by Neil Sheehan
Truman demonstrated his determination to hew to this strategy when it put him on a collision course with the Navy and set off the “Revolt of the Admirals” in 1949. That April he and his secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, canceled the Navy’s planned “supercarrier,” the USS United States, in favor of more adequate funding for the B-36. The Navy had been counting on construction of this imposing ship, the model for the majestic aircraft carriers that were to be built in later decades to handle modern jet aircraft, to keep it on a par with the Air Force. The secretary of the navy, John Sullivan, resigned and Truman and Johnson sacked Admiral Louis Denfeld, the chief of naval operations, to quell further opposition within the senior ranks.
Soviet acquisition of the bomb in 1949 did not negate the economic rationale for the strategy. The end of the monopoly simply meant that the United States would have to outpace the Russians constantly in the size and power of its nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver an annihilating assault. The same economic motivation then led Dwight Eisenhower to adopt and elaborate on the strategy after his election in 1952. The surge in military spending for conventional armaments brought on by the Korean War, and the need to arm the new West German state and rearm Washington’s European allies for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance Stalin had clumsily provoked, peaked after his death in 1953 cleared the way for a truce in Korea that July. To achieve what he called “security with solvency,” Eisenhower resumed Truman’s policy of restricting spending on the conventional military in favor of reliance on the intercontinental reach of LeMay’s nuclear bombers.
The Eisenhower administration’s official euphemism for the strategy was “The New Look,” taken from a women’s fashion line exhibited by Christian Dior in the late 1940s. (Some in the administration also favored a catchy phrase for the strategy that was tinged with a bit of gallows humor—“a bigger bang for a buck.”) It soon became more appropriately known as Massive Retaliation, after Eisenhower and his stridently anti-Communist secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, made clear that a Soviet assault on West Berlin, for instance, or on any of America’s allies, would result not merely in a local defense under NATO, but in an all-out response of America’s nuclear might. Eisenhower and Dulles reasoned that the threat would curb military adventurism by the Soviets on the periphery of their empire and deter the Russians from launching a general war with their own growing nuclear arsenal. And if general war did occur, SAC would be the fist that delivered the knockout blow of a nuclear holocaust.
The strategy entailed previously unimaginable civilian casualties, but this does not seem to have bothered anyone in authority. The prospect certainly did not disturb LeMay Having had to inflict a cruel death by fire on hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in order to destroy Japan’s industry and render the country prostrate and ripe for surrender appears to have calloused him morally. Taking human life on a horrendous scale once apparently made it easier for him to contemplate taking it on a far more horrendous scale the next time. It was therefore not that difficult for him to go from anonymous Japanese men, women, and children by the hundreds of thousands to the planned killing of tens of millions of anonymous civilians in the Soviet Union, the East European states, and China. The same could be said of the other military leaders of his generation who had not had LeMay’s personal experience and of the civilian politicians above them. The RAF campaign of nighttime “city busting,” culminating in the slaughter at Dresden in February 1945, when a city filled with refugees was struck by both British and American bombers and from 36,000 to 136,000 civilians killed (no one has been able to estimate the number accurately), along with the incineration of Japan, inculcated the assumption that strategic bombing entailed massive civilian casualties as an unavoidable consequence. By 1954, when LeMay would have 1,500 atomic bombs at his disposal, the estimate was that 60 million people would be killed and 17 million injured within the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China if SAC was unleashed. A chilling phrase began to appear in the lexicon of advocates of strategic nuclear bombing: “to kill a nation.”
Massive Retaliation as a national strategy also confirmed the primacy of the Air Force among the services and raised LeMay’s Strategic Air Command to ascendancy within the Air Force itself. While Eisenhower reduced the overall strength of the military establishment by nearly a million men, inflicting most of the cuts on the ground forces of the Army but also shrinking the Navy and the Air Force as a whole, he encouraged SAC to grow. By 1957, when LeMay was to depart after nearly nine years to go to Washington as vice chief of staff, his creation would number 224,014 officers, enlisted men, and civilian support personnel. One hundred and twenty-seven of the B-36s would linger, but not for long. The rest of the propeller-driven fleet, the B-29s and B-50s, would have become a memory. In their place, lavish spending would have immensely enhanced the air power they had represented. SAC would field 1,285 B-47 medium jet bombers in 1957 and almost 250, with many more to come, of the new eight-engine B-52 jet Stratofortresses Boeing had begun delivering two years earlier to constitute the heavy bomb wings. (The tanker shortage had also long been solved after hundreds of KC-97s had flowed into SAC’s fleet by the end of 1953 and into 1954 to form new refueling squadrons that would meet the bombers going out and coming home.) When LeMay took command of SAC in 1948 his title was the ordinary one of commanding general. By 1955 the ordinary would be exalted to commander-in-chief. The letters and memoranda LeMay exchanged with his superior, General Nathan Twining, who was to succeed Vandenberg as chief of staff in mid-1953, reflect the unique status he held within the Air Force. It was customary for ranking generals to address each other in the familiar Dear Nate, Dear Curt manner, but LeMay’s side of the correspondence, preserved with Twining’s in the archives of the Library of Congress, goes one step further. It has the tone of a man addressing an equal, not a senior.
24.
INTO THE LION’S DEN
Ageneral Bennie Schriever once worked for paid him an unusual compliment in an efficiency report: “He is not afraid of anybody.” In crossing Curtis LeMay, however, Schriever was placing himself in peril of being crushed by a titan of his profession. And in their first encounter, he looked decidedly foolish. It was one of the few occasions in his life when he came up with a genuinely harebrained scheme. At the time, in early 1951, Bennie was working in a preliminary job General Saville, the deputy chief of staff, development, had given him when he brought him back to the Pentagon after graduation from the National War College. He was made an assistant to evaluate R&D projects, deputy to a remarkably imaginative scientist from MIT named Ivan Getting. An electrical engineer and physicist, Getting had won a Medal of Merit, the highest decoration the president could then award a civilian for military work, for his achievements in radar design at the Radiation Laboratory during the Second World War. After the outbreak of the Korean War, Saville had persuaded Getting to take a leave from MIT and come down to the Pentagon as his principal assistant to sort out R&D enterprises.
LeMay complained that, although SAC was the most important element of the Air Force, it wasn’t receiving enough attention from Saville’s department. Saville passed the complaint on to Getting, who in turn passed it to Schriever. One of the issues at the moment was how to disperse SAC’s bases in order to make them as survivable as possible. Stalin’s only long-range bombers, his Tu-4 copies of the B-29, might carry just enough gas for a one-way trip to only some of America’s cities, but one still had to guard against the contingency, however remote, that he might order his air force to attack anyway. This was one of the reasons SAC headquarters had been moved from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., to Offutt Air Force Base just outside Omaha, Nebraska (the base had originated as a cavalry post during the Indian wars of the nineteenth century), when LeMay assumed command in October 1948.
Schriever took a look at the map and it struck him that all of the waterways running through the American continent and others along its edges like the Chesapeake Bay provi
ded an obvious means of dispersal. If floating SAC bases were established on them the aircraft could be shifted as often as desired. The catch was that the bombers would have to be equipped with pontoon landing gear in order to land and take off on water. This was theoretically possible, but the additional weight would reduce range and the pontoons would create drag that would also reduce speed. Getting should have recognized the proposal as impractical and General Saville certainly should have known that it would appear absolutely wacky to a bomber man like LeMay. Unfortunately, neither had his common-sense radar turned on and Bennie and Getting flew out to Omaha to present the scheme to LeMay.
Getting sat beside the general and his senior staff officers while Bennie set up his charts on an easel in front and flipped through them as he gave his presentation. LeMay reacted with mutterings of disgust and ridicule and, at the end of the briefing, took his cigar out of his mouth, leaned forward, and asked with sarcasm, “Did you say your name was Schriever?” Then he left and Bennie folded his charts and he and Getting left too, right back to Washington.
Later that year Saville retired and Getting went off to take a high-level position in the electronics industry. Donald Putt, the technology-oriented student of von Kármán, stepped into Saville’s place as deputy chief of staff, development, and promoted Bennie to be his assistant for development planning. Because the job entailed literally planning the future of the Air Force, Bennie had to deal with LeMay. He found, however, that when he returned to Omaha with sensible advice or proposals, LeMay wouldn’t listen on these occasions either.
The obstacle doesn’t seem to have been that first silly episode. If LeMay remembered it, he never mentioned it. The problem was that Curtis LeMay had become an altered man. The young colonel who had been so open-minded and keen to learn that he had risked personal humiliation by convening all-ranks, freewheeling criticism sessions in the mess hall after a raid on Nazi-occupied Europe had become the four-star general who was no longer willing to hear anything that did not fit his preconceptions. He was the classic example of a man made arrogant by power. Years of commanding with unchallenged authority had rendered him rigid. He had become a figure of obsessions and had lost his sense of proportion. His former restraint had also been replaced by a quick temper, a short fuse as it was called in the military, which further inhibited his ability to listen.
The change was conspicuously apparent in his correspondence with Nathan Twining in the mid-1950s. Formed as he was by the gruesome, no-quarter-given air battles with the Luftwaffe in 1943, he was fixated in the belief that the Soviets were also going to build an air force powerful enough to challenge his SAC in a similar death struggle for supremacy of the skies. He had such profound and unquestioning faith in the bomber that he could not imagine someone else might resort to an alternative weapon to rain nuclear fire on an opponent. The fixation resonated in a March 21, 1955, memorandum to Twining and in a covering letter of the same date. Both assessed with uninhibited criticism a plan by Twining’s headquarters that laid out a proposed structure for the Air Force through 1965. “Before 1965 Soviet Forces will probably attain a delivery capability and a [nuclear] stockpile of sufficient size and configuration to completely destroy any selected target system within the U.S.,” LeMay stated on the opening page of his memorandum. Some of this “delivery capability,” he conceded, may consist of future Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, but he was convinced that the predominant element would be intercontinental bombers. (The prototype of the first strategic bomber of original Soviet design, not a copy of the B-29, had been detected in 1954. It was the Miasishchev Mia-4, dubbed the Bison by NATO intelligence, with swept-back wings and four jet engines.)
Therefore, he emphasized again and again in the memorandum and in the covering letter, the Air Force had to structure itself so that its “primary objective … should be to win the battle against Soviet Air Power.” This meant a bigger and better SAC because “the bomber airplane is the best delivery vehicle” to triumph in this “battle against Soviet Air Power,” a phrase he repeated constantly. He asserted that his bombers would catch the Russian planes on the ground and destroy them and their bases as well as the industries that produced them. He wanted 1,440 of the new B-52s by 1965. To keep this bomber fleet aloft with midair refueling, he asked for 1,140 of the forthcoming Boeing KC-135 four-engine jet tankers, which were to replace the propeller-driven KC-97s. (The KC-135, ample-bodied to carry as much aviation fuel as possible, initiated one of the most spectacularly successful commercial spinoffs from military hardware. The entrepreneurs in Seattle saw in its dimensions a passenger jet and with the installation of seats and other civilian accoutrements it became the famous Boeing 707 jetliner, over a thousand of which were sold to American and foreign airlines. The plane transformed international air travel.) With the cost of this stupendous bomber and tanker fleet in mind, he objected to the number of jet fighter-bombers and air superiority fighters the Air Force planned to buy to fulfill the Tactical Air Command’s mission of providing close air support over a battlefield for Army ground troops. Assisting the Army was not a mission that interested LeMay. He even argued that the bomber was the best weapon to neutralize any ICBMs the Soviets might field by 1965 because of its ability “to destroy their launching sites as a matter of high priority.” (Since it would take hours for SAC’s bombers to reach the launching sites and only half an hour for a Soviet ICBM to reach its target in the United States, the logic of bombing empty launching sites hardly seems to follow.)
LeMay’s attachment to the bomber and his fixation on winning the air battle he anticipated with a Soviet version of SAC led him to what was perhaps his most astonishing proposal to Twining. He wanted to abolish conventional armaments and go entirely nuclear. “Atomic and thermonuclear weapons have made conventional weapons obsolete, and the United States should cease stockpiling of conventional weapons,” he wrote. “The expense of developing and maintaining a limited conventional capability in the face of the critical need for skilled personnel and resources to man and equip strategic units can no longer be justified.” He proposed henceforth to use only nuclear weapons in wars both big and small. In other words, it was just as appropriate to let fly with nuclear weapons in a small-scale war like the recent conflict in Korea as it was in a full-scale one with the Soviets. “The distinction between localized and general war is political rather than military,” he said, and the United States should “always use the best weapons available in either general or limited war.”
There was a further advantage to moving straight to nuclear weapons in small wars, he maintained. They would bring quick victory and, apparently with the example of Korea in mind, avoid having the war drag out and public opinion turn against it. Therefore, “to insure the favorable outcome of a localized war in a short period of time, it was necessary that any political or psychological restraint in employing atomic weapons be erased.” Precisely what Twining thought of LeMay’s proposal is unknown and there is no record of a reply in the correspondence. Presumably he understood, as the changed LeMay did not, that for the U.S. Air Force to publicly advocate something like this would set off a political firestorm at home and abroad of nuclear dimensions.
His memory of those terrifying skies over Germany was also the root cause of LeMay’s most striking loss of a sense of proportion—his unquenchable desire for more and more megatons of nuclear explosive to drop on his Soviet opponents and more and more bombers with which to loose it. (A megaton is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT.) He feared that when war came, unnerved crews would not strike with the accuracy they attained in practice exercises in peacetime. Some planes would also not find their targets because of navigational errors, others would be shot down, still others would turn back because of mechanical failures. The answer was to make up for these errors and omissions with bigger and bigger bombs and enough planes to double and triple the number of strikes programmed for a single target.
He was extremely pleased in late 1954 to ge
t the first practical hydrogen bomb, designated the Mark 17, a “weaponized” version of a dry thermonuclear device, fueled by lithium deuteride, which the Los Alamos laboratory had set off at Bikini Atoll earlier that year in a test called Romeo. This first “droppable” H-bomb weighed 42,000 pounds, which meant that only a B-36 in the current SAC fleet could carry it, but it exploded with a doomsday blast of eleven megatons, the equivalent of 524 Nagasaki, first-generation plutonium bombs, and 880 times the force of the smaller atomic bomb that had devastated Hiroshima. LeMay began pressing right away for lighter hydrogen bombs of equal or greater megatonnage. With them he wanted to turn his B-47s, which had a 25,000-pound payload, into thermonuclear bombers and fit more than one hydrogen bomb into the new B-52, with its 43,000-pound capacity (soon increased to 50,000), in order to obliterate multiple targets. When the Mark 21 hydrogen bomb, which weighed 15,000 pounds and yielded 4.5 megatons, appeared in 1955, he immediately mated it to the B-52 as the central component of SAC’s striking power for the next couple of years. The Mark 21’s “bang” did not satisfy LeMay, however, and so he pressed for an upgrade. This was to be the Mark 36, which would be produced the following year. It was somewhat heavier than the Mark 21 at 17,500 pounds, but yielded more than twice the force when it exploded.
In another memorandum to Twining that November of 1955, LeMay raised the ante on bombers. He now said he needed approximately 1,900 B-52s and some 1,300 KC-135 jet tankers to midair refuel these bombers by 1963. (Eisenhower was eventually to cap B-52 production at 744 aircraft by the fall of 1962, a decision the Kennedy administration was to uphold, with the comment: “I don’t know how many times you can kill a man, but about three should be enough.”) Nor did LeMay succeed in persuading the Eisenhower administration to build an H-bomb, except for the original Mark 17, beyond ten megatons, but not for lack of trying. In 1953, he asked the Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board to look into the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb of twenty megatons or greater, an idea Eisenhower is said to have vetoed as beyond common sense. The massive megatonnage and the doubling and tripling on targets was to lead to fantastic overkill. SAC was to end up programming for Moscow alone more than twenty-five megatons. Pressure from LeMay was to be the major impetus in driving the yield of the American stockpile of nuclear warheads up to the record 20,491 megatons peak it was to reach in 1960, enough to provide each of the approximately 180 million inhabitants of the United States at the time with bomb material equivalent in explosive force to 110 tons of TNT.