General Curtis LeMay

I have to add yet another book to my prospective reading list, based on a note I received last evening from Mike Dunn, President and CEO of the Air Force Association.  A few quotes from that e-mail:

AFA Members, Congressional Staffers, Civic Leaders, and DOCA members, this past weekend I read a great book – one that anyone who cares about airpower should consider. The book is entitled: LEMAY – The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay. It is written by Warren Kozak, published in 2009, and came to me via a staff member from a former Chairman of the Board of AFA. Simply put – the book destroyed all the preconceived notions I had about General LeMay – most of which were formed by his run for Vice President, the movie Dr. Strangelove, and his often quoted statement of "bombing the North Vietnamese back to the stone age."

Here is a sampling of what I found in the book:

"It should be remembered that generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant fought seventeen battles in each of their careers. LeMay fought one almost every day for three years. And unlike any other general in modern times, he did not send his men out on perilous missions, he led them. On the most dangerous missions, LeMay insisted on flying the lead aircraft in the formation himself, in the first plane the enemy would target. No other general in WWII did this."

The Army Air Corps chose the B-18 over the B-17 in the 1935 heavy bomber competition. The country was in the midst of the great depression and leaders were looking for the 75% solution [my words] when it came to recapitalizing the Army Air Corps. However, this compromised approach yielded an aircraft that lacked both the payload capacity and range to effectively engage in most combat scenarios—including those anticipated in Europe and the Pacific. Fortunately, Congress had the wisdom to add money for the B-17 – to keep both the bomber … and the Boeing Company alive for what was to come. By the end of the war 12,000 B-17s had been constructed, with nearly half of these lost in combat.

" … the start of the military buildup in the fall of 1941 hardly relieved LeMay's anxiety. The US was starting from nothing. It was impossible, he thought to correct twenty years of neglect in just six months or even a year, and he was right."

" The entire American effort managed just over seventy sorties in August of 1942, compared to … more than 20,000 [sorties] a month later in the war."

General LeMay was a hero to me when I was a boy coming of age in the '50s… and that was a time when he was leading USAF's Strategic Air Command (SAC).  My father, who was also on active duty at the time, served under LeMay in England during WW II.  The Ol' Man could tell the most amazing stories about the general and his legendary exploits (see the first paragraph in my excerpt, above) both in the air over Germany and on the ground in Ol' Blighty.  It's also worth mentioning that General LeMay and I served in the same Air Force, given he retired in 1965 and I joined in 1963.  I will also say I'm happy I never had the "opportunity" to serve in SAC.  Former members of SAC and airmen who are familiar with SAC's reputation and "aura" will understand exactly what I'm on about here…

General Dunn goes on to say it's a shame that most of the American public only knows LeMay as George Wallace's running mate in Wallace's abortive third party presidential campaign of 1968.  If they know of LeMay at all… I should probably add.  1968 was over 40 years ago and both George Wallace and Curtis LeMay are basically only footnotes in American history nowadays.  And that's a shame, because General LeMay was a true American hero and patriot.  He might also be the last of the truly great Air Force generals, but that's another story, innit?