A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  He developed the first practical bomber formation, called the “combat box.” He put multiple combat boxes together to form a “combat wing.” The aerial gunnery schools in the United States for a bomber’s machine gunners were pathetically amateurish in the early years of the war. LeMay lobbied for gunnery schools in England to teach the men how to handle their .50 calibers well enough to knock down German fighters boring in to rake a bomber. He established “lead crew” schools for bombardiers and navigators to familiarize themselves with potential targets. When one of these was designated for a strike at a morning briefing, someone in the room already knew how to fly there and the best approach. As LeMay devised each of these innovations, they were quickly adopted as standard procedure by now Major General Ira Eaker’s VIII Bomber Command, the bomber branch of his fledgling Eighth Air Force. And as the struggle in the skies over Germany intensified, the bomber became more than a weapon to Curtis LeMay, it became a fighting machine to which he was deeply wedded emotionally, an arm in which he had unshakable faith.

  In September 1943, he received his first star, and then in March 1944, at Eaker’s urging, Hap Arnold passed over several more senior brigadiers to give LeMay his second, making him, at thirty-seven, the youngest major general in the U.S. Army. He was also a well-decorated one, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for valor, for LeMay was never shy about taking over the co-pilot’s seat in the lead bomber on a mission.

  The new long-range B-29 Superfortress was entering the bomber force. Arnold was convinced that if the full potential of the B-29s could be brought to bear on Japanese industry, the transportation system, and other infrastructure, Japan could be forced to surrender without the necessity of an invasion. The seizure of the southern home island of Kyushu, planned for November 1945 at the estimated cost of roughly 300,000 American servicemen killed and wounded, could be averted. Victory through the B-29s would, in addition, demonstrate the efficacy of air power in the most dramatic way possible and strengthen mightily the argument for an independent air force after the war.

  In January 1945, Arnold demonstrated the special confidence he had grown to have in LeMay by placing him in command of all B-29s operating out of Guam and its sister islands, Saipan and Tinian, in the Marianas group in the western Pacific. The islands had been seized from the Japanese during the summer of 1944 at the cost of more than 16,000 Marines killed and wounded and nearly 4,000 Army casualties. But LeMay encountered over Japan an enemy he had not met in the German skies. It was a high-altitude jet stream, a wind so strong that it would grab B-29s, whose crews were attempting to line up on a target at 195 miles per hour, and propel them ahead at a speed of almost 450 mph. Accurate calculations with the Norden bombsight became impossible. To make matters worse, the reigning deity of the atmosphere over Japan was a god of the clouds. Clear visibility was infrequent.

  LeMay was not a man to persist in a futile exercise and the challenge he faced brought out the ruthlessness in him. In contrast to the brick-and-mortar cities of Europe, Japan’s cities, like many other urban centers in the Asia of the time, were wooden and thus highly vulnerable to fire. An estimated 90 percent of the buildings in the wealthier sections of Tokyo were constructed of wood and 99 percent in the poorer districts. Moreover, the streets were narrow and the houses and other buildings close together, so that flames could easily spring from one structure to another and leap the streets, rapidly engulfing an entire area. Tokyo and the neighboring port of Yokohama to its south had experienced devastating fires on several occasions prior to the war, the worst set off by the earthquake of 1923, when much of the metropolitan areas of both cities had been devastated and 100,000 people killed. Since he could not bomb Japan’s industries directly, LeMay decided he would burn down the factories by burning down the cities around them.

  On the night of March 9, 1945, he staged the most horrendous fire-bombing in the history of modern warfare. He sent 334 B-29s over the center of Tokyo, each loaded with six tons plus of 100-pound Mark 47 oil-gel bombs, one of which could ignite a major blaze, and Mark 69 bombs of napalm, a jellied gasoline, one of the more terrifying inventions of the war, which had been devised by a Harvard chemist named Louis Fieser. LeMay wanted to head the raid himself, but he had been briefed only recently on the atomic bomb and was thus barred from flying for fear that he might divulge the secret under torture if shot down and captured. He chose as the man to lead the attack his newest wing commander, Brigadier General Thomas “Tommy” Power, a slim, angular Irishman from New York City. His leadership of the attack that night was to begin a long association between the two men, and Power, in a subsequent and quite different role, was also to become a major figure in Bennie Schriever’s career in the building of the intercontinental ballistic missile during the 1950s.

  “It was a hell of a good mission,” Tommy Power shouted down from the cockpit of his Superfortress when LeMay came out to meet him as the bomber taxied to a halt on the airstrip back on Guam at 9:00 on the morning of the 10th. The aerial reconnaissance photographs that afternoon showed that LeMay had razed a wasteland in Tokyo at least fifteen miles square. (The subsequent official Japanese calculation was 16.8.) Hardly anything was left standing amidst the ashes except charred steel beams and the concrete and masonry fragments that had once been parts of buildings. No one knows precisely how many people he killed in that single raid. At the time the Japanese authorities put the number at 83,793 dead and another 40,918 people injured. An official Japanese history of the war later revised the number to 72,489 deaths. A million people were also rendered homeless as the firestorm destroyed more than 267,000 buildings.

  While LeMay’s willingness to engage in slaughter on such a scale demonstrated the remorselessness of the man, he was not attempting to be deliberately cruel. The firebombings were the only way he could think of to destroy Japan’s industry. Balanced against the bloodletting the American infantryman and Marine would have to endure to invade and physically conquer the Japanese home islands, the agony of Japan’s civilians had no weight in the scales. No American leader, military or civilian, was going to protect Japanese civilians at the expense of American soldiers.

  Two nights later it was the turn of Nagoya, the center of Japan’s aircraft industry. Then it was the turn of Osaka, then Kobe. Over a period of ten nights the somewhat stocky man of medium height with the square jaw and the taciturn manner razed thirty-three square miles of Japan’s four leading industrial cities. On the night of April 13, 1945, 327 Superfortresses revisited Tokyo, dropping 2,139 tons of incendiaries and torching another 11.4 square miles of the city. The capital’s sister city of Yokohama to the south was added to the list. The statistics became a litany of destruction. By the middle of June, LeMay had eliminated 105.6 square miles of Japan’s main centers of industry, including 56.3 square miles of Tokyo.

  Working his ever-growing fleet of B-29s a record 120 hours a month, LeMay began to drop incendiaries virtually as fast as the Navy transports carrying them reached the Marianas. Japan had become more naked than ever at the end of March 1945, after the assault and seizure of the small volcanic island of Iwo Jima, less than a third the size of Manhattan, from its 21,000 dug-in Japanese defenders at the cost of 6,821 Americans killed from all services, including 4,554 Marines. (For the first time in the war, the assault forces sustained more casualties than there were Japanese on the island—almost 30,000 Americans in all, 23,573 from among the Marines.) Iwo Jima was located just 670 miles south of Tokyo, approximately midpoint from the Marianas. The island was the perfect base for P-51 Mustangs, shifted to the Pacific after the defeat of Germany. From Iwo Jima the P-51s, king of Second World War propeller-driven fighters, could easily rendezvous with the B-29s and escort them on daytime missions. They shot the remaining Japanese fighters out of the sky. The island also served as an emergency landing point for damaged bombers that would never have made it the remaining 625 miles to the airfield at Saipan, north of Guam. Bennie’s younge
r brother, Gerry Schriever, who had also become an Army Air Forces engineering officer in the Pacific, was awarded his colonel’s eagles by LeMay for the speed with which the engineer group he commanded repaired these B-29s on Iwo Jima and had them flown back to the Marianas.

  By the end of July, LeMay had scorched the greater part of sixty large and medium-sized Japanese cities to cinders with 150,000 tons of firebombs. A total of 670,000 Japanese civilians were to perish in American bombings, most in LeMay’s fire raids. In June, Arnold had asked him when he thought he could end the war. LeMay replied that he would run out of targets about the first of October and by then the Japanese ought to be ready to capitulate without the necessity of an invasion. He was wrong about the timing. The awe-inspiring destruction of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki three days later enabled Japan’s emperor, Hirohito, to overrule the fanatical militarist holdouts and announce a surrender on August 15, 1945. Yet LeMay was still the man most responsible for ending the war with such swiftness, for it was he who had reduced Japan to the point where these bolts of nuclear annihilation could immediately snap the will to resist any further.

  LeMay’s place in the postwar U.S. Air Force as its preeminent combat leader was assured. In determining the way the bomber arm of the U.S. Army Air Forces had fought in Europe and in the Pacific, he had also made the greatest contribution in proving the new preeminence of air power itself. And that preeminence, coupled with the unlimited potency of nuclear weapons, was to be the deciding factor in forming the military strategy of the United States during the early and middle years of the Cold War. LeMay had been the indispensable man. A message from Carl Spaatz to Arnold a week before the surrender of Japan demonstrated in what regard LeMay was now held. In July, with the Eighth Air Force due to transfer out of Europe and join the war against the Japanese, Arnold had persuaded the other chiefs to create a Strategic Air Forces command for the Pacific modeled on the one he had established for Europe in 1944. As in Europe, he put the man in whom he had ultimate faith, Tooey Spaatz, in charge. Spaatz appointed as his chief of staff an officer who had been a captain five years earlier, Major General LeMay, and told him to carry on. His message to Arnold, referring to LeMay’s B-29 command with the military message traffic term of Baker Two Nine, explained why:

  HAVE HAD OPPORTUNITY TO CHECK UP ON BAKER TWO NINE OPERATIONS AND BELIEVE THIS IS THE BEST ORGANIZED AND MOST TECHNICALLY AND TACTICALLY PROFICIENT MILITARY ORGANIZATION THAT THE WORLD HAS SEEN TO DATE.

  In October 1948, Hoyt Vandenberg had brought LeMay home from Europe, where he had been commanding general of U.S. Air Force units deployed there, and handed him a languishing organization called the Strategic Air Command with instructions to turn it into the formidable nuclear striking force it was intended to be. SAC had initially been formed by Spaatz in March 1946 with precisely this objective in mind. It had been so ill-maintained and badly trained over the two years before LeMay inherited it that the SAC of 1948 literally couldn’t hit anything under realistic conditions. The jet fighters the United States and the Soviet Union were both fielding meant that the propeller-driven B-29s, then the mainstay of SAC, and the B-50s then entering service, an improved version of the B-29 more easily rigged to carry an atomic bomb, could not survive in the daytime. (The B-36 colossus just coming on line could still bomb in daylight because Soviet fighters could not reach its 40,000-foot altitude, but that advantage would disappear as Russian jets improved.) The B-29s and B-50s therefore had to strike at night. This was made possible by employing the plane’s radar to pick out prominent terrain features or tall buildings, called “target finders,” that would show up distinctly on the screen, and then calculating the direction and distance to the drop point.

  To demonstrate to the SAC crews precisely how incompetent he suspected they were, LeMay ordered the entire command, approximately 480 B-29s and a sampling of the new B-50s and B-36s, to stage a mock night raid on Wright Field. The nearness of the airfield to Dayton, Ohio, should have given the crews plenty of tall buildings to use as target finders. As they approached Wright Field, the planes would transmit a tone over their radios. It would be picked up by an antiaircraft radar unit at Wright. The bombardier would simulate the release of his bombs by halting the tone. The antiaircraft unit would then calculate from the moment the tone halted and the altitude, speed, and distance of the plane precisely where the bomb would have landed. Shoddy maintenance kept a lot of the bombers from even getting off the ground that night and forced others to abort and turn back. And of those that did make it to the general vicinity of Wright Field and sent the Bombs Away signal, not a single crew hit the target. The details of SAC’s assault on Wright were immediately classified secret to try to hide from the Soviets that they faced a sawdust bogeyman. But every crew learned how dismally it had performed. LeMay had made his point and reformation began.

  When Bennie Schriever first encountered him in 1951, LeMay was about to gain the fourth star of a full general and had been back in the strategic bombing business for the better part of three years. He was transforming SAC into an organization that inspired dread in Moscow. As of December 1951 he had tripled its manpower to 144,525 officers and men, including civilian specialists and maintenance personnel, and his aircraft, 1,186 of all types, had grown significantly in numbers and striking power. His three heavy bomb wings were approaching their full complement of thirty B-36s each and he had another approximately 550 B-29s and B-50s organized into seventeen medium wings. Within the near future he would also have two more medium wings of the revolutionary B-47 Stratojet, America’s first strategic jet bomber, as the Boeing production lines fed them into his force. A svelte-looking aircraft with its slim fuselage and six jet engines slung on pods under the swept-back wings that were the first fruit of the von Kármán team’s postwar discoveries in Germany, the B-47 had a top speed of 630 miles per hour, as fast as most fighters of the day, and could climb above 40,000 feet.

  Moreover, through a combination of midair refueling from tanker aircraft and overseas staging bases from which his bombers could launch strikes or stop to refuel on the way to raids, LeMay had given his entire SAC force an intercontinental span. The overseas bases encircled the Soviet Union. In most of Stalin’s empire, no city or town, no military installation, no industrial plant was beyond the touch of LeMay’s hand of destruction. The first of the staging bases were borrowed RAF airfields in England. Engineers were set to work meanwhile reconstructing into permanent SAC installations other disused fields such as Greenham Common, a former paratroop and glider base west of London near Newbury, or Brize Norton amidst the rolling landscape and stone-roofed cottages of the Cotswold Hills farther west in Gloucestershire. The locations west of London were deliberately chosen so that the RAF jet fighters at fields on the other, eastern, side of the English capital could protect SAC’s bombers against attacking Soviet aircraft.

  When the B-36 with its 3,500-mile combat radius was counted in, everything from the satellite states like Poland, Hungary, and Romania, and all of western Russia as far as Moscow and beyond to the industrial centers of the Urals, was within reach of these English bases, airfields that recalled those from which the B-17s in which LeMay had learned his craft had risen not long before to humble Nazi Germany. The oil wells and refineries at Baku and elsewhere in Azerbaijan in the Soviet Caucasus were vulnerable to SAC bombers staging out of North Africa from the air base abuilding at Sidi Slimane in Morocco. Any targets worth hitting in the Soviet Far East, like Vladivostok with its air and naval facilities, and much of China, where the Communist leader Mao Tse-tung now ruled, were exposed to attacks staged from Guam and Yokota Air Base in American-occupied Japan.

  The U.S. nuclear arsenal, which numbered 549 atomic, i.e., fission, weapons by the end of 1951, did not yet possess quite enough for all of LeMay’s bombers, but that shortcoming was being remedied. The Sandstone series of nuclear tests at Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific in April and May of 1948 had led to the development of a
more advanced plutonium bomb, the Mark 4, which, at 31 kilotons, exceeded the blast of the Nagasaki weapon by approximately 10 kilotons. The Atomic Energy Commission geared up its facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Hanford, Washington, and elsewhere to mass production. LeMay was also hoping that his aircraft would soon be armed with the hydrogen bomb, which, in 1950, President Truman had ordered the AEC to create through the laboratory it now controlled at Los Alamos.

  SAC was no longer the bumbling organization LeMay had been given in 1948. He honed his combat crews and subordinate commanders with the training techniques he had devised for use against the Germans and the Japanese. He instituted practice bombing competitions. To further motivate his men, he wangled the authority, a privilege extended only to SAC, to award spot promotions for outstanding performance, as high as lieutenant colonel in the officer grades and technical sergeant and master sergeant in the enlisted ranks. The awards were usually given to an entire crew at once in order to encourage teamwork. For example, a command pilot who was a captain could go to major, his co-pilot from first lieutenant to captain, and everyone else in the crew could also jump one rank ahead of their peers. If their proficiency fell, LeMay would take away the promotions. By 1951, LeMay’s force was ready to go. The atmosphere of the time reinforced the motivation. These were the years when anti-Communist fervor ran so high that some of the citizenry did not think it insane to repeat the slogan “Better Dead Than Red!”

  LeMay’s SAC had, in fact, become the centerpiece of America’s national strategy. The concept underlying it had originally evolved out of Truman’s short-lived confidence in an American atomic monopoly—the same source of his and Jimmie Byrnes’s abortive attempt to intimidate Stalin with their postwar atomic diplomacy—and out of his concern to avoid deficits, curb inflation, and prevent the American economy from being undermined by profligate military spending. If the United States alone possessed the bomb and the means to deliver it through a long-range strategic bomber force, there was no need to burden the American economy with the huge expense of large ground forces to match the Red Army and with major naval forces for a prolonged war with the Soviet Union. The bomb would render any war with Russia short and decisive.