James M. Scott brings to life with painstaking detail and humanity the terror and plight and hopes of Japanese citizens in their cities, and US pilots in the air--their duties, their misgivings, their conflicted reactions, their sense of victory, and their moral survival off that victory. You realize you've never read this story before in this way, with these long views of history and such collar-grabbing intensity. Black Snow raises profound questions about how peace is made during one of America's most turbulent periods on the world stage, and it speaks clearly to us today. You won't put it down.--Doug Stanton, #1 New York Times bestselling author of In Harm's Way and Horse Soldiers Black Snow brilliantly vivifies the horrific reality of the most destructive air attack in history, against Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. James Scott deftly employs sharply etched portraits of individuals of all stations and nationalities to survey the global, technological, and moral backdrop of the cataclysm, including the searing experiences of Japanese trapped in a gigantic firestorm. This riveting account illuminates an historical moment of profound contemporary relevance.

--Richard B. Frank, author of Tower of Skulls: A History of the Asia-Pacific War: July 1937-May 1942 James Scott's fine new book concerns itself with many incendiary things, but fundamentally it addresses perhaps the most incendiary question to be found within the ethics (if there are any) of warfare: Should civilians be considered legitimate targets? Scott explores this tricky topic with an appropriate sense of gravitas, with a storytelling verve, with a mastery of the subject matter, and, most important of all, with a searching heart.--Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and On Desperate Ground The firebombing of Japan is one of the most gut-wrenching and controversial chapters in modern history. James Scott's Black Snow is a brilliant, fast moving, utterly absorbing, and devastating account of the full price of victory in the Pacific.--Alex Kershaw, author of The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II A book as valuable as it is engrossing. An account filled with sharp detail that never slows the headlong narrative pace. Black Snow is at once an adventure story, a technological thriller, and a harrowing reminder of the human cost of total war in our modern age.--Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril: America in the Fight for the Atlantic, the Longest Battle of World War II Long buried and forgotten, the deliberate firebombing of Japan's main cities in 1945 was as gruesome as the dropping of the atomic bomb that followed.

Now, 77 years later, renowned WWII historian James Scott has told the true and complete story for the first time, from both sides of the vengeful coin. Without sparing the suffering of its Japanese victims, Scott narrates in Black Snow the real and remorseless saga, from the drawing board in Seattle to the runways of revenge in the Pacific. Scott's prodigious research, his interviews and oral histories of survivors--American and Japanese--as well as his mastery of the telling detail, will make this a classic history of war: a tale of fantastic military hubris and its ultimate, catastrophic cost to a people who had literally sown the whirlwind. Unputdownable.--Nigel Hamilton, author of the FDR at War trilogy: Master of the Battlefield, Commander in Chief, and War and Peace.