Retired
Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay Dies at 83
October
1, 1990
MARCH
AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. (AP) _ Air Force Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, who relayed the
order to drop the A-bomb on Japan and said the United States should threaten to
bomb North Vietnam ″back into the Stone Age,″ died Monday. He was 83.
LeMay,
who also directed the 1948 Berlin Airlift and ran for vice president in 1968 as
George Wallace’s running mate, died of a heart attack at the 22nd Strategic
Hospital, said Sgt. Steve Mahnke.
An
ambulance had picked him up minutes earlier at his retirement home outside this
base east of Los Angeles.
″He was
one of the real American heroes of World War II,″ Wallace said. ″I am proud to
have served under him in World War II and proud to have had him on the ticket
as a vice presidential candidate in my third-party campaign. ... I will always
count it a high honor to have been his personal friend.″
The
former four-star general who built the Strategic Air Command into a global
strike force.
Considered
the father of strategic bombing, LeMay and his tactics were instrumental in
pressing the daylight bombing offensive against the Nazis in Europe in World
War II.
LeMay
was the architect of B-17 bombing formation tactics in Europe, and later
transferred to the Pacific where he organized the B-29 bombing campaign against
the Japanese islands.
Years
later, he said the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary
to force Japan’s surrender.
″We felt
that our incendiary bombings had been so successful that Japan would collapse
before we invaded,″ LeMay said in a 1985 interview with the Omaha (Neb.)
World-Herald.
″We went
ahead and dropped the bombs because President (Harry) Truman told me to do it.
He told me in a personal letter.″
But
LeMay told the newspaper he felt the United States could have defeated Japan in
″a few more days″ if it had continued the firebombing of Japanese cities.
After
the war, LeMay was given command of the U.S. Air Force in Europe. He was there
in 1948 when the Soviet Union cut off ground access to West Berlin. His
management of the airlift that kept West Berlin supplied brought LeMay much
notice at home.
He was
named commanding general of the Strategic Air Command in October 1948 and held
the command until June 1957 - longer than any other general.
The 1955
Jimmy Stewart movie, ″Strategic Air Command,″ provided a glimpse of the strike
force LeMay built. A cigar-chomping Frank Lovejoy portrayed a character that
displayed LeMay’s tough, demanding persona.
He was
SAC’s second commander but was widely credited with having built its bomber
force to a formidable level.
Within a
few short years he transformed the largely demobilized air arm into a global
striking force that could deliver nuclear weapons anywhere at any time.
In a
1965 biography, ″Mission with LeMay,″ published in 1965 after his retirement as
Air Force chief of staff during the early years of the Vietnam War, he wrote
that a solution to the war might be to warn the North Vietnamese that they
″have got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we are going to
bomb them back into the Stone Age.″
His
reputation was that of a man who was equally unsparing of his men and himself.
He said he was unable to distinguish between the unfortunate and the incompetent,
and he tolerated little if any error from his subordinates.
But he
would willingly do any job that he demanded of his followers. He was as
comfortable in a machine gun cupola as he was in the cockpit. He personally led
dozens of missions in Europe.
One of
many famous stories about LeMay was that he once found a SAC sentry who had put
down his weapon to eat a sandwich.
″This
afternoon I found a man guarding a hangar with a ham sandwich. There will be no
more of that,″ LeMay’s subsequent memo said.
He was
promoted to full general while at SAC.
After
leaving SAC, LeMay became vice chief, then President Kennedy named him chief of
staff of the Air Force.
LeMay
retired in 1965, frustrated by the politics of the Pentagon and by Robert S.
McNamara, defense secretary under presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
McNamara
had denied LeMay the B-70, which the general had wanted as the successor to the
B-52, and forced him to accept the F-111 fighter-bomber. In so doing, McNamara
had subordinated LeMay’s coveted bombers to the new ballistic missiles.
LeMay
also grew angry over McNamara’s restraints on U.S. air power in Vietnam, a sore
point for LeMay who believed in an all-out war.
At a
news conference at which he was introduced as Wallace’s running mate, LeMay
said he saw nothing wrong with using nuclear weapons to shorten any war and,
thus, save lives.
LeMay
had been living in Air Force Village West, a military retirement community
outside March.
A
memorial service is scheduled for Wednesday at the air base chapel. Burial will
be at the U.S. Air Force Academy on Thursday.
He is
survived by his wife, Helen, and a daughter.
Excerpts from interview with Gen. LeMay.
ReplyDeleteIn a handwritten letter from LeMay with an appended date in 1976, LeMay appears to state that he would not wish the interview to be published during his lifetime nor during the lifetimes of anyone about whom he spoke in an "uncomplimentary" manner.
Interview: Curtis LeMay
[Interviewed by John B. Frantz]
June 28, 1971
... … I sat in on the critique of the [Bay of Pigs] operation for General White too in which the President attended, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, CIA, and all the rest of them. And it got around to the point that the lack of air cover was what caused the failure. Secretary Rusk was asked
about the cancellation of air cover . The President turned to him to see what his answer was. He said, "Well, I didn't know anything about the importance of this," and that ended the discussion. All these articles that you have seen that have been written by the great brains of the Kennedy Administration, including Robert Kennedy, on the Bay of Pigs as to the bad military advice and the betrayal of the military to President Kennedy is just a bunch of hogwash because it was not a military operation. The Joint Chiefs as far as I know were not asked to participate except as I mentioned, and it was not a military operation -- it was a civilian operation from start to finish.
F :
No one in Cuba doubted where it came from or would have I think under any
circumstances. What do you get, that - this feeling that this is just kind
of a bunch of amateurs wanting to--that they were playing toy soldiers?
L :
Well, I try not to exaggerate but everyone that came in with the Kennedy
Administration and is the most egotistical people that I ever saw in my life .
They had no faith in the military; they had no respect for the military at
all . They felt that the Harvard Business School method of solving problems
would solve any problem in the world. They were capable of doing it; they
were better than all the rest of us; otherwise they wouldn't have gotten
their superior education, as they saw it. And the fact that they had it
entitled them to govern the rest of us, and we shouldn't question their
decisions. I try not to exaggerate but that's exactly the case. So all
during the administration we found it impossible to get experience or
judgment cranked into the solution of any problem. As a matter of fact,
I have had a man tell me, "No, General, this is not the kind of weapon
system that you want to use, this is what you need." This man was in knee
pants when I was commanding the division in combat. He had no experience on the use of
weapons at all. And certainly the military are not without knowledge of the use of computers and
other methods of gathering statistics and solving problems and so forth. But war is an art, not an
exact science, and you are dealing with people, and judgment and experience are very
valuable in solving that kind of problem. And we couldn't get those factors
ever ground into the solution. ...
Yes, but the Official CIA history of the Bay of Pigs says that the Cubans were originally trained by Landsdale and his Philllipines pal V. as commandos who were to be infiltrated in small groups into the mountains. When Lansdale and V. were relieved, the plan was changed to a full scale mechanized (tanks) invasion with air cover at the Bay of Pigs. It wasn't just the lack of air cover but the change in plans. Who got rid of Lansdale and V. and changed the plan and location?
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