By early March, LeMay had finalized his plan for low-level nighttime firebombing; planes would fly in low, below 10,000 feet—sometimes, if need be, down to 5,000, even if “flesh and blood can't stand it.” At that level, a number of advantages immediately accrued. The B-29s could fly singly beneath the cloud cover and not be subject to the jet stream. Strain on the engines would be minimized, as planes would not have to labor to reach thirty thousand feet and fly in tight formation. Reduced fuel consumption meant no auxiliary gas tanks, permitting increased bomb loads. Japanese antiaircraft battalions were accustomed to high-level attacks, so there were few 40mm and 20mm rapidfiring smaller batteries that were so effective below ten thousand feet. Although the Japanese could send up formidable fighters during day raids, they possessed few planes that were effective at night. And by flying over Japan under the cover of darkness, the returning bombers would be in the vicinity of Iwo Jima in daylight, easing the challenge of forced landings and ditchings.
LeMay also ordered most guns and ammunition removed, to save weight and reduce accidental firing on friendly planes in the night. He felt that initial losses to enemy fighters would be more than offset by the destruction of factories and refineries, which would ensure an end to most fighter and flak resistance in the near future. And so, for the inaugural fire raids, the bombers flew in essentially unarmed—until declining crew morale and increasing fighter resistance mandated a return to defensive capability. Still, by war's end, LeMay's missions were becoming progressively safer for his crews. By July 1945 the loss per mission was 0.03 percent, and LeMay could boast that the final incendiary raids over Japan had become the safest air assignment of the war.
Most important, LeMay realized that the Japanese cities were far more densely populated than European urban centers, and built largely of wood. Because industrial production was often decentralized in smaller, family-run factories, the idea of simply torching the entire urban core not only was practicable but also made strategic sense. Even if thousands of civilians were killed in the process—“I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay said later—the general felt his plan would shorten the war and avert an American invasion of Japan, thus saving lives on both sides. Besides, he reasoned, Japan had started the war and had a record of atrocity, including routinely torturing and beheading downed American fliers: Of the roughly 5,000 B-29 crewmen of the Twentieth Air Force shot down during the war, approximately 200 were found alive in Japanese camps after the war.
The decision to go in low was entirely LeMay's. In a preview of LeMay's future operational style, he did not notify his immediate superior, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, of his radical redeployment of the B-29s. He reasoned, “If it's all a failure, and I don't produce any results, then he can fire me.” He also ignored the fierce opposition of subordinates, some of whom called the plan suicidal.
On March 9, 1945, a trail of 334 B-29s, four hundred miles long, left the Marianas. Preliminary pathfinders had seeded napalm over Tokyo in the shape of an enormous fiery X to mark the locus of the target. Planes flew over in small groups of three, a minute apart, most at not much over five thousand feet. Five-hundred-pound incendiary clusters fell every fifty feet. Within thirty minutes, a 28 mph ground wind sent the flames roaring out of control as temperatures approached 1,800 degrees. The fire lasted four days.
No single air attack in the history of conflict had been so devastating. We will never know the exact number of people incinerated; officially, 83,793 Japanese died outright and 40,918 were injured. Nearly 16 square miles were obliterated, 267,171 buildings destroyed, and 1 million Japanese left homeless; one fifth of Tokyo's industrial sector and nearly two thirds of its commercial center no longer existed.
The planes returned with their undercarriages seared and the smell of human flesh among the crews, yet only fourteen bombers had been lost and forty-two damaged. And the March 9 raid was only the beginning of LeMay's incendiary campaign. Suddenly, all of Japan lay defenseless before LeMay's unforeseen plan of attack. Quickly, he increased the frequency of missions, at one point sending his airmen out at the unheard-of rate of 120 hours per month each—the Eighth Air Force in England had flown a maximum of 30 hours per month—as they methodically burned down Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka within ten days before turning to smaller cities. LeMay's supply of incendiaries posed the one real obstacle to his plan of attack: His ground crews now simply unloaded the bombs at the dock and drove them right over to the bombers, without storing them in arms depots.
In between fire raids, his B-29s dropped high explosives on industrial targets and aerial mines into harbors and ports, which eventually helped to shut down nearly all the maritime commerce of Japan. By war's end, LeMay's forces had wiped out 175 square miles of Japan's urban area in sixty-six cities. A million Japanese had died, more than 10 million were left homeless, and the country ceased to exist as a modern industrial nation.
Although it is often stated that the two atomic bombs prompted the Japanese to sue for peace, their own leadership cited LeMay's far more lethal fire attacks as the real incentive. As Prince Fumimaro Konoe put it, “The determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.” LeMay, who strongly supported dropping the atomic bombs, concluded, “The war would have been over in time without dropping the atomic bombs, but every day it went on we were suffering casualties, the Japanese were suffering casualties, and the war bill was going up.”
By August 1945, LeMay had destroyed urban Japan, yet he had more planes and men under his command than ever. By November, he would have had 2,500 operational B-29s, with 5,000 more on order. Together with the 3,692 B-17s that were to be based on Okinawa as part of the redeployed Eighth Army Air Force, and the 4,986 B-24s that were already being transferred from Europe, the Americans were planning the systematic destruction of Japanese society through the weekly use of more than 12,000 bombers. With the additional transference of Britain's Royal Air Force, including four-engine Lancaster VII heavy bombers, more than 15,000 heavy aircraft soon would have been operational. A force of that magnitude might have dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs each month, far above the 34,402 monthly average dropped by B-29s on Japan between May 1 and August 15, 1945. Surely, dropping the two atomic bombs was the correct decision—not so much because it circumvented an American invasion of Japan but because it abruptly ended LeMay's bomber crusade, which would have slaughtered millions of Japanese, a campaign he had warned the recalcitrant Japanese about through preliminary leaflet droppings. Had LeMay been given another year of bombing, the American assault would have found Japan a vast crematorium.
LeMay's career in the 1950s and 1960s is essentially the history of America's venture into the potential for nuclear-equipped strategic bombing and the general use of tactical airpower in the hot spots of the Cold War. A string of commands and crises followed his victories in the Pacific. From 1945 to 1947, he headed the U.S. Army Air Forces research-and-development program and facilitated the transition to jet bombers and in-flight refueling. In 1947 he took command of all American air forces in Europe and directed the Berlin Airlift. (At one point, the highest-ranking U.S. Air Force commander in Europe flew in a load of coal himself. He explained, “In those early days I had to make several runs to see how things were going.”) When American strategic forces were considered inadequate to meet a potential Soviet response, LeMay was sent back to Washington in late 1948 to reorganize the Strategic Air Command. Shocked by the poorly trained crews and the absence of regulation, he concluded of his forces' first practice mission under his command, “Just about the darkest night in American military aviation history. Not one airplane finished that mission as briefed. Not one.”
Quickly, he brought in his trusted generals from the Pacific bombing campaign over Japan, and by the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, the United States had developed a formidable striking force under LeMay's command. Accident rates plummeted from sixty-five per hundred thousand hours flown to a mer
e three. LeMay's forces dropped nearly as many bombs on Korea as on Japan. It is too often forgotten that thousands of North Korean civilians were killed directly or indirectly as a result of these missions; in three months during the first summer of the war, all assigned targets in North Korea were considered eliminated, the B-29 campaign was therefore called off as essentially completed, and the bombers were used only haphazardly thereafter against strategic sites. “We killed off—what—twenty percent of the population,” LeMay wrote of all bombing between 1950 and 1953, arguing that strategic bombing over China and restricted portions of North Korea would have made that carpet attack on civilians unnecessary. But after the winter of 1950–51, with the entry of China, the American restriction on targets near the Chinese border, and the appearance of Soviet MiG-15 jets, the B-29 strategic campaign over Korea became marginal: Their targets were now off-limits and the planes too vulnerable. The protocols of unlimited bombing against the enemy, which had brought America success in World War II, no longer applied in a world of nuclear weapons. LeMay's worst postwar nightmare had materialized: America's strategic assets were either prevented from actively engaging the enemy or given the unheroic, dangerous, unpopular, and inevitably inconclusive role of tactical bombing of ground troops. LeMay realized that 169,676 tons dropped on Japan in 1944 and 1945 had destroyed the enemy's ability to resist; 167,000 tons dropped on North Korea between 1950 and 1953 had not. Worse still, when bombers were used wrongly, it discredited the entire doctrine of victory through strategic airpower.
LeMay, forever the absolutist, believed in unchanging rules of military doctrine and felt that new geopolitical conditions did not alter the need to destroy utterly the enemy's infrastructure from the air, whatever the threat of Soviet intervention. The Pentagon's stricture on strategic bombing of North Korea and China ensured that LeMay's bombers, unlike their use against Japan, would not be able to resume their proper mission and thus win the war outright. LeMay later wrote:
That wasn't what the B-29s were trained for, nor was it how they were intended to perform. The B-29s were trained to go up there to Manchuria and destroy the enemy's potential to wage war. They were trained to bomb Peking and Hankow if necessary. They could have done so. The threat of this impending bombardment would, I am confident, have kept the Communist Chinese from revitalizing and protracting the Korean War.
Although LeMay was never allowed “to turn SAC loose with incendiaries” over the major industrial areas of China and Korea, he continued to expand the Strategic Air Command during the increased tensions of the Cold War. When he arrived, the air force did not have even systematic reconnaissance, much less a list of strategic targets in the Soviet Union and China. By 1957, when LeMay left SAC to become vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, he had created an enormous organization that was capable of reaching every industrial center in the Soviet Union. In all, 224,014 people and 2,711 aircraft had been under his direct control at SAC, and he was eyeing command of the navy's interconti-nental-missile program. (He supposedly had a model of a Polaris submarine with a SAC insignia displayed in his command hallway.) “There are only two things in the world,” LeMay purportedly boasted at the time, “SAC bases and SAC targets.”
While LeMay has often been condemned as trigger-happy and bellicose during his tenure at SAC, the command was perhaps a paradoxical one. LeMay—who inaugurated the command's motto, “Peace Is Our Profession”— was ordered to create a strategic air force of nuclear bombers formidable enough to deter Soviet aggression; yet, should he ever use one of his nuclear bombers in an actual attack, his entire command would be considered a failure, and its leader little more than a butcher who had sent millions to a nuclear crematorium. LeMay saw the paradox, quite unabashedly referring to his bombing command as enforcing a Pax Americana through a “Pax Atomica.” To entrust to the most aggressive and successful bomber commander in our nation's history the task of creating an offensive bomber force that should never be used was fraught with irony from the beginning, and but a glimpse of LeMay's growing dilemma to come.
Between 1957 and 1965, he was vice chief and then chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, overseeing the creation of America's nuclear ballistic-missile force and the modernization of its manned-bomber fleet. At this point, according to most critics, LeMay's previous energy and eccentric bellicosity for the first time posed grave risks for the nation and the world at large. While acknowledging the general's record in deterring Soviet airpower in crises involving Berlin, China, and the Middle East, the critics have pointed out that such aggressiveness was precisely the wrong temperament for someone who was to oversee America's nuclear arsenal. There is much in the LeMay record to bear out this criticism. “We must RACE!” he wrote, advocating enormous increases in nuclear weaponry and advances in new bomber technology, oblivious that “the arms race” was becoming a catchphrase for the danger and expense of a seemingly endless, pointless strategic competition with the Soviets. Throughout the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, as air force chief of staff, LeMay battled repeatedly over the restrictions placed on his command during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the war in Vietnam:
Always I felt that a more forceful policy would have been the correct one for us to embrace with the Russians, and in our confrontation of their program for world Communism. In the days of the Berlin Air Lift I felt the same way…. I can't get over the notion that when you stand up and act like a man, you win respect … though perhaps it is only a fearful respect which leads eventually to compliance with your wishes. It's when you fall back, shaking with apprehension, that you're apt to get into trouble. We observed Soviet reaction during the Lebanon incident and during the Cuban incident. Each time when we faced the Russians sternly we've come out all right. It's only when we haven't stood up to these challenges that things went sour.
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 w
ould 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:
In all candor the strong and the rich are seldom popular. They are sometimes feared and sometimes resented. But they are usually respected. Anyone who seeks an absolute end to the possibility of war might as well resign from the human race. Pacifists with their perennial utopian quests can harm the human race as much as conquerors…. There can be no doubtthat the believed strength of an enemy's defenses and his counterattack capability have always been a deterrent to war. Unless we start to win the wars we get into, we may find ourselves overextended around the world on several frontiers, fighting equivocal wars. To maintain such vast military forces America would become an armed camp with all our sons being drafted for these endless foreign wars. God forbid!
The Cold War Page 31