What Happened to LeMay's Lead Pilot After the Tokyo Firebombing

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]March 9th, 1945, 2300 hours Tokyo time. 5,000 ft above the Sumida River on a course of 010° true, the lead B-29 of the 21st Bomber Command rolls onto its bomb run. In the left seat is Brigadier General Thomas Sarsfield Power. He is 39 years old from New York City, the son of an Irish immigrant. He has been LeMay's deputy for 4 months. He carries on his lap a clipboard, a yellow legal pad, and three sharpened pencils. For the next 2 hours and 57 minutes, he will orbit Tokyo at 5,000 ft. He will write on the clipboard the entire time. The notes he takes will become the official after-action report.

[00:00:49]The fire below him will reach temperatures that boil the surface that boil the surface of the river. The mission was Operation Meetinghouse. 325 B-29 Superfortresses of the 21st Bomber Command launched from North Field, Guam, North Field, Tinian, and Isley Field, Saipan. Stripped of every defensive gun except the tail position to save weight.

[00:01:15]Each aircraft loaded with 1,520 M-69 incendiary cluster munitions, 6-lb bomblets filled with napalm designed to scatter on impact and ignite the wooden paper structures of central Tokyo.

[00:01:32]The aiming point was the Asakusa district in the city's heart, a 16 square mile zone of 100,000 civilians per square mile, the densest urban concentration in the world. The mission was personally approved by LeMay on March 6th, 1945.

[00:01:51]LeMay did not fly, he sent Power. But to understand why LeMay sent Thomas Power instead of leading the mission himself.

[00:02:00]And why Power would spend the next 25 years of his career building, he wrote down at 5,000 ft over Tokyo, we have to look back to who Power was before March 9th.

[00:02:13]He was not a career bomber pilot. He was an engineer.

[00:02:17]He had graduated from the Barbizon School of Engineering in New York in 1928, then enlisted in the Army Air Corps as a flying cadet. He had spent the 1930s as a test pilot at Wright Field. He understood aircraft as a designer understands a structure, every component, every margin, every load tolerance. LeMay sent Power over Tokyo on March 9th because Power was the only officer in the 21st Bomber Command who could read the burn pattern of a city the way an engineer reads a stress diagram. The notes Power took at 5,000 ft would become the operational template for nine more firebombing raids that spring. The bombing began at 23:15 hours on March 9th.

[00:03:08]Power's aircraft was the third over the city. The lead pathfinders had already laid an X pattern of incendiaries across central Tokyo to mark the aiming point.

[00:03:18]By 23:40 hours, the fire was visible from 60 miles out over Tokyo Bay. By 00:30 hours on March 10th, the firestorm had generated its own wind system.

[00:03:31]Surface winds of 40 mph drawn into the burning core, lifting roof tiles, lifting metal, lifting people. The B-29s in the second and third waves were thrown several hundred feet in altitude by the rising thermals. Three aircraft were lost. Power's aircraft was rocked twice but held. He kept writing. At 0212 hours on March 10th, the last B-29 cleared the target area. Powers aircraft turned south for the return leg to Guam, 1,570 miles of open ocean. He continued writing the report on the flight back.

[00:04:10]He did not sleep. He landed at North Field, Guam at 0518 hours, March 11th.

[00:04:17]He went directly to LeMay's quarters.

[00:04:19]LeMay was awake, waiting. Power handed him the clipboard. LeMay read the seven pages standing up. He read them twice.

[00:04:27]Then he asked Power one question, "How many?" Power said, "I do not know. We will not know for a week. It will be more than the bomb on Hiroshima will be when we drop it."

[00:04:39]LeMay said nothing. The final estimate, when it came, was approximately 100,000 dead in a single night.

[00:04:47]Five months later, in August, Hiroshima killed 70,000 on the first day.

[00:04:53]Operation Meetinghouse was, by every available measurement, the most destructive single air raid in human history. 100,000 dead.

[00:05:03]16 square miles of central Tokyo destroyed. 1,200,000 people made homeless overnight.

[00:05:11]Powers after-action report, classified secret at the time, was distributed within the 21st Bomber Command on March 12th, 1945.

[00:05:22]It contained no moral commentary. It contained ignition rates, wind dispersion measurements, optimal release altitudes, optimal incendiary tonnage per square mile, recommended target densities for subsequent missions.

[00:05:38]The 21st Bomber Command flew nine more major firebombing missions against Japanese cities in March, April, and May 1945, using the operational template Power had drafted at 5,000 ft, approximately 1/2 million additional civilians died in those raids. Power did not give a public interview about Operation Meetinghouse during the war. He did not give one in the first 10 years after the war. When asked in 1952 by a Saturday Evening Post reporter what he had thought as he watched Tokyo burn from 5,000 ft, he answered, "It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen, and it was necessary." Then he refused to elaborate. The interview was published with that one sentence and a paragraph of biographical detail.

[00:06:32]The Saturday Evening Post reporter, a writer named Bernt Balchen Jr., who had himself flown B-17s over Germany, later wrote that Power's refusal to expand on the sentence was the most articulate response to the firebombing he had ever heard from any participant.

[00:06:50]Power did not write a memoir of the war.

[00:06:54]The only book he ever published, Design for Survival, came out in 1965 and was about nuclear deterrence, not about Tokyo. What Thomas Power did between 1945 and 1957 is not in the standard public memory. If this is the kind of history you want more of, subscribe. We are just getting to it. He commanded the bomber school at Maxwell Field, Alabama, from 1946 to 1948, where every B-29 and early B-50 pilot in the United States Air Force trained under his direction. He commanded the Air Research and Development Command from 1954 to 1957, supervising the development of every American bomber, missile, and reconnaissance aircraft that would equip the Cold War strategic force.

[00:07:49]He was promoted to four-star general on April 15th, 1957.

[00:07:55]On July 1st of that year, he replaced Curtis LeMay as commander-in-chief of Strategic Air Command. He commanded SAC for 7 years. In that time, the SAC alert force grew from 300 B-47s and 100 B-52s to 900 bombers and 1,000 intercontinental ballistic missiles standing on alert 24 hours a day. SAC, under power, was, in measurable terms, the most concentrated instrument of destructive capability ever assembled by any government in human history. The alert bombers carried hydrogen bombs with yields in the megaton range. Each weapon's equivalent to the entire conventional tonnage dropped on Germany during the war.

[00:08:43]The ICBM force could deliver an additional 8,000 megatons within 30 minutes.

[00:08:50]Power's standing operational concept, which he briefed personally to President Eisenhower in 1958 and to President Kennedy in 1961, was that SAC's purpose was not to win a nuclear war, but to make one unwinnable for any adversary. The doctrine was called massive retaliation. It was the policy of three administrations. Power believed it. Power had drafted it. Power had also, in March 1945, watched 100,000 people burn from 5,000 ft. And he believed his entire postwar career was the consequence of that watching. On October 24th, 1962, at 1,000 hours Eastern Standard Time, with Soviet ships approaching the American naval quarantine line around Cuba.

[00:09:43]And President Kennedy in the White House Cabinet Room with his Executive Committee of the National Security Council, General Thomas Power at Strategic Air Command Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, issued an order. He ordered a SAC's worldwide alert status raised from DEFCON 3 to DEFCON 2. He did not consult the White House. He did not consult Secretary McNamara. He had the legal authority to do so under the standing rules of engagement governing the SAC alert force. He then ordered the DEFCON 2 declaration to be broadcast over the SAC global command radio network in clear English with no encryption.

[00:10:26]He intended Moscow to hear it. Moscow heard it within 90 minutes. The Soviet Foreign Ministry filed a formal protest with the State Department by midnight.

[00:10:37]Whether Power's October 24th broadcast accelerated the Soviet decision to withdraw the missiles from Cuba or nearly triggered a Soviet preemptive launch is a question historians have argued for 60 years.

[00:10:53]Khrushchev's own memoirs, published posthumously in 1974, described the broadcast as the moment he understood that the United States was preparing to use its strategic and that he had hours, not days, to reach a settlement. McNamara, in his 1995 memoir In Retrospect, describes the broadcast as the most reckless single act by a senior American military officer during the Cold War.

[00:11:22]Both men agree on one thing. They did not know on October 24th, 1962, whether Thomas Power, alone, on his own authority, had ended the Cuban Missile Crisis, or had nearly ended the world.

[00:11:37]Power remained a SAC commander for 15 more months after the missile crisis.

[00:11:43]His relationship with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, which had been correct but distant for 2 years, deteriorated steadily through 1963.

[00:11:55]The break came over the B-70 bomber.

[00:11:57]Power believed the United States required a new high-altitude, high-speed manned bomber to maintain the credibility of the deterrent.

[00:12:07]In McNamara believed missiles had made the manned bomber obsolete, and the B-70 program was a waste of approximately $14 billion in 1963 money. Power testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 1964 in support of B-70 procurement.

[00:12:28]McNamara had instructed him not to.

[00:12:31]Power testified anyway. On November 30th, 1964, McNamara recommended to President Johnson that Power be relieved as SAC commander.

[00:12:43]Johnson approved the recommendation within 48 hours.

[00:12:47]Thomas Power was relieved as commander in chief of Strategic Air Command on December 1st, 1964.

[00:12:55]He was reassigned to no follow-on duty.

[00:12:58]The Air Force offered him a vice chief of staff position. He declined. He requested retirement. The retirement was approved on January 31st, 1965.

[00:13:09]He was 59 years old. He had been on active duty for 36 years and 145 days.

[00:13:17]He moved to Palos Verdes Estates, California, a coastal suburb of Los Angeles, into a modest, single-story house overlooking the Pacific.

[00:13:28]He took a position as a consultant to the Schick razor company, where his predecessor as SAC commander, Curtis LeMay, had also been a board member. The position was a courtesy.

[00:13:40]Power gave no public interviews after his retirement. He attended no congressional hearings. He gave one speech in 1967 to the Air Force Association. The speech, given on November 14th, 1967.

[00:13:57]At the Air Force Association annual convention in Washington, was Power's only sustained public statement about the connection between Operation Meetinghouse and Strategic Air Command.

[00:14:09]He spoke for 42 minutes.

[00:14:11]The full text was published in Air Force magazine in January 1968.

[00:14:17]The most quoted passage came near the end.

[00:14:20]He said, "I have spent my entire adult life trying to make certain that no American officer would ever again have to do what I did at 5,000 ft over Tokyo on the night of March 9th, 1945.

[00:14:35]The deterrent we built at Strategic Air Command is the policy I owe to the people who died below me that night.

[00:14:42]If we are correct that we have made another such night impossible, then their deaths have produced an outcome they themselves were not given the choice to consent to. I will not call that consolation. I will call it the responsibility of the survivors."

[00:15:00]General Thomas Sarsfield Power died on December 6th, 1970 at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Long Beach, California. Cause of death, myocardial infarction. He was 65 years old. He had been retired for 5 years and 10 months.

[00:15:17]He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, Section 30, with a four-star generals marker.

[00:15:24]The marker reads, Thomas S. Power, General, US Air Force, World War II.

[00:15:30]There is no mention of Strategic Air Command. There is no mention of Tokyo.

[00:15:34]There is no mention of Cuba. Curtis LeMay attended the funeral. LeMay gave the eulogy. The eulogy was 3 minutes long. LeMay said, "Tom Power did the hardest job this Air Force has ever asked an officer to do. He did it the way it had to be done. He did not look for credit. He did not look for forgiveness. He looked for the work. We owe him every quiet night we ever sleep through." Curtis LeMay himself died on October 1st, 1990, age 83 at March Air Force Base, California. He is buried at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs. His marker carries the inscription, "Curtis E.

[00:16:17]LeMay, General of the Air Force, World War II, Korea, Vietnam." He had outlived Power by 19 years and 10 months. He had outlived McNamara, who would die in 2009, by no time at all, because McNamara was still alive then and would, in his final years, repeatedly identify the firebombing of Tokyo as the single most haunting decision he had been associated with in his entire career.

[00:16:45]McNamara never named Power in those late reflections. He named only LeMay.

[00:16:51]The man who had flown the mission was, by the 1990s, almost completely outside the public American memory of what had happened over Tokyo on March 9th, 1945.

[00:17:04]There is an argument that has run inside Air Force professional circles for 50 years. Was Thomas Power's career a triumph of professional service to a difficult duty, or was it a tragedy of moral entrapment in a doctrine that required him to spend the rest of his life justifying a single mission?

[00:17:24]The case for triumph, Power did the job his country asked. He built the deterrent. The deterrent worked. No American officer has ever again been required to fly the mission Power flew on March 9th, 1945.

[00:17:40]The case for tragedy, Power was a young engineer who watched 100,000 civilians die.

[00:17:47]He spent the next 25 years using his engineering mind to design a system intended to make sure he never had to watch it again. He never publicly grieved. He never wrote about it.

[00:18:00]The October 24th, 1962 broadcast on his own authority suggests a man for whom the work was never finished. The argument has not been resolved. Power himself in the 1967 speech called it the responsibility of the survivors. General Thomas Sarsfield Power died on December 6th, 1970. He was 65 years old. He is buried in section 30 of Arlington National Cemetery in a section where, by this point, four of the men whose stories this channel has told are buried within 400 yards of each other. General Hodges, General Taylor, General Fellers, and now Power. The 21st Bomber Command was deactivated in November 1946 and absorbed into the new Strategic Air Command, which Power would command from 1957 to 1964.

[00:18:59]The SAC itself was deactivated in 1992 and absorbed into the United States Strategic Command, which still operates today from Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, the headquarters Power commanded from the B-29 aircraft that led Powers mission over Tokyo on March 9th, 1945, tail number 42-638058 of the 314th Bombardment Wing, was retired from service in 1950 and scrapped in 1953 at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona. No part of it survives. The Sumida River still runs through Tokyo.

[00:19:42]The Asakusa district was rebuilt.

[00:19:44]Both the man who flew the mission and the man who ordered it lived to old age, said almost nothing publicly about that single night, and died believing their work had been the prevention of a worse one. If your father, your grandfather, your uncle, anyone in your family served in the 20th Air Force, the 21st Bomber Command, the 314th or 313th or 73rd Bombardment Wing on a B-29 crew in the Marianas, in the post-war Strategic Air Command, or in any unit of the United States Air Force that stood the SAC alert from 1948 through 1992, leave their name and what they did in the comments below. Don't just leave the name. Tell us one thing about them.

[00:20:37]One thing they did or one thing they said or one thing you remember. The men who were there deserve more than a name in a database. They deserve to be remembered as people. Now, subscribe if you want the next story. There are more of them.