CHAPTER 47

COLD WARRIORS

Of the eight men profiled herein, only three remained in the service long enough to wear US Air Force blue while on active duty, and after Tooey Spaatz retired in 1948, only two made a career of the new service.

The Berlin Blockade brought together, albeit briefly, the two men who had maneuvered against one another over small-arms ammunition at Langley Field during those innocent prewar days. Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay commanded the whole show, while Colonel Hub Zemke arrived at the end of the operation as the commander of the 36th Fighter Group, the first group equipped with the Lockheed F-80 Shooting Star jet fighter to be assigned to USAFE.

When he came home from Europe and his months at Stalag Luft I, Zemke, unlike most Eighth Air Force fighter pilots, elected to remain in the service. His first assignment took him to the Air Tactical School at Tyndall Field near Panama City, Florida, as the chief of its Tactics Division. In 1948, the 36th, a wartime Ninth Air Force component, was equipped with jet fighters and redeployed from Howard AFB in Panama to the wartime Luftwaffe base at Fürstenfeldbruck. It would remain in Germany until 1994, but Zemke moved on, first to assume command of the 2nd Air Division—formerly the Eighth Air Force 2nd Bomb Division—at Landsberg, and then back to the States in 1953 to attend the Air War College at Randolph AFB in Texas.

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LeMay came back in October 1948 to the command for which he is best known—nine years at the helm of the Strategic Air Command. Created in 1946, SAC had gotten off to a shaky start under the command of General George Kenney, who had to contend with a budget at its nadir and a mass exodus of experienced personnel. Meanwhile, he had been the wartime commander of the Fifth Air Force, which had been engaged in tactical, not strategic, operations. Hoyt Vandenberg, now Air Force chief of staff, felt LeMay was ideally suited for the role, and it turned out that he was right. With the job came a fourth star for LeMay, who became a full general in 1951.

The Berlin Blockade experience, coupled with the reality of the Korean War, which began in 1950, brought about a realization by the American public and Congress of both Soviet intentions and the folly of reducing the numbers and capability of the American armed forces to the point where they were not a serious deterrent to Soviet mischief.

LeMay took command of an organization made up of two heavy bomb groups, only one of which had aircraft—the first of the new B-36 intercontinental bombers—and a dozen medium bomb groups, which were composed of B-29s (once “very heavy” bombers and now redesignated as “medium” in deference to the much larger B-36) and B-50s, variants of the B-29. There were no jet bombers yet, no aerial refueling capability, and no realistic training.

When LeMay left in 1957, SAC had 11 heavy bomb wings, equipped with a rapidly increasing number of B-52s and 28 medium bomb wings, equipped with a force of more than 1,300 B-47 jet bombers. By the mid-1950s, on LeMay’s watch, SAC had developed the capability for aerial refueling of its bombers—with KC-135 jets—to fly to targets anywhere in the world. In 1957, to demonstrate SAC’s global reach, LeMay sent three B-52s, supported by aerial refueling, on a nonstop flight around the world. Training, once lax, had become rigorous, maintenance was streamlined, merit promotions were introduced, and SAC was maintaining a bomber force on continuous airborne alert.

As LeMay wrote in his memoirs and as he reiterated in conversations with this author, he was certain that if the order had been issued, his command “could have destroyed all of Russia (I mean by that all of Russia’s capability to wage war) without losing a man to their defenses. [However,] we in SAC were not saber rattlers. We were not yelling for war and action in order to ‘flex the mighty muscles we had built.’ No stupidity of that sort. We wanted peace as much as anyone else wanted it. But we knew for a fact that it would be possible to curtail enemy expansion if we challenged them in that way.”

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Hub Zemke also served with SAC, arriving in 1955 from USAFE to command the 31st Strategic Fighter Wing, flying Republic F-84F Thunderstreaks out of Turner AFB, Georgia. Eleven years after he had been shot down literally on the eve of taking over the 65th, he finally had his wing command. The 31st was well-known for Operation Fox Peter, a series of mass overseas deployments of the entire wing using aerial refueling. Fox Peter One, the first of these, which took the wing overseas to Misawa AB in Japan in July 1952, was led by Colonel Dave Schilling, Zemke’s former second in command at the 56th Fighter Group during the war.

In 1957 Zemke took command of the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, formed at Turner AFB a year earlier to operate RB-57D Canberra high-altitude electronic intelligence aircraft on clandestine missions over the Soviet Far East and China from bases in Japan and Alaska. At the time that Zemke took over and transferred the wing to Laughlin AFB, it was becoming the first SAC unit to begin operating the Lockheed U-2, heretofore flown mainly by the CIA. He moved on to the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) staff in Colorado before the 4080th began its overflights of Cuba during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

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In July 1957, when General Thomas White, the wartime commander of the Seventh Air Force and a longtime fixture on the Air Staff at the Pentagon, took over as Chief of Staff of the Air Force, LeMay left SAC to become White’s vice chief. Under Eisenhower administration policy, the role of the service chiefs in the 1950s was administration, while that of the vice chiefs was operational. In notes penned in 1964, White later observed that he picked LeMay to run the service because “he was then the commander of the most efficient component of the Air Force . . . he was the architect of the Strategic Air Command.”

Of White, LeMay told Tom Coffey that “he thought politics was the art of compromise. He would go into battle ready to compromise. I never believed in that. I thought if you believed in something, God damn it, you got in there and fought for it.”

In 1961, LeMay’s bluntness and disdain for compromise put him at odds with the incoming administration of John F. Kennedy. The new president’s handling of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba sapped LeMay’s respect for Kennedy. By most accounts, including LeMay’s to this author, the two men never got along personally.

Nevertheless, when White retired in July 1961, Kennedy surprised everyone—LeMay included—by naming the vice chief as the new chief of staff. Kennedy biographer Arthur Schlesinger later wrote that “LeMay’s popularity in the ranks and on [Capitol] Hill gave him immunity,” though Hugh Sidey of Time magazine later observed that LeMay “had the toughness Kennedy felt the country needed most,” and quoted Kennedy as saying that it was good to have men like LeMay “commanding troops once you decide to go in. . . . I like having LeMay at the head of the Air Force. Everybody knows how he feels.”

However strained things might have been between Kennedy and LeMay, the general’s interactions with Kennedy’s controversial and opinionated secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, amounted to open animosity. A Harvard-trained accountant and statistical analyst, McNamara was the archetypical “bean counter.” He had actually served under LeMay briefly during World War II as a staff officer, and spent most of his postwar career at the Ford Motor Company.

McNamara clashed with Air Force leaders on numerous topics, notably his preference for ICBMs over manned aircraft. He became notorious for canceling the B-70 Mach 3 bomber program, for which LeMay had fought long and hard. He also promoted the Tactical Fighter Experimental (TFX), an aircraft that he felt could serve all the needs of both the US Navy and the Air Force. It eventually became the costly and trouble-plagued F-111, which the Navy never used.

“My quarrel with McNamara was not so much our differences of opinion,” LeMay observed in his memoirs. “I’ve had differences of opinion with a lot of people. My quarrel with him was [that I was] trying to help him and he doesn’t want my help. And he does things I’ve known all my life are wrong.”

McNamara became famous—or infamous—for coining the terms “mutually assured destruction” (MAD) to describe nuclear war, and “sublimited war” to describe his concept of strategy for the Vietnam War. It was this latter strategy—which McNamara many years later recognized as a mistake—over which the two antagonists disagreed most sharply.

LeMay favored a decisive use of strategic airpower against North Vietnam, cutting off enemy supply lines at their source, while McNamara favored a limited use of tactical airpower against smaller targets close to the battlefield. By 1965, as the American involvement grew, McNamara acquiesced to attacks on North Vietnam, but deliberately imposed tactical limits on American airmen.

“In Japan we dropped 502,000 tons and we won the war,” LeMay told Tom Coffey in 1985. “In Vietnam we dropped 6,162,000 tons of bombs and we lost the war. The difference was that McNamara chose the targets in Vietnam and I chose the targets in Japan.”

LeMay has long been controversial for writing in his memoirs that North Vietnamese aggression could be halted by the threat of shoving them “back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.” Frequently misinterpreted, the statement dogged LeMay for years as he was called upon repeatedly for an explanation. In a Washington Post interview published on October 4, 1968, he explained, “I never said we should bomb them back to the Stone Age. I said we had the capability to do it. I want to save lives on both sides.”

When Curtis LeMay retired from the US Air Force in January 1965, the war had barely begun, but he was adamant about a strategy for ending it. Seven long and bloody years would pass before his ideas were finally implemented. In December 1972, it was Operation Linebacker II, a sustained maximum effort by Eighth Air Force B-52s against exactly the same targets LeMay had recommended, that finally brought North Vietnam to the bargaining table.

During the presidential campaign of 1968, two years after he retired, LeMay made his last foray into public life by accepting the spot as the running mate to Alabama governor George Wallace on the American Independent Party ticket. While many of his old colleagues—Tooey Spaatz and Ira Eaker included—counseled him not to do it, he allowed himself to be talked into it because he felt the United States needed a strong alternative to Hubert Humphrey on the Democratic ticket, and he did not feel that the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, offered this alternative. Humphrey lost, as did the Wallace-LeMay ticket, but they carried five states and won 46 electoral votes, more than any third party in a presidential election since Theodore Roosevelt ran in 1912.

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Hub Zemke left the service in 1966, a year after LeMay, retiring as a colonel, while LeMay retired as a four-star general. After three decades, he and Maria divorced in 1973. He bought a ranch near Oroville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, and settled down in the quiet obscurity that LeMay also eventually achieved. Meanwhile, Hanns-Joachim Scharff, the Luftwaffe master interrogator who had interviewed Zemke, also wound up in California in the 1970s, having reinvented himself as a successful mosaic artist. Among his commissions were the floor of the California state capitol and the walls of the Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World.

Working with Roger Freeman, author of The Mighty Eighth, Zemke published two volumes of memoirs in 1988 and 1991. As Freeman wrote in 1988, “In retirement, Hubert Zemke, as befits his outlook, has a habit of dismissing his achievements in life with a joke. Others who have known him accord him substantial honors, in particular recognition as probably the most successful American fighter leader of the Second World War. This, the subject contests, not through modesty but because he does not believe it to be true. He insists that the successes in air fighting were due to the quality of whole organizations and not to one man.”

In his final decades, LeMay eschewed the limelight and refused interview requests, but made time for old friends. He and Helen lived for many of those years in Newport Beach, California, then moved into a retirement home for Air Force veterans near March AFB. It was here that he suffered a fatal heart attack on October 1, 1990. Helen passed away 17 months later, and is buried next to him at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Zemke died four years after LeMay, on August 30, 1994, at the age of 80. Roger Freeman noted that it had been “Hub’s wish that when the time comes his ashes are to be interred beneath a towering sequoia in the Sierra Nevada. . . . While his mortal remains may lie in the forest that he loved so dearly, for those who have known Hubert Zemke, either personally or through the medium of the written word, his presence is elsewhere. Far away, high above the land of his forefathers, where wisps of cirrus form and fade in the frigid blue, the spirit of Hubert Zemke forever soars.”

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The Eighth Air Force continued to soar throughout the Cold War and beyond. The Eighth was within Curtis LeMay’s chain of command from 1948, when he took over at SAC, until he retired as chief of staff in 1965, and it remained as Hub Zemke’s home for most of those years as well. It was headquartered within the United States until 1970, when it moved to Andersen AFB on Guam. From there, the Eighth managed all of the B-52 missions and SAC refueling operations during the war in Southeast Asia. In 1975, its headquarters moved to Barksdale AFB near Shreveport, Louisiana, where they have remained since.

When SAC was merged into Air Combat Command in 1992, the Eighth went with it. In 2009, when the Air Force Global Strike Command was formed from the nuclear-weapons-capable components of Air Combat Command and Space Command, the entire manned bomber capability of the new organization was placed under the umbrella of the Eighth Air Force.