Curtis LeMay helped organize the Berlin Airlift that kept a blockaded city alive and was also the architect of the deadliest single bombing raid in human history. This episode explores a commander who treated warfare not as a romantic clash of ideologies but as a solvable engineering problem, from a childhood of grinding poverty in Columbus, Ohio, and a civil engineering degree at Ohio State to his celebrated 1938 navigation of B-17s to intercept the liner SS Rex more than 600 miles out at sea despite deliberately wrong coordinates from the Navy.

The episode follows LeMay's combat box formations and court-martial threats for aborting crews in Europe, then his pivot in the Pacific when the jet stream made high-altitude precision bombing useless: stripping guns from B-29s, flying low at night, and using incendiaries against wood-and-paper nei ...