The Cold War (41 page)

During the tense days of October 1962, LeMay repeatedly demanded offensive action (“city-busting”) against the Soviet Union: “If there is to be war, there's no better time than the present. We are prepared and ‘the bear’ is not.” Of Cuba (“a side-show”), he remarked simply, “Fry it.” Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, he specifically urged a comprehensive plan of open reconnaissance flights over Cuba, guarded by armed fighter escorts; around-the-clock readiness of SAC nuclear bombers targeted at the Soviet Union; and the eventual use of nuclear weapons against Cuba. To LeMay, the thought of a small Caribbean state only ninety miles off the coast of Florida threatening the security of the United States, when the latter possessed overwhelming military superiority over both Cuba and its patron, was unthinkable and dangerous. As American officials hesitated, LeMay worried that even a blockade of Soviet armaments to Cuba was an admission of weakness, especially if monitored by United Nations inspectors. Far better, he urged, to send the fleet to Havana, circle the skies overhead with SAC bombers, and then order Fidel Castro to allow U.S. military officers to inspect the Soviet-installed nuclear missile sites. LeMay shocked Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who wanted to know the capability of SAC bombers in a possible conventional strike against Cuban installations; when the president's brother asked how many of LeMay's planes carried nuclear weapons, the general said, “All of them.” In disbelief, Robert
Kennedy asked, “How many of them could carry conventional weapons?” LeMay answered, “None of them.”

To LeMay, incrementalism encouraged provocation, and only the ability and clear intent to face off the Soviets would ensure a cessation of their presence near the Americas. Of the peaceful final resolution to the Cuban crisis, LeMay scoffed that it was “the greatest defeat in our history.” He thought the secret trade-off of American Jupiter missiles in Turkey for Soviet weapons in Cuba, and the clear impression that the United States would not, when pushed, use its strategic assets against a Soviet Union inferior in nuclear power, meant that the Soviets would be free to continue to aid Cuba and meddle in Latin America. In short, he felt the United States had gained the international reputation of an enormously powerful state that could not or would not act. Central to LeMay's brinkmanship was the belief that the Soviet Union either would not attack American interests or would be annihilated before its bomber fleet could reach the United States and its allies. LeMay was mostly correct: The Soviets probably would have backed off, and had they not, he probably could have caught their bombers and missiles on the ground. But “mostly” and “probably” were not guarantee enough in a new world in which a single surviving warhead might mean the loss of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Whatever LeMay's astute reading of human nature and his confidence in his superb bombers, he could not ensure the absolute safety of the American citizenry in the ensuing inferno—and it is not clear that he always understood this.

What, then, are we to make of this strange Curtis E. LeMay, this triggerhappy Buck Turgidson in the flesh? We can begin by realizing that both LeMay's military success and public relations catastrophes evolved from a frank, often brutal, but ultimately realistic assessment of human and hence national behavior. LeMay's bleak summation of human character was entirely Thucydidean, nearly echoing the historian's famous dialogue between the Athenians and their doomed foes on the island of Melos in 415 b.c., in which he lays out the bleak, timeless realities anytime the strong confront the weak. LeMay wrote:

For all his hyperbole and failure to grasp the dilemma of nuclear warfare— in which America demanded absolute, rather than near, invulnerability— LeMay's assessment of Soviet intentions and the need to achieve overwhelming strategic superiority seems, after the collapse of the Cold War, more rather than less correct. His distrust of the numbers crunchers in Robert McNamara's Pentagon (“so-called thinkers”) was often based on the premise that it was amoral for bureaucrats to send Americans into a war they could not win—and that those who did so had not tasted fire. Given McNamara's own confessional, LeMay's program for ending the war may have even been the more humane one, political issues aside, in the sense that an early and comprehensive campaign against all strategic targets in Hanoi and Haiphong would have saved more lives on both sides in the long run. LeMay's idea that guerrilla fighters and irregular armies could not be stopped with piecemeal use of American ground troops, but only through massive air attack on their ultimate sources of supply, seems in hindsight more logical than lunatic. LeMay, remember, thought entirely in a military sense: Airpower could be successful only when the enemy's entire infrastructure was strategically targeted. If politicians worried about subsequent escalation of hostilities, LeMay would counter that any overwhelming military deterrence precluded enemy options and hence made all-out war less rather than more likely. Current American defense doctrine of the need for overwhelming force in cases of intervention is beginning to appear more rather than less in line with LeMay's earlier advice.

Nor does LeMay's innate skepticism about idealistic but inexperienced technocrats without battle experience seem shallow. For example, he worried about the young Harold Brown—who, in 1980 as secretary of defense in the Carter administration, was to oversee the flawed and undermanned raid into Iran to try to free the American hostages in Tehran. LeMay concluded that Brown was naive and utopian and could be dangerous in his misguided view of the nature of war. In anger, LeMay correctly ridiculed Brown's dictum that the
air force was to use “the minimum force available to attain those ends. We are trying to minimize our own casualties, the casualties of our allies. We are even trying to minimize the casualties of our adversaries.” In LeMay's eyes, minimizing “the casualties of our adversaries” inevitably meant prolonging war—and increasing our losses.

While it is easy to quote the garrulous LeMay to his detriment, and to find examples in which he may have exceeded authority, his subservience to civilian control was never really in doubt. Much of his rhetoric now seems to have been intended for in-house bickering over budgetary appropriations, designed to advance the extreme position in hopes that the ultimate compromise might satisfy his insatiable need for more bombers. Moreover, his public lectures and writings echo a common theme: Decisive, massive use of force—especially air-power—can shorten, even circumvent, war, thus saving more lives than it costs. LeMay had no faith in the United Nations as a preventive force, and he urged the United States to act alone or with its NATO allies according to its own interests and military capability.

If, like Sophocles' Ajax—who finds his heroic code outmoded and unappreciated in a more complex and nuanced world—we find the LeMays of our country at times dangerous, surely uncouth, and always embarrassing, we must realize that theirs is the baggage that often comes with unsurpassed courage and a willingness to step forward to take on the burden of defense in war's darkest hours. Men of that temperament organize massive armadas, create air forces ex nihilo, and cannot and should not be caged within established bureaucracies where the necessary business is maintenance, not construction; peace, not war; conciliation, not assault. In peace, of course, we want men of education, prudence, and manners guiding our military. But in times of war, as we have learned from both the fire raids over Japan and the standoff with the Soviets, we have often been served far better by the improbable emergence of warriors like Curtis E. LeMay, who somehow can find, organize, and lead men into the inferno. In the darkest hours of the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy acknowledged this: “It's good to have men like Curt LeMay and Arleigh Burke commanding troops when you decide to go in. But these men aren't the only ones you should listen to when you decide whether to go in or not.” By his careful use of “only,” Kennedy acknowledged the value even of LeMay's blunt and often extreme advice.

Like Grant and Patton, the LeMays can do what Lincoln called “the terrible arithmetic,” and so understand that the American way of war is to throw vast
amounts of men and matériel into the fire in order to end, not prolong, the killing. They know battle for what it is, so have no illusions that even a democracy must sometimes go to war wholeheartedly and therefore kill—thousands of the enemy if need be—to survive. Their legacy is that while being branded bellicose, they have saved more lives than they have taken. Their tragedy is that their brutal success in war produces a peace uneasy with their continued presence, and that their continued ardor asks us to make sacrifices we cannot and should not make. Just as they have come out of nowhere, so, too, when their foul business is done, should they disappear into the dark recesses that they inhabit. LeMay himself seemed to concede this: “I had blood upon my hands as I did this, but not because I preferred to bathe in blood. It was because I was part of a primitive world where men still had to kill in order to avoid being killed, or in order to avoid having their loved Nation stricken and emasculated.”

Embattled and caricatured in his later years, LeMay understood his own Sophoclean dilemma. Many of his reckless pronouncements, as chilling as they sound today, were more likely the final proud bluster of an epic figure onstage who would rather perish in his absolute code of good and evil than change to meet the necessities of a far more nuanced and complex world for which he was so poorly suited in both comportment and speech. That he was not secretary of defense during the Cold War was wise; that he was even chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force with nuclear weapons under his command was cause for legitimate concern; that he commanded our bombers against Japan was a stroke of fortune for us all. And so now I tend to agree with my father that he had survived the war largely because of the daring and genius of the loudmouthed, cigar-chewing General Curtis E. LeMay.

DOUGLAS PORCH

The historian George G. Herring opens his notable study,
America's Longest War,
with a scene that in retrospect is suffused with an unforgettable (but almost forgotten) poignance. The date was September 2, 1945, the same day that representatives of the Japanese government signed a formal surrender agreement on the battleship
Missouri
. At Hanoi that day, the former cabin boy Ho Chi Minh, wearing a faded khaki suit and rubber sandals, proclaimed the independence of Vietnam from French rule.

As Herring writes:

For several months Ho's Communist front organization, the Viet Minh—which translates roughly as the “Vietnamese Independence League”—occupied the government headquarters in Hanoi. But France was determined to hold on to Indochina, which comprised not only Vietnam but also Cambodia and Laos. Vanguards of the French army, helped
by British occupation forces that had taken responsibility for accepting the Japanese surrender south of the 17th Parallel, drove the Viet Minh out of the area then known as Cochin China, centered around Saigon. The U.S. gave tacit approval to the French reoccupation of its richest colony. Our backing of nationalist movements in Southeast Asia, which FDR had advocated before his death, would have to wait. The threat of a Communist takeover in France kept the U.S. from interfering in its colonial affairs. The risk of alienating, and perhaps losing, a key nation in the Western alliance was one the Truman administration did not want to take.

The French attempted to negotiate with the Viet Minh, which all the while continued to build up strength. The talks went nowhere. “Their own stubbornness,” the journalist and historian Bernard Fall writes, “and their unwillingness to see the situation as it was” doomed the halfhearted French overtures. To Indochina, the appeal of nationalism, stiffened by Communist discipline, was becoming irresistible. Part of the genius of Communism, especially in colonial nations, was that this system of ultimate repression seemed forever on the side of liberation.

Out of frustration, the French abandoned political means in favor of military ones. In November 1946 a French cruiser shelled Haiphong, Indochina's biggest port, killing an estimated six thousand and setting off, in Herring's words, “a war which in its various phases would last nearly thirty years.” Between 1946 and 1949, the French, who lacked both the manpower and the necessary weight of modern weaponry, struggled in vain to smother the Viet Minh rebellion. All attempts to pin down and destroy the Viet Minh in set-piece battles failed. Whenever their losses threatened to become insupportable, Giap's men simply faded into the jungle that covered more than half of Indochina. For France, this
guerre sans fronts
soon proved a gamble as foolhardy as the Communist decision to invade South Korea. As Ho expressed it in a neat parable: “If ever the tiger pauses, the elephant will impale him on his mighty tusks. But the tiger will not pause, and the elephant will die of exhaustion and loss of blood.”