as the massive swimming pool inside the Futaba School. But the pool water offered no protection this night in which superheated vapors rushing ahead of the tsunami of flames cooked the air up to the same temperature as a blast furnace. The next morning over a thousand pink and scorched bodies were found crammed within; it was bone dry as all the water had boiled away. Others raced for the Sumida River whose Kototoi Bridge was a bonfire as the metal trestles had long been removed to be melted into munitions and replaced with now flaming wooden beams. A bundle of M69s burst right over the crowded span, effectively cooking anyone who didn’t jump into the water. “People were burning to death on the bridge,” recalled Hashimoto. “Clothes would burst into flames. My hair caught fire. Everyone was screaming.”
<div id="attachment_888423" style="width: 932px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-888423" class="size-large wp-image-888423" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Kototoi_bashi_old-922x576.jpg" alt="Kototoi Bridge. Public Domain. " width="922" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Kototoi_bashi_old-922x576.jpg 922w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Kototoi_bashi_old-300x188.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Kototoi_bashi_old-768x480.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Kototoi_bashi_old.jpg 1280w" sizes="(max-width: 922px) 100vw, 922px" />Kototoi Bridge. Public Domain.</div>
When dropping bombs from up in the stratosphere, airmen are somewhat shielded by what psychologists call “the morality of altitude” wherein they are presented not with fellow human beings way down there on the ground, but rather just “targets”. But at a mere 5,000 feet there was no denying the horrors they were inflicting on the people below. Bombardier Maynard David <a href="https://ww2ondeadline.com/2021/03/29/world-war-ii-on-deadline-anniversary/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">recalled</a>: “When the bomb bay doors opened, the plane filled with smoke from the ground and we smelled this horrible odor. We closed the bomb bay doors after we dropped and headed out to sea. The odor was still so strong in the plane the pilot ordered me to open the doors again to let the fresh air in. You could only imagine what was going on down below us.” The odor was the aroma of burning flesh. The sickeningly sweet smell permeated aircraft and uniforms for days after.
Two-and-a-half hours after the first B-29 appeared overhead, the last of the American “fire devils” plotted a southerly course over the ocean and headed back to base 1,200 miles away. Unfathomable scenes of horror were playing out in the blazing city behind them. But to a relieved LeMay, the mission had been a success beyond expectation.
In a single raid, the B-29 was vindicated and the entire trajectory of the war had been altered. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay had his template. No city in Japan was safe. And hence forward all of Dai Nippon, the land of the Rising Sun whose jackbooted conquerors had so recently lorded over the Western Pacific from China to Burma to New Guinea to the Aleutian Islands would suffer the wrath of his B-29s and their rain of fiery death from the sky.
Japan’s celebrated Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku is rumored to have uttered a chilling prognostication after his surprise attack on Pearl Harbor a little over three years before: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve.” Whether he really said this or not, one doubts that even the imaginative Yamamoto, had he lived, could have envisioned just what a terrible resolve Curtis LeMay and his fleet of B-29s that would soon number over 1,000 Superfortresses at his disposal had in store for his people. America’s hellfire of retribution had begun.
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Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw02hy-lB4UuAlHo7FfD_FIQ">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tokyo-inferno-operation-meetinghouse-the-deadliest-air-raid-in-history-part-1?row=0&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;author=Brad+Schaeffer&amp;title=Tokyo+Inferno%3A+Operation+Meetinghouse%2C+The+Deadliest+Air+Raid+In+History%2C+Part+1&amp;category=News" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED: Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 1</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tokyo-inferno-operation-meetinghouse-the-deadliest-air-raid-in-history-part-1?row=0&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;author=Brad+Schaeffer&amp;title=Tokyo+Inferno%3A+Operation+Meetinghouse%2C+The+Deadliest+Air+Raid+In+History%2C+Part+1&amp;category=News" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED: Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 3</a>

Firebombed Tokyo

Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 2

On November 15, 1941, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall gave a secret briefing to a small group of reporters to discuss the rising tensions between Washington D.C. and Tokyo. He was asked how the U.S. might prosecute a war against Japan if it should come to that. Marshall went off the record, and stated we would be merciless. American aircraft would be “dispatched to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians — it will be all out.”
Just three weeks later, Pearl Harbor was attacked and the U.S. found itself at war with the Japanese empire. With the exception of Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s celebrated, if mostly symbolic, April 1942 raid the enemy’s homeland remained safely out of range.
As the Americans began to press ever closer to Japan in a series of island hopping operations through the Central Pacific, however, it became clear that once the Marianas were captured this situation would change.
In 1943, out in the Utah desert on the Dugway Proving Ground, the Army Air Force constructed a 24-building replica of a Japanese city. There they ran a series of tests to determine how best to bomb a metropolitan area with wooden structures containing paper walls. Inside the imitation homes were pieces of imported Japanese furniture, tatami mats, and even clothes hung in the closets for authenticity. With forensic dispassion, they dropped various ordnances on the miniature city dubbed “Little Tokyo” to determine which was most effective.
<div id="attachment_887413" style="width: 810px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-887413" class="size-full wp-image-887413" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/German_Japanese_Village_Dugway.jpg" alt="View of the German and Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah, 1943. US ARMY, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons." width="800" height="215" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/German_Japanese_Village_Dugway.jpg 800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/German_Japanese_Village_Dugway-300x81.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/German_Japanese_Village_Dugway-768x206.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" />View of the German and Japanese Village at Dugway Proving Grounds, Utah, 1943. US ARMY, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</div>
The weapon chosen was the new M69 napalm bomb. It was a simple design. Weighing under seven pounds, it didn’t look like a typical bomb. Instead it was a hexagonal pipe just three inches in diameter and only 20 inches long and packed with cheesecloth bags loaded with napalm. The bomb trailed a three-foot streamer to slow its descent so it wouldn’t crash through a structure to the basement before igniting. Once the M69 pipe landed it lay inert for several seconds before shooting out the cheesecloth bags with a bang. Unimpeded, the bags could fly as far as a football field’s distance in any direction. If one should hit something in its path, like a wall, a ceiling, a car, a person even, the bag would burst like a water balloon, splattering a glob of flaming gel up to 50 feet, starting hundreds of intense mini fires. And they kept burning until the small fires eventually coalesced into an inferno, ravenously feasting on the ready fuel supply of Japanese wood and paper.
The destructive implications were disquieting. Potential civilian casualties would be on an order of magnitude never before seen. This at a time when firebombing Axis cities, like the RAF raid on Hamburg in July 1943 that killed 45,000 civilians, had already come into its own. By this stage in the war, however, with casualties mounting and Japan showing no inkling towards surrender, American hatred for the Japanese was so intense that personal scruples hardly entered into the calculation.
Meanwhile, the engineers at Boeing Aircraft had created an awesome delivery system to bring the war to Japan: The B-29 long range bomber. With a fuselage length of 99 feet and wingspan of 140 feet, the aptly named “Superfortress” was the largest, most technologically advanced mass-produced weapon of the Second World War. Driven by four 2,200 horsepower Wright R-3350 engines mounted on wing nacelles spinning four 16-foot 7-inch four-bladed propellers, and protected by remote-control gun turrets, the 60-ton wonder plane sped through the air at up to 350 mph at 30,000 feet. Pressurized compartments liberated the crews from the bulky flight suits and oxygen masks at altitude that were a necessity for the aviators on the B-29’s less advanced stablemates, the USAAF B-17 and B-24 and RAF Lancaster. Despite its size and weight, the Superfortress could hit targets 1,600 miles away with a 12,000 pound payload at altitude. The B-29 was to the other bombers in the Allied arsenal what the Cadillac DeVille was to the Model-T.
<div id="attachment_887453" style="width: 763px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-887453" class="size-large wp-image-887453" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Boeing-Whichata_B-29_Assembly_Line_-_1944-753x576.jpg" alt="Bell-Marietta Georgia, B-29 Assembly Line - 1944. Serial numbers on the planes suggest these are Wichita-built Boeing B-29-5-BWs. United States Army Air Forces, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons." width="753" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Boeing-Whichata_B-29_Assembly_Line_-_1944-753x576.jpg 753w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Boeing-Whichata_B-29_Assembly_Line_-_1944-300x230.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Boeing-Whichata_B-29_Assembly_Line_-_1944-768x588.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Boeing-Whichata_B-29_Assembly_Line_-_1944-1536x1175.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/Boeing-Whichata_B-29_Assembly_Line_-_1944-2048x1567.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 753px) 100vw, 753px" />Bell-Marietta Georgia, B-29 Assembly Line &#8211; 1944. Serial numbers on the planes suggest these are Wichita-built Boeing B-29-5-BWs. U.S. Army Air Forces, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.</div>
But having spent an unprecedented $3 billion in 1940s dollars designing, constructing ,and deploying the new leviathan bomber, U.S. planners feared they may have created the costliest flop in military history.
For all its promise and technological wonder, however, the B-29 was proving to be a disappointment. 
Flying first off of bases on mainland China and then, once captured, the Marianas, the B-29, would climb to its prescribed bombing altitude of 30,000 feet. Once there, the aircraft encountered the heretofore unheard of jet stream — a current of air that raced over Japan like an angry “kaze”, or wind, at 250 mph. When flying perpendicular to it, the bombers skidded wildly off course. If flying directly into it, real ground speed was reduced to a crawl, making the bombers easy targets for anti-aircraft. And if the kaze was in their six, the bombers raced headlong over their targets at speeds in excess of 450mph which was far too fast for accurate bombing. The results were negligible, and each time a B-29 was shot down, $600,000 worth of aircraft (in a time when a typical new house cost $3,100) and anywhere from ten to fourteen highly trained crewmen were lost. And, though greatly diminished by mid-1944, Japanese fighters still rose up to challenge the intruders over their cities.
In its first raid against Japan on June 15, 1944, for example, 60 China-based B-29s flying at 30,000 feet attempted to bomb a steel mill in Kyushu. Seven bombers were lost, while only one bomb hit the target. Something had to be done to salvage the B-29.
So the overall USAAF commander, Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, reached over to the European Theater and summoned his most aggressive airman, Gen. Curtis LeMay, to take over the Pacific strategic bombing campaign from Gen. H.S. Hansell, who remained a stubborn disciple of high altitude precision bombing with high explosives. Arnold’s orders to LeMay were direct: get results or be fired too.
<div id="attachment_887389" style="width: 457px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-887389" class="size-large wp-image-887389" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3244623-447x576.jpg" alt="circa 1955: Studio portrait of United States Air Force Major General Curtis Emerson Le May wearing a military uniform, with medals over his left breast pocket. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="447" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3244623-447x576.jpg 447w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3244623-233x300.jpg 233w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3244623-768x989.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-3244623.jpg 795w" sizes="(max-width: 447px) 100vw, 447px" />circa 1955: Studio portrait of United States Air Force Major General Curtis Emerson Le May wearing a military uniform, with medals over his left breast pocket. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)</div>
The cigar-chomping LeMay was known as a no-nonsense bomber ace who’d flown his share of combat missions over Germany, often piloting the lead plane into the flak and Luftwaffe-filled skies. He brought that same gritty determination to the Pacific.
At first, LeMay stayed true to daylight precision bombing dicta. But dropping high explosives on Tokyo from six miles up was proving ineffective. So on February 28, 1945, LeMay did something unorthodox. He sent his bombers high over Tokyo again, but this time they carried 450 tons of incendiaries. The results were encouraging; one square mile of Tokyo was burned out and 28,000 buildings destroyed or damaged. The general wondered what a mass raid coming in low could do.
LeMay summoned his wing commanders to his Quonset hut on Guam to inform them he’d made a stunning, and some thought insane, decision. He would bring the B-29s down under the jet stream to an altitude of between 5,000 and 8,000 feet. To impede anti-aircraft they would go in under the cover of night and the bombers would be loaded to the gills with M69 napalm bombs. And as if this wasn’t radical enough, LeMay informed his flabbergasted crews “I’m going to send you in at 5,000 feet without any guns, gunners or ammunition.” Though stripping away the heavy .50 caliber machine guns and extra crewmen would enable each bomber to haul an additional 2,700 pounds of ordinance, each aircraft would now be defenseless.
LeMay’s fliers were horrified. In fact, they saw the mission briefing as tantamount to a madman reading out their collective death sentences. There was safety in altitude. Said one aviator, “A sort of cold fear gripped the crew. Many frankly did not expect to return from a raid over that city at an altitude of less than 10,000 feet.” This wasn’t hyperbole. LeMay’s own flak experts feared that as many as seven out of ten bombers could be lost.
But the calculating airman thought he’d spotted a hole in Japan’s air defenses between low-level small caliber and high-altitude larger caliber anti-aircraft fire in that five to ten thousand corridor. He also knew there were only two dedicated night fighter squadrons on Tokyo’s Honshu island.
Dangers aside, there was a moral aspect to the new mission code-named “Operation Meetinghouse.” The specific target selected was a three-by-four-mile area that housed an estimated 750,000 people, many of them working as home-based shop laborers for the local war factories, which the planners figured made the zone a legitimate military target. Still, LeMay had no delusions as to what he was asking of his young fliers, and he was coldly candid in his briefing. “No matter how you slice it, you’re going to kill an awful lot of civilians. Thousands and thousands. But if you don’t destroy Japanese industry we’ll have to invade Japan.” Every man knew the horrific casualties such a final Götterdämmerung on the home islands implied.
At 5:35 p.m. on Friday, March 9, 1945, the first of 324 B-29s, carrying a combined payload of three and a third million pounds of napalm, roared down the runways on three Marianas islands; first Guam, which was farthest from Japan, then forty minutes later lifting off from Saipan and Tinian. Once in the air, the bombers headed for Japan in three parallel streams stretching 400 miles across the darkening Pacific sky.
<div id="attachment_887371" style="width: 730px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-887371" class="size-large wp-image-887371" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556232-720x576.jpg" alt="Two U.S. soldiers watching the takeoff of a B-29 bomber from the air base at Saipan, destination Tokyo. Saipan, 23rd November 1944 (Photo by Mondadori via Getty Images)" width="720" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556232-720x576.jpg 720w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556232-300x240.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556232-768x614.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/GettyImages-141556232.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" />Two U.S. soldiers watching the takeoff of a B-29 bomber from the air base at Saipan, destination Tokyo. Saipan, 23rd November 1944 (Photo by Mondadori via Getty Images)</div>
LeMay, being LeMay, had wanted to lead the mission himself as he was going all in, betting hundreds of expensive bombers, and the young lives of their crews, on an untested theory. But his knowledge of the atomic bomb made his capture too high a security risk, so he was compelled to stay behind on Guam and pace his control room while furiously chomping his cigar. For the first time in the war, Curtis LeMay could not sleep. “I’m sweating this one out,” he confessed. “A lot could go wrong.”
<div id="attachment_887463" style="width: 996px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-887463" class="size-full wp-image-887463" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/501st_Bombardment_Group_B-29_takeoff_Northwest_Field_Guam_1945.jpg" alt="" width="986" height="515" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/501st_Bombardment_Group_B-29_takeoff_Northwest_Field_Guam_1945.jpg 986w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/501st_Bombardment_Group_B-29_takeoff_Northwest_Field_Guam_1945-300x157.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/03/501st_Bombardment_Group_B-29_takeoff_Northwest_Field_Guam_1945-768x401.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 986px) 100vw, 986px" />501st Bombardment Group B-29 takeoff Northwest Field Guam. U.S. Army Air Forces, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</div>
1,500 miles farther north, Tokyo’s teeming inhabitants had no clue as to the holocaust heading their way. All they knew from Radio Tokyo was that tomorrow, March 10, was Army Day. There would be a big parade through the streets. After reading the latest news, Radio Tokyo offered final words of encouragement to stay strong in the face of mounting adversity. “It is always darkest before dawn,” said the announcer. Then he wished them a good night and signed off.
Shortly after the radio went silent, six-year-old Suzuki Kensuke heard the blare of air-raid sirens erupting across the city, mingling with the ominous hum of thousands of approaching radial engines echoing through the night sky. “They sounded like an advanced notice telling us death was on the way,” he recalled. Death was, in fact, already overhead.
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Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw02hy-lB4UuAlHo7FfD_FIQ">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tokyo-inferno-operation-meetinghouse-the-deadliest-air-raid-in-history-part-2?row=0&amp;elementPosition=1&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;author=Brad+Schaeffer&amp;title=Tokyo+Inferno%3A+Operation+Meetinghouse%2C+The+Deadliest+Air+Raid+In+History%2C+Part+2&amp;category=News" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED: Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 2</a>
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/tokyo-inferno-operation-meetinghouse-the-deadliest-air-raid-in-history-part-1?row=0&amp;elementPosition=2&amp;rowType=Vertical+List&amp;author=Brad+Schaeffer&amp;title=Tokyo+Inferno%3A+Operation+Meetinghouse%2C+The+Deadliest+Air+Raid+In+History%2C+Part+1&amp;category=News" target="_blank" rel="noopener">RELATED: Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 3</a>

World War II. American Air

Tokyo Inferno: Operation Meetinghouse, The Deadliest Air Raid In History, Part 1

Bombings

Tokyo

Iwo Jima Photo

‘Uncommon Valor Was A Common Virtue’: The Battle Of Iwo Jima

'Uncommon Valor Was A Common Virtue': The Battle Of Iwo Jima

Iwo Jima

On July 30, 1941, a wan, painfully gaunt man in his early fifties was chauffeured through the Kremlin gates and ushered into the office of Josef Stalin. The American presented the Soviet dictator with a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In it, FDR instructed Stalin that his sickly envoy should be treated with “the identical confidence you would feel if you were talking directly to me.”
The man’s name was Harry Hopkins.
Hopkins, whose last official government title was Secretary of Commerce until 1940, acted as Roosevelt’s chief emissary throughout the war years. He was, in fact, Roosevelt’s most trusted confidant. So heavily did the president lean on his friend’s counsel that Hopkins literally lived for three-and-a-half years in his own <a href="https://time.com/archive/6782779/presidential-agent/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">private quarters</a> within the White House. He had been the principal architect of the New Deal and, between that and his work at the Commerce Department, was considered a top notch administrator. Indeed, Hopkins had the president’s unshakeable faith — so much so that Hopkins’ <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Operation-Barbarossa-Cataclysm-Jonathan-Dimbleby/dp/0197547214/ref=asc_df_0197547214?mcid=0fb21b4b93c03010be6c135e68622dcc&amp;hvocijid=6511239155696965424-0197547214-&amp;hvexpln=73&amp;tag=hyprod-20&amp;linkCode=df0&amp;hvadid=730434177080&amp;hvpos=&amp;hvnetw=g&amp;hvrand=6511239155696965424&amp;hvpone=&amp;hvptwo=&amp;hvqmt=&amp;hvdev=c&amp;hvdvcmdl=&amp;hvlocint=&amp;hvlocphy=9013184&amp;hvtargid=pla-2281435178098&amp;psc=1" target="_blank" rel="noopener">detractors</a> saw him as “a sinister figure, a backstairs intriguer, and an Iowan combination of Machiavelli, Svengali and Rasputin.”
<div id="attachment_875305" style="width: 422px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875305" class="size-large wp-image-875305" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468-412x576.jpg" alt="Soviet Communist leader Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953) with American diplomat Harry Hopkins (1890 - 1946). Original Publication: People Disc - HW0294 (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" width="412" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468-412x576.jpg 412w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468-215x300.jpg 215w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-2628468.jpg 733w" sizes="(max-width: 412px) 100vw, 412px" />Hulton Archive/Getty Images</div>
But he was FDR’s man. Someone to whom he’d effectively given a sort of presidential power of attorney to speak on his behalf throughout the war to such important allies and world leaders as Stalin and Churchill, and to decide matters that could affect the fates of millions across four continents, while the physically deteriorating president stayed back in Washington. Hopkins was also appointed to head the $11.3 billion Lend-Lease program to aid the Allies, and became a member of the War Production Board and the Pacific War Council. But he functioned mainly as the president’s intimate, and unelected, advisor.
This was some serious power placed courtesy of the president into the hands of one man, an unelected administrator. Indeed, Hopkins wielded much more de facto power under FDR than Elon Musk does under Donald Trump today. The tech billionaire’s unsalaried role as the head of DOGE is to recommend to the president actions he might take to root out government waste, fraud and abuse, and nothing more. As per the historical record, no one “voted” for Hopkins any more than they voted for Musk — a common complaint from a Democrat Party that has not been so bewildered by a total loss of power since Appomattox.
Unlike President Trump, Roosevelt never openly campaigned on giving Hopkins, who also served as his 1940 campaign manager, such an integral role in the center of his administration. And yet, there were no GOP lawmakers making fools of themselves, a la Chuck Schumer today, through cringe-worthy grandstanding by shrieking over any perceived threat Hopkins posed to the health and safety of our sacred Democracy.
While Hopkins was pushing his cancer-riddled body to the breaking point in his global travels on behalf of his closest friend, other unelected men who would also wield awesome power and authority granted by Roosevelt were hard at work back home shifting the USA’s manufacturing base to a war footing.
<div id="attachment_875321" style="width: 714px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875321" class="size-large wp-image-875321" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-704x576.jpg" alt="Homeward bound from the Casablanca Conference of 1943, President Roosevelt is shown in animated conference with Harry Hopkins. Sitting directly behind them are Lieutenant George Fox (left), US Navy Medical Corps, and Rear Admiral Ross T. McIntyre (right), Surgeon General of Navy. Across the aisle are Guy H. Spaman (back to camera) of the US Secret Service, and Captain John L. McCrea, Presidential Naval Aide. Standing are Arthur Prettyman, valet, Charles Fredericks, (hands folded), Elmer Hipley, Secret Service, Wilmer Deekand, Secret Service, and Captain Otis Bryan, Chief Pilot." width="704" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-704x576.jpg 704w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-300x246.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368-768x629.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/GettyImages-515955368.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 704px) 100vw, 704px" />Homeward bound from the Casablanca Conference of 1943, President Roosevelt is shown in animated conference with Harry Hopkins. Getty Images.</div>
This was not an easy task for FDR, a neo-socialist, whose isolationist stance stalled America’s response as war clouds brewed overseas. His ideological antipathy towards pure capitalism caused the U.S. government to do everything it could to hinder war production through activist policies that capped profits on war materials, and banned the sale of arms to foreign powers. By 1940, Roosevelt had effectively destroyed the U.S. defense industry. All this while malevolent nations like Germany and Japan were on the march.
It is difficult for us today to imagine how weak the United States military was leading up to the Second World War. At its outbreak in 1939, the U.S. fielded less than 175,000 troops, ranking 19th in the world and behind such global powerhouses as Portugal. In fact, in 1940 FDR was advised that Nazi Germany — which was by then Blitzkreiging its way across Scandinavia, the Low Countries and the mighty France — might only need five divisions to take over much of the country. The administration was suddenly faced with a difficult choice: bring back the war economy, or risk invasion.
Gen. George Marshall, FDR’s Joint Chiefs head, told him in no uncertain terms that the U.S. government could not prepare the nation for war and then execute production on its own. He therefore urged Roosevelt to bring in the industrialists if this mammoth mobilization effort was to succeed. Says <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCkIyEmUgX0&amp;t=555s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Stephen Davies</a> of the <a href="https://iea.org.uk/dr-stephen-davies/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Institute of Economic Affairs</a>, “There was no large army, there was virtually no air force. It all had to be created from scratch in almost no time at all, and the administration, the government, recognized very realistically that there was just no way they could do this themselves. What they had to do was to reach out to private industry, the private sector, and divert it to the war effort.” 
Roosevelt saw the light. Says <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCkIyEmUgX0&amp;t=555s" target="_blank" rel="noopener">historian</a> and pilot Randy Hotton, “Roosevelt said ‘I want the top manufacturing guys in this country.’ And one of his top advisors said, ‘Number one is Bill Knudsen of General Motors. Number two is Bill Knudsen of General Motors.’ And we can all guess who number three was.” Knudsen ended up flying in the face of the administration&#8217;s and other war economies’ dicta by keeping the U.S. war economy unplanned, unfettered, open, and allowing defense industries to turn a profit.
<div id="attachment_875313" style="width: 730px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-875313" class="wp-image-875313 size-large" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-720x576.jpg" alt="File:General Motors head. Washington, D.C., May 29. A new informal picture of William S. Knudsen, President of General Motors Corp. Harris &amp; Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons" width="720" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-720x576.jpg 720w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-300x240.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-768x614.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-1536x1229.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/02/General_Motors_head._Washington_D.C._May_29._A_new_informal_picture_of_William_S._Knudsen_President_of_General_Motors_Corp._LCCN2016875727-2048x1638.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 720px) 100vw, 720px" />William S. Knudsen, President of General Motors Corp (right). Harris &amp; Ewing, photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons</div>
Hopefully by now the reader sees a parallel between Roosevelt’s actions in delegating authority in the 1940s to affect a specific outcome — overhaul the war effort while bestowing upon unelected officials enormous power to affect real change both domestic and abroad — and what Trump is doing today in his empowering a man he trusts in Elon Musk, and those also unelected DOGE whiz kids, to massively overhaul our own federal government.
The Democrat Party is so pathetically lost, so out-of-touch, so confused that they are desperate for any issue to use as a differentiator between them and the Trump-enabled wrecking ball laying waste to their carefully constructed edifice of waste, fraud and abuse. So they have turned their vocal and crazed minority loose on their newest impediments to maintaining power: Elon Musk, “Big Balls,” and the DOGE crew. They claim DOGE is behaving in an “unconstitutional” even “illegal” manner. Why? Because, as Senator Elizabeth Warren screeched with an interesting choice of grammar for a Harvard professor, “No one elected Elon Musk to nothing!”
As the examples above show, when faced with a far more daunting task than rooting out government waste, even Roosevelt, among the most Left-wing of presidents, did not keep the task of winning the war within government alone, but rather brought in top men from the private sector to do the job that the federal bureaucracy simply could not be entrusted to do. Knudsen’s National Defense Research Committee and Office of Production Management was to the 1940s what DOGE is today. And the GM CEO then was the Tesla CEO of his day. And like Musk, Knudsen was even an immigrant! 
The enemy these two extraordinary men, along with Hopkins on the other side of the Atlantic, were mobilized to defeat may be different — Roosevelt’s team faced an external threat in the Axis, whereas Trump’s crew faces the internal threat of a far-reaching, ingrained web of Deep State corruption and waste. But the underlying idea of bringing on top private sector minds in a particular field (manufacturing in 1940, coding and AI search algorithms in 2025) to most efficiently perform a vital, indeed existential service to the country, even though no one elected them, is a model that has been tried before, and has succeeded with stunning results.
The Democrats know this, of course, don&#8217;t they? Ignorance can be rectified, but deep-seeded corruption, mendacity, lust for power and reliance on theft for one’s income is a harder course to change.
And as for Musk’s seeming “co-presidency” as Time magazine’s latest cover showing the Tesla/SpaceX CEO sitting behind Trump’s Resolute Desk implies, all I can say is there have been no private citizens in modern history with more power bestowed upon them by an American president, a Democrat icon no less, than Harry Hopkins and William Knudsen. Even the rabid isolationist Henry Ford got on board after Pearl Harbor. 
These men, who were akin to the Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos of their day, had very prominent seats at the Roosevelt administration table in order to tackle problems that were simply beyond an entrenched, ideological Federal administrative state. And not only did the nation survive, it thrived. We won the war and came out on the other side as the economic colossus of the world. Courtesy of the diligent and invaluable efforts of many patriotic, if unelected, titans of their day.
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Brad Schaeffer is a commodities fund manager, author, and columnist whose articles have appeared on the pages of The Daily Wire, The Wall Street Journal, NY Post, NY Daily News, National Review, The Hill, The Federalist, Zerohedge, and other outlets. He is the author of three <a href="https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id=55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07MQJBJSD?ccs_id%3D55112527-86f6-4c89-b82e-a96d6869abed&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw3K_WhJtiUZw7LF1PwSIHtH">books</a>. Follow him on <a href="https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://bradschaeffer.substack.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw02hy-lB4UuAlHo7FfD_FIQ">Substack</a> and <a href="https://x.com/bschaeffer123" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://x.com/bschaeffer123&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1736518135479000&amp;usg=AOvVaw0P6pRoAqcBhUQ1W0qwN5rH">X/Twitter</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

President Franklin Roosevelt

Before Trump, FDR Had His Own Unelected Millionaires Come To Washington

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)

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One of the most common rebuttals you’ll get when you criticize diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in any meaningful fashion are historical red herrings. If you’re so opposed to DEI, such arguments go, then you must have a problem with people learning about America’s history of slavery, the civil rights movement, and anything to do with race relations. Obviously, these arguments are fallacious ones — but that hasn’t stopped them from coming up in the middle of modern debates over DEI and America’s struggles with racial division.
Recently, the Air Force was forced to confront this argument. In the wake of President Trump’s executive order prohibiting discriminatory DEI practices at the federal level, reports <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/air-force-reinstates-tuskegee-airmen-backlash-pete-hegseth-katie-britt">surfaced</a> that the Air Force had removed (for “review”) instructional materials pertaining to the historical legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen, America’s first black military pilots, along with material on the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs), a paramilitary group that served during World War II. Among those outraged over the implications of this review was Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), who <a href="https://x.com/SenKatieBritt/status/1883623739763429512">deemed</a> the move “malicious compliance” on X, a sentiment Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth <a href="https://x.com/PeteHegseth/status/1883628784160809314">echoed</a>. “This will not stand.” Shortly after, the Air Force <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74e175p40qo">confirmed</a> that “no curriculum or content highlighting the honor and valor of the Tuskegee Airmen or Women Air Force Service Pilots [was] removed from Basic Military Training.&#8221;
If, as some of DEI’s most outspoken allies maintain, critics of modern DEI initiatives are truly motivated by racial animus, or a sincere desire to whitewash America’s history, the <a href="https://www.afhistory.af.mil/FAQs/Fact-Sheets/Article/458979/tuskegee-airmen/">story</a> of the Tuskegee Airmen would definitely be on the chopping block.
<div id="attachment_866641" style="width: 755px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-866641" class="size-large wp-image-866641" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-115600234-745x576.jpg" alt="Tuskegee AirmenAugust 1944 - Fliers of a P-51 Mustang Group of the 15th Air Force in Italy shoot the breeze in the shadow of one of the Mustangs they fly. Tuskegee airmen, pilots of a P-51 Mustang Group of the 15th Air Force in Italy, shoot the breeze in the shadow of one of the Mustangs they fly, August 1944. They are, from left to right, Lt. Dempsey W. Morgan, Jr., Lt. Carroll S. Woods, Lt. Robert H. Nelson, Jr., Captain Andrew D. Turner, and Lt. Clarence P. Lester. (Photo by PhotoQuest/Getty Images)" width="745" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-115600234-745x576.jpg 745w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-115600234-300x232.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-115600234-768x594.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/01/GettyImages-115600234.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 745px) 100vw, 745px" />PhotoQuest/Getty Image</div>
Hailing from central Alabama, the Airmen had to overcome the pervasive Jim Crow laws often used to block black soldiers from becoming pilots. The Airmen, recognizable by their planes’ iconic red tails, <a href="https://www.nationalww2museum.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/tuskegee-airmen.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">served</a> honorably in World War II despite facing bigotry and racism during their time in the armed forces, flying more than 15,000 missions. According to the National WWII Museum, “In all, the Tuskegee Airmen earned eight Purple Hearts, fourteen Bronze Stars, three Distinguished Unit Citations, and 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses.”
To understand their story, and the story of the many minorities who achieved success and greatness in America during that time, is to understand what real structural racism and anti-meritocratic prejudice looks like. Furthermore, to understand their crucial role in American history is to understand exactly why many modern arguments for DEI simply do not pass muster. The reality is that a black pilot in 1940 facing Jim Crow racism is not at all <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/ibm-hosts-internships-that-bar-whites-asians-and-men-with-exception-for-men-who-identify-as-women" target="_blank" rel="noopener">analogous</a> to a potential IBM intern who happens to be an “underrepresented minority” facing a normal meritocratic selection process. And using the valor and perseverance of the former to justify “diversity” quotas that serve the latter is to cede that past discrimination requires present discrimination.
The story of the Tuskegee Airmen is a devastating argument against much of the modern DEI space. Thus, it’s suspicious that it’s even part of a conversation about ending DEI. The reality is that no serious DEI skeptics have any problem with the Tuskegee Airmen. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Katie Britt (R-AL) stating the obvious truth that DEI doesn’t just mean “anything involving minorities” is a win for sanity and normalcy. It’s a sign that conservatives can walk and chew gum at the same time — we can repudiate the extremes of DEI while being honest about what America’s victories over racism have actually cost.
As litmus tests go, that’s a basic one. But, given how many DEI advocates seemingly can’t pass it, it’s an important one.
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Isaac Willour is an award-winning journalist focusing on race, culture, and American conservatism, as well as a corporate relations analyst at Bowyer Research. His work has been featured at outlets including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Opinion, C-SPAN, and The Daily Wire. He is a member of the Young Voices contributor program and can be found on X <a href="https://twitter.com/IsaacWillour" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@IsaacWillour</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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