As some of you may know, Malcolm @Gladwell 's podcast  just completed a four part deep dive on Curtis LeMay, napalm, and the firebombing of Tokyo. 

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/45-the-bomber-mafia

Book reviews are so twentieth century; here's my stab at a pod review.

I'll start by saying it's fantastic. It's one of the most accessible treatments of the topic that does not shy away from unsettling moral questions. It looks beyond Japan to the bombing of North Korea and Vietnam. It includes Japanese perspectives. It's hard not to be impressed.

That said, there are points where Gladwell's laser-like focus on LeMay obscures other crucial facets of the shift to area bombing. In Gladwell's telling, the turn to firebombing comes at the personal behest of LeMay, who, after replacing Hansell, pioneered this new tactic.

There's no denying LeMay's central role as an architect, but this narrative doesn't account for the fact that the US military was investigating the viability of incendiary raids against urban Japan well before LeMay ever set foot on the Marianas.

That Japanese cities were tinderboxes was well known. As Gennifer Weisenfeld points out, the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake was a global event, heightening awareness of the combustibility of Japan's wooden cities.

Billy Mitchell and other prophets of American air power took note

Retaliatory calls to "bomb Tokyo" after Pearl Harbor eventually gave way to concrete plans to burn it to the ground.

See, e.g., this 1944 Committee of Operations Analyst report, which, in chilling language, lays out a plan for the firestorm to come. https://www.scribd.com/document/64963302/COA-Economic-Effects-of-Successful-Area-Attacks-on-Six-Japanese-Cities-4-Sept-1944-Part-1

Most crucially, the episodes overlook the pains taken by war planners and AAF officials to cast Japanese cities as uniformly military and industrial in composition.

This was the rhetorical lubricant that helped the military sell the bombing of civilians to the public.

As @CaryKaracas and I have shown, abstract spatial and linguistic representations of cities effectively emptied urban Japan of any indications of civilian or social life. J. cities were cast as "industrial areas" comprised of "workers housing." 

http://www.japanairraids.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/A-Cartographic-Fade-to-Black.pdf

Gladwell, for example, rightly pays attention to the model Japanese test structures burned to the ground at Dugway, but disregards the fact that they were routinely labeled "workers quarters" located in "industrial urban sectors."

The interior of these test structures suggests otherwise: tatami, cabinets, and futon that one would encounter in the single family home.

Much more could also be said about the targeting of Shitamachi, the working class neighborhood that became "incendiary zone 1" on March 9/10

The contours of this zone were not drawn haphazardly; they had been in the sights of military strategists since as early as 1943.

Lastly, the tight focus on Tokyo doesn't allow for a discussion of the shifting nature of urban targets: the slide from the destruction of Osaka, Kobe, and other industrial centers to Kofu, Nagaoka, and dozens of small cities (of minor importance to the war economy).

In this, Gladwell is hardly alone. Scholars understandably lavish attention on the atomic bombings and make mention of the Great Tokyo Air Raid, but fast-forward through the raids on the 60 cities in between.

@CaryKaracas and I have a short piece forthcoming on this point.

Of course, it wouldn't be an academic review if it didn't include the line: these are mere quibbles.

Gladwell has done a wonderful job and unearthed a rich oral archive. He'll do more to prompt reflection on this topic than any academic could. For that he should be applauded.

Which is my elaborate segue to a plug for @PaperCityTokyo a documentary I'm producing about the crusade of survivors of the firebombing of Tokyo to memorialize their experience while they still can. https://vimeo.com/344006883