The Cold War (39 page)

Nor has more recent history been kind to LeMay, the air force general most readily identified with the American strategic arsenal during the first two decades of the Cold War. For example, in Richard Rhodes's
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb,
LeMay is depicted as a hothead who tried his best to provoke a nuclear conflagration during the Cuban Missile Crisis. In Rhodes's opinion, LeMay felt that our nuclear forces (otherwise a “wasting asset”) ideally
should be used in a preemptive attack on the Soviet Union, a move that Rhodes believes would have resulted in “historic omnicide.”

Once described as “a rogue elephant barging out of a forest,” LeMay spoke too candidly and wrote too much. His method of argumentation and counsel was both undiplomatic and often theatrical; Maxwell Taylor remarked that LeMay “would jam that damn cigar in his mouth and place a chip on his shoulder and parade through the halls of the Pentagon looking for a fight.” So, despite his substantial experience and proven record of success, LeMay is now remembered too often for his outrageous one-liners (“Well, maybe if we do this overflight right, we can get World War III started”), which seemed to confirm that for years a scary dinosaur from World War II had America's atomic weapons under his operational command. No wonder he ended up a nearrecluse, reluctant to appear publicly or grant interviews, still bitter over the crude and simplistic portrayal of him in the popular media during the 1960s.

LeMay was an obvious and easy target for caricature. After President Lyndon Johnson successfully portrayed Republican candidate Barry Goldwater as a trigger-happy nuclear warmonger in the 1964 campaign, and with disenchantment growing over the stalemate in Vietnam, the American public began to grow leery of the power—and intentions—of the country's Cold Warriors. In addition, in 1965, LeMay had at last published his memoirs (
Mission with LeMay
), which confirmed the hearsay and innuendo that had circulated about him for years. For once, in fact, the official record was far more inflammatory than the rumor and gossip of any liberal journalist. Of the existing “no-win” policy against the North Vietnamese, LeMay scoffed, “My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.” LeMay's “back into the Stone Age” became an often repeated and embarrassing part of the discourse about the war. Further, LeMay's experience in dealing with Japanese kamikazes in World War II, and his later concern over the human-wave attacks by North Korean and Chinese Communists, appeared in print as racist advice on how to win another Asian war:

Because of LeMay's theatrics and frequently uncouth pronouncements, most critics missed the fact that his advocacy of a strategic air campaign against military targets in North Vietnam—dockyards, ports, power plants, railroads, factories, and irrigation facilities—might have been more successful, as well as less devastating to civilians in the long run, than the actual policy of carpetbombing the south. Because LeMay was his own public relations nightmare, most forgot that he had deplored the use of tactical fighter-bombers in occasional haphazard strategic roles, while—against his wishes—his beloved strategic B-52 bomber fleet was used tactically, resulting in slaughter without harming the enemy's infrastructure.

As for the fictional General Buck Turgidson's eagerness to push the nuclear button (“only 10 to 20 million killed, tops”), LeMay himself had written nearly as much in his 1965 autobiography:

LeMay's nuclear fascination was in evidence as late as a 1984 interview, in which the seventy-eight-year-old retired general still lamented his inability as commander of America's strategic air forces to gain unquestioned access to nuclear weapons “and to take some action on my own” if—as Buck Turgidson puts it in
Dr. Strangelove—
“the normal chain of command has been disrupted.”

In 1968, when he ran for vice president on George Wallace's third-party ticket, LeMay published the polemical
America Is in Danger,
which in part outlined a strategic air campaign against Red China. On occasion, he quoted Dr. Edward Teller—the model for Dr. Strangelove himself—about the advantages
of nuclear proliferation. “One could also question the basic premise,” LeMay added, “that stability itself is always desirable.”

LeMay's physical appearance only enhanced his hard-nosed reputation: a burly physique, thick hair combed straight back, bushy black eyebrows, a barrel chest bedecked with air medals, binoculars slung around his neck, the huge cigar perennially stuck out of one side of his mouth, occasional sunglasses—a cartoonist's dream, which ever since has provided the stereotype of the Penta-gon's top brass. An avid big-game hunter and sports-car enthusiast, he was frequently photographed with elephant, buffalo, and bear trophies as well as souped-up racing cars. This was no technocrat, no West Point academician controlling our nation's nuclear bomber fleet, but a general more comfortable behind the wheel of a fully loaded bomber. Indeed, LeMay ended his autobiography with his favorite last order as he boarded his bomber: “Crank her up, let's go.”

All this has made it difficult for the historian to separate LeMay's public bluster from his actual record as an air force general. Like many others, I accepted without question Kubrick's caricature of LeMay and considered him a reckless and one-dimensional military mind with little concern for human lives, civilian or military, the enemy's or those of his own men.

I also had some personal, anecdotal information about General LeMay, and it confirmed the image of a no-holds-barred, bombs-away hyperpatriot. During World War II, my father had flown on thirty-four missions (and was credited with two destroyed Japanese fighters) in a B-29 attached to the 504th Bomb Group, stationed with the 313th Bombardment Wing on the island of Tinian as part of LeMay's XXI Bomber Command. My father's stories of the firebombing of Japanese cities seemed to tell of indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population and a reckless use of American aviators. By taking their magnificent precision bombers (which were theretofore targeting strictly military and industrial targets) from the near safety of 30,000 to 35,000 feet to fly as little more than huge dive-bombers at 5,000 to 7,000 feet and occasionally lower, LeMay seemed bent on a deliberate sacrifice of aviators' lives simply to deliver more ordnance. That Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both nuked under LeMay's command and, with his support, rounded out the crude stereotype.

Still, I have been intrigued by my father's failure to criticize LeMay directly, when it would have been so easy for him to do so. Despite his horrific stories of B-29s overloaded with napalm and blowing up on takeoff, of low-flying
bombers shredded by flak and their eleven-man crews sent spiraling into a selfgenerated inferno over Tokyo, of the smell of burning Japanese flesh wafting through the bomb-bay doors, he never equated that barbarity with LeMay. On the contrary, he seemed to think that the carnage below his plane and the sacrifice of his friends in the air—twelve of sixteen B-29s in his 398th Squadron crashed, were shot down, or were never heard from again—had been necessary to win the war and save, not expend, lives. And despite his lifelong Democratic Party credentials, my father spoke highly of LeMay even in the midst of the general's entry into controversial right-wing politics. Increasingly, I have wondered why he bore affection for such a seemingly unaffectionate personality.

To review the career of Curtis E. LeMay is to chronicle the growth of the U.S. strategic air force. To review his behavior and conduct in the military is to understand the American character itself, its mettle in wartime and its naïveté and impudence during the peace. No other American bore more responsibility for the development of strategic air power from 1944 to 1965, a twenty-one-year period that saw the strategic fleet develop from a force of often ineffectual pro-peller-driven bombers into the most powerful airborne arm the world had seen. LeMay's role was decisive at all levels—operational, tactical, and strategic— and characterized throughout by decisive judgment, aggressive leadership, and unquestioned personal courage. Anywhere American bombers were deployed, LeMay was not far away; often he was in the cockpit. (By the end of his career, LeMay was certified to fly—and flew—seventy-five types of military aircraft, ranging from strategic and tactical bombers to tankers, cargo planes, fighters, civilian transports, and helicopters.)

In 1937, after nine years in the U.S. Army Air Corps, First Lieutenant LeMay was attached to the 2nd Bombardment Group, which was the first unit to fly the new B-17 bomber. LeMay's crews trained on it for the next four and a half years, until the United States entered World War II. In April 1942, Colonel LeMay was assigned to the Eighth Air Force, and he took command of the 305th Bombardment Group, comprising thirty-five B-17s. Although he was only thirty-five years old, no other American had more experience with the B-17; in fact, LeMay was the only pilot in his entire group to have flown the bomber at all. “I gave them a ride in a B-17 before we went overseas so they could shoot at a target as we flew across the desert at a hundred feet,” he later recounted in his autobiography. “That was it. That's what we went to war with.
They were not only a rabble, but I didn't have any confidence in their com-mander—me! I had never commanded anything.”

But in little over a year, after leading many of the daylight missions over Europe himself, LeMay was made brigadier general. By March 1944, as a major general, he had taken command of an entire air division (266 B-17s and B-24s) and flown on some of the most dangerous air battles of the war, including the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raids. Although not yet forty, he had developed a reputation for organizational skill in creating professional, effective forces ex nihilo.

In August 1944 he was ordered to the Pacific theater to take over the XX Bomber Command, as part of the army's new strategic air campaign against Japan. This force, based in China and India, was understaffed and its novel B-29s still unproved; LeMay was largely frustrated in his attempt to destroy strategic Japanese industries on a wide scale. But in January 1945 he went to the newly conquered Mariana Islands and assumed command of the consolidated strategic forces of the XXI Bomber Command, a force far different from the B-29 squadrons he had commanded the year before in Asia. The new bases on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan were easily supplied by the navy, relatively safe from enemy attack, completely autonomous, and not surrounded by hostile native populations, while the B-29s themselves were gradually being freed from engineering flaws and early mechanical problems. Both crews and planes were arriving in increasing levels, and fighter squadrons of P-47s and P-51s were being assembled to escort the planes over Japan. In addition, the capture of Iwo Jima in February created a safe base for damaged B-29s on their return trip from Tokyo. Finally, LeMay's predecessor, Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, Jr., had devised the foundation—infrastructure, command organization, tactical approach—of an effective bombing command during his threemonth tenure. Unfortunately for Hansell, the inclement weather over Japan —the jet stream and thunderclouds that tossed planes wildly in random directions—and the enormous distances involved for the new planes and crews had meant a failure to achieve the dramatic results demanded by Washington from the corps's orthodox reliance on high-altitude, precision bombing.

It was here, with a radical change in tactics, that LeMay gained fame as he methodically engineered the destruction of most of the urban areas of Japan. But for six weeks after he arrived on Guam, LeMay did little to change his pre-decessor's tactical and strategic practices. The huge bombers, after all, had
been created to fly well above Japanese fighters at 30,000 to 35,000 feet. From there, equipped with radar and protected by twelve .50-caliber guns whose turrets could be synchronized, the bombers' well-trained eleven-man crews could supposedly attack industrial targets accurately and with impunity.

In reality, that was rarely true. The bombers' unreliable engines overheated during the strenuous effort to reach high altitudes while overloaded with enormous bomb loads of twenty thousand pounds. Mechanical difficulties and adverse weather reduced the number of bombers that could reach the target. Often under 5 percent of the bombs dropped on Japan were landing within a thousand feet of the designated target. Further, until Iwo Jima was captured, bombers were crashing into the ocean in increasing numbers on their long way back to the Marianas.

LeMay knew that if aircraft losses continued to rise and Japan's infrastructure remained largely viable, he, too, would be relieved of command. But he also was aware of some preliminary and successful trials with low-level incendiary attacks at night. The E. I. du Pont company had produced a new substance known as napalm that ignited and engulfed with flame anything it came in contact with. And in December 1944, B-29s had burned out over 40 percent of the Japanese supply facility at Hankow, China. So the challenge for LeMay was to expand on that early, promising, and harrowing evidence—in the process, refuting the entire tradition of precision bombing, dismissing much of his own experience gained in the daylight air war over Germany, contradicting the previous training of his own bomber crews, ignoring the original design intent of the B-29, and committing a democratic United States to a policy that would guarantee the incineration of thousands of noncombatants.