CHAPTER 1
SCORCH, BOIL, AND BAKE
The plane is a dud. A very, very expensive dud. And your boss wants you to save the day. You are General Curtis LeMay and your boss is Hap Arnold, and Hap Arnold’s ass is on the line because the B-29 is the most expensive weapon of the war and it’s a dud and General Arnold wants you to rescue him from complete and total humiliation. So he has sent you to the war in the Pacific and you are stationed on a tiny volcanic island where every day is the same day, baking sunshine mixed with brief thunderstorms. Thank goodness the Quonset hut has air conditioning, because you’ve got a solid week of work ahead of you. You’re going to ask for a pot of coffee and work the problem, a habit happily indulged, going back to your days as an engineering student at Ohio State.
Your predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, had been flummoxed by two formidable issues: the vagaries of Mother Nature and the debugging of a revolutionary aircraft. The B-29 is still a work in progress. Its engines, meant to push the plane high above the clouds, are incredibly powerful, but they often overheat. You also find out that even if the pilots manage to reach thirty thousand feet without the engines bursting into flames, there’s another problem: fierce hundred-mile-per-hour jet stream winds in this part of the Pacific, which compromise accurate targeting. There’s more. Even if the B-29s can be held steady rocketing through a wind-blasted sky, soupy clouds over Japan regularly make it impossible to even see targets at all. General Hansell had hoped the Soviets might supply more accurate forecasts, since the weather in Japan arrives from Siberia, but no cooperation has been forthcoming from Marshal Stalin. What a fucker.
You stay up into the early morning hours reading intelligence reports, studying reconnaissance photos. Every past attack tells you a story. You figure out that the Japanese have almost no air defenses left, and you come to the conclusion that the bombing campaign has to start over. You want the B-29s flying at night, at low altitude. This should help with putting bombs on targets. Just because the B-29s can fly above the clouds doesn’t mean that’s the only way to use them. You’re also going to strip guns from planes. Since the Japanese have no fighters left, what’s the point? That will decrease the size of the crews, which will allow the bomb capacity to be increased by five or six tons. At the next flight meeting, you’re going to be telling everyone that they’ll now be flying low… light… at night… with more bang.
You’re also very aware that thousands of Japanese homes are made of paper and wood. And you know all about the recent devastation in Europe. Firebombing works. It might work even better in Japan. You are of the opinion that the best way to save lives is to end the war as soon as possible. You also know that the worst way for this war to end would be to make foot soldiers fight their way to Tokyo inch by bloody inch, with millions of suicidal kids rushing at them with bombs strapped to their bellies. That would be the biggest fucking nightmare in the history of war. Your B-29s are going to keep that from happening. They are going to scorch, boil, and bake the Japanese until they’ve had enough. When the B-29s next attack Tokyo, they’ll be doing just what the British have been doing in Germany. The planes going to Tokyo will be packed with hundred-pound oil-gel bombs and six-pound gelled-gasoline bombs. You’re going to turn the capital of Japan into one giant bonfire.
When the crews start bitching that the young hotshot general has a brand-new way of getting them killed, you’ll explain that they are going to deliver the biggest firecracker the Japanese have ever seen. You’ll also remind the airmen about the horrific fighting and towering sacrifice required by the U.S. Marines to claim Tinian, and Saipan, and Guam, which put their bombers a few thousand miles closer to the Japanese mainland. You’ll remind them of the Imperial Army beheading their fellow airmen. You’ll mention the kamikaze attacks sinking warships. You’ll mention all the Boeing workers in Kansas who’d spent night and day and day and night building the B-29, the world’s first intercontinental bomber, capable of a four-thousand-mile round trip, the largest and heaviest plane ever mass produced, with a 141-foot wingspan carrying 2,000-horsepower engines, with propellers sixteen and a half feet in diameter. But you also say this: You say this new plan is your deal. If this fails, you—General Curtis Emerson LeMay of the Twenty-First Bomber Command—will be solely responsible. Heck, you haven’t even told Hap what you’re doing. “In a war,” you’ll tell a reporter, “you’ve got to keep one punch ahead of the other guy all the time. A war is a very tough kind of proposition. If you don’t get the enemy, he gets you. I think we’ve figured out a punch he’s not expecting this time.”
As the Air Force was becoming the sexiest branch of the service, the demanding and uncompromising Curtis LeMay became its guiding and often divisive figure. His leadership skills were undoubtedly precocious, and he rose rapidly. Stocky, stern, blunt, immensely self-confident, LeMay would be to the Air Force what George Patton was to the Army. Both were prototypical, unapologetic members of the warrior class.
LeMay spoke sparingly. Being on the verge of a growl was his steady state. His ferocious bearing was enhanced by the cigars he was constantly chewing, which would dangle from one side of his mouth. In truth, the cigars were a kind of prop, used as an act of concealment. It disguised the fact that one side of LeMay’s face drooped from Bell’s palsy, contracted during a flight in the inhumanely frigid conditions of high altitude, before the era of pressurized cabins.
The United States began World War II pursuing daytime, precision bombing of Nazi military and industrial targets, which was in theory more humane and accurate, but which also involved a much higher degree of difficulty and produced a higher rate of mortality for the airmen. The early results were paltry. In practice, pilots being assaulted by darting Nazi Focke-Wulf interceptors and blistering antiaircraft fire from 88-millimeter guns weren’t maintaining position over their targets for the necessary amount of time. LeMay established a new rule: no more evasive action. “Having paid the price of admission to get over the target,” LeMay told his airmen, “we’ve got to get the benefits.”
Such an order required a giant measure of courage, and it was also, just as clearly, suicidal. But LeMay won the loyalty of those under his command because he backed up his words with tactical brains and personal courage. On November 23, 1942, in an attack on a fortified U-boat pen in Saint-Nazaire, France, LeMay piloted the lead plane. It was damaged by flak, but he and his crew nailed the target, as did the majority of the 101 B-17s on the mission. A month later, LeMay introduced the “combat box,” which required bombers to break up into small box-shaped groups. By doing so, the planes were able to mass firepower from their defensive guns and, during raids, concentrate the release of bombs on a given target.
In recognition of his guts and, more significantly, his genius for improving the effectiveness of killing machines, LeMay would become the youngest four-star general in the Army, at age thirty-seven. As the Nazi threat diminished, he was dispatched to fix an ineffective bombing campaign in the Pacific theater, part of which involved nursing the temperamental, multibillion-dollar B-29 bomber, as costly to develop as the atom bomb. The plane’s Wright Cyclone engines had come to be nicknamed the “Wrong” engines and ultimately required more than eighteen hundred modifications to fix leaking, overheating, fried cylinders, faulty exhaust stacks, and the tendency to conk out or catch fire. Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the Army Air Force, had to that point written a very big check for a plane that was all promise and no punch.
By 1945, when the concept of strategic bombing had morphed into the barbarity of area bombing, LeMay had no qualms about this evolution. It could even be said the reverse was true: He readily became its most productive adherent when he determined that the ideal bombing strategy for mainland Japan was to turn the entire country into a heap of smoking rubble. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” he’d say. “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough, they stop fighting.”
However, as strategy, area bombing—or, less euphemistically, the indiscriminate killing of noncombatants—proved to be mostly pointless and even counterproductive. The British had theorized that their air raids would cause German citizens to rebel against the Nazis, but, as Robert Pape noted, the opposite occurred: The attacks actually increased reliance on Hitler’s government for basic necessities. “Air power has never driven the masses into the streets to demand anything,” Pape wrote. Moreover, raids on cities had a negligible impact on German war production because many factories were outside city centers. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey estimated that the effect of all Allied city bombing probably depleted the German economy by no more than 2.7 percent. German production in 1944 was three times greater than it was at the start of the war. The most effective missions targeted such resources as oil facilities. By 1945, the Nazis were running out of gas.
Raids in Italy had long-term negative political consequences. During the American offensive, U.S. bombers targeted railroads, bridges, and factories. The rampant destruction dimmed Italian enthusiasm for the American liberators, especially among industrial workers. As a result, many Italians had a more favorable opinion of the Red Army, and during the Cold War, the country’s working class backed the most vigorous Communist Party in Western Europe.
The Air Force didn’t win the war in the Pacific, either. All the decisive battles were fought by the Navy. In June 1944, Admiral Chester Nimitz put 127,000 troops on 535 ships and began ejecting the Japanese from multiple island strongholds with a series of amphibious landings. The bloodshed was horrific. The first target, Saipan, was attacked on June 15, 1944. On the beaches, exposed Marines were sliced and shredded by mines, mortars, and machine guns. Bodies were typically dismembered and even atomized into red bits. The Japanese fought to the point of futility, choosing hopeless banzai charges instead of permitting capture, making final stands in pillboxes and caves, many of which became coffins as American soldiers resorted to the use of flamethrowers.
To subdue Saipan, 13,000 U.S. troops were killed or wounded. Of the 30,000 Japanese soldiers defending the island, only 921 were taken prisoner. Even Japanese civilians joined this death cult. After being told the Americans would commit rape, castration, and torture, as many as 1,000 men, women, and children proceeded to the northern tip of the island and tossed themselves off a six-hundred-foot seaside cliff. Back in Japan, a newspaper praised the event as “the finest act of the Showa period.”
Tinian, Saipan’s sister island in the Marianas archipelago, was the next target. After being cleared of Japanese forces, this dot in the middle of the Pacific, some six thousand miles west of San Francisco, was transformed into the largest and busiest airport in the world. The Navy’s can-do construction battalion, the Seabees, cut and paved six huge runways, each almost two miles long and as wide as a ten-lane highway. These jumbo dimensions were required to accommodate the B-29 Superfortress, half a football field in size.
Soon, each day on the island would conclude with the thrum of giant piston engines building to a deafening symphony of a single sustained note. Every fifteen seconds, another bomber choked with fuel and explosives would fitfully lift into the fading daylight, headed north into the night for an early morning attack on a Japanese target.
On March 9–10, 1945, the aerial bombardment of cities reached a new and even more sickening level when LeMay ordered 334 B-29s to attack Tokyo. The bombers each carried two kilotons of incendiary devices. What occurred, according to the Strategic Bombing Survey, was worse than a firestorm. It was termed “a conflagration.” Thousands of bombs scattered what was described as a “flaming dew” above Tokyo’s flammable wood-and-paper residences. Volatile gases merged and rose, becoming an invisible wall of boiling heat. Wind speeds climbed as the air became violent. B-29s were turned upside down. The fire spread madly, erasing everything until there was nothing left for the flames to consume.
“Fire winds with burning particles ran up and down the streets,” said factory worker Tsuchikura Hidezo. “I watched people, adults and children, running for their lives, dashing madly about like rats. Flames ran after them like living things, striking them down. They died by the hundreds in front of me.… The whole spectacle with its blinding lights and thundering noise reminded me of the paintings of purgatory—a real inferno out of the depths of hell.”
The United States later calculated that in the six-hour bombardment of Tokyo more people lost their lives than in any equivalent period “in the history of man.” More than one hundred thousand men, women, and children were killed; a million more were made homeless. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay later conceded.
During the Cold War, LeMay’s public image would eventually track downward, but it began with a long spell at rare heights. The bombing campaign by his B-29s ultimately established him as an unequivocal military superstar, with journalists of the day ignoring the unconscionable body count from attacks that ultimately reduced seventy Japanese cities to dust. His portrait on the cover of Time carried this blunt caption: Can Japan stand twice the bombing that Germany got? The esteem lasted into the 1950s as LeMay took over Strategic Air Command, a Cold War–era creation. SAC crews were put on a perpetual hair-trigger standby, and the division’s nearly three thousand bombers packed enough megatonnage to instantly turn the Soviet Union—or any foe—into a radioactive ruin.
The emotional underpinning of SAC was a misplaced overpreparedness that could be attributed to a Pearl Harbor syndrome. Curtis LeMay was among the generation of officers who felt the sting of humiliation when the U.S. military was caught sleeping, literally, in the early hours of a Sunday morning in 1941 when Japanese fighters and bombers swarmed Hawaii. He was also intimately aware that the American forces at the time were incapable of swiftly mounting a counterpunch. With 200,000 troops, the 1941 version of the U.S. military was about the same size as Bulgaria’s, and the Air Force had only a few hundred first-line combat aircraft.
By 1944, however, American air power was unchallenged. LeMay and other commanders were supervising 2.4 million personnel, up from 20,000, with a total of 80,000 planes. After being engorged with weaponry, LeMay fiercely fought to maintain a surplus of destruction for the rest of his military career.
He also cultivated an incestuous relationship with Hollywood, which spent the first half of the Cold War mythologizing the magnificence of American air power. Command Decision (1948) starred Clark Gable as a crusading Air Force general who stops the Nazis from deploying their frightening new jet fighters. Twelve O’Clock High (1949) portrayed a fictional underperforming U.S. bomber group motivated into greatness by General Frank Savage, a disciplinarian presented in a positive light by Gregory Peck. In 1952, MGM released Above and Beyond, based on the experiences of Paul Tibbets in training the B-29 squadron that dropped the atomic bombs. Those who bought a ticket watched a fraught relationship between Lucy Tibbets, a weary, worried, lonely wife, and a driven, distracted, distant, self-centered, and short-tempered husband. In one scene, Paul returns home late—yet again. As he carries one of his sleeping sons into the bedroom, Lucy joins him. While they are bonding over their children sedately snoozing, Paul volcanically erupts in a defense of using atomic weapons.
PAUL: Why?
LUCY: Oh, I keep thinking of this war and how somewhere at this very moment bombs are being dropped and children like that are being killed.
PAUL: Lucy, don’t ever say that again! Not to me… Look. Look. Let’s clear up one little piece of morality right now.… War is what’s wrong, not just its weapons. Sure… innocent people are dying and that’s horrible. But to lose this war to the gang we’re fighting would be the most immoral thing we could do to those kids in there. And don’t you ever forget it!
In the real world, LeMay would become yet another general stuck fighting old battles and anxious for the next one to start. In the Korean conflict, U.S. bombers resumed the scorched-earth tactics of World War II, decimating cities and villages, and in the process killing two million North Korean civilians, or, as LeMay proudly calculated, “20 percent of the population.” But, as in World War II, this savagery was not determinative. The entry of Mao’s ground troops into the Korean conflict, in massive numbers and commanded to fight without reason, ultimately produced a stalemate.
Army general Matt Ridgeway was unalterably opposed to LeMay’s supposition that modern nuclear wars could be fought quickly, easily, and antiseptically. He had witnessed the worst fighting in World War II and Korea, and in Korea, particularly, he saw what the Air Force had promised to do with strategic bombing and how limited it was in fact as an instrument of policy and power. When the United States bombed, Ridgeway argued, it inevitably ended up using ground troops. He compared air power to an aspirin; it gave some immediate relief, but it did not cure the underlying problem. Ridgeway also deemed the “strategic bombing” of residential areas fundamentally immoral.
In 1954, when LeMay was asked what he would do if hostilities resumed in Korea, he said he would drop a few atomic bombs on China, Manchuria, and southeastern Russia in the hope it might escalate into World War III and allow the United States to finish off the Soviets before they were an equal match in nuclear firepower. By that point, it’s important to note, the Soviets had ended the U.S. atomic monopoly, had two hundred atomic bombs of their own, and were on the verge of testing a hydrogen device, one of which, if dropped on New York City, could have caused millions of deaths, with the destruction reaching Boston and Washington, D.C. LeMay simply refused to grasp that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t the beginning of a new age of warfare. It was just the opposite: a warning that such a war could never, ever be fought.
Hollywood—with LeMay as an unofficial executive producer—nonetheless found a way to even glamorize thermonuclear destruction. Strategic Air Command (1955)—the first in a so-called SAC trilogy that also included Bombers B-52 (1957) and A Gathering of Eagles (1963)—advertised that it had been filmed in “the sky-filling grandeur of Vista Vision.” A barking narrator told moviegoers: “Now for the first time the Air Force throws opens its guarded gates to reveal the amazing story of America’s top-secret striking force, its earth-quaking power ready for defense at a moment in history when the world trembles in the shadow of an H-bomb.”
The star of Strategic Air Command was Jimmy Stewart, who had flown twenty bombing missions in World War II. He played Dutch Holland, an ex–bomber pilot and baseball legend who is called back to duty by the Air Force to fulfill a need for senior leadership. The man doing the recruiting is a character named General Ennis C. Hawkes, modeled on General Curtis LeMay, who tells Dutch that SAC is only interested in deterrence. “We’re here,” he says, “to stop a war from starting.”
However, it began to leak out that Curtis LeMay had long been hoping to start a war with the Soviet Union, more or less by himself.
By the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, LeMay had become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as head of the Air Force, and he viewed the high-stakes showdown as an opportunity to subvert John F. Kennedy’s blockade. He covertly told SAC airborne-alert nuclear bombers to soar past their customary turnaround points, and he failed to halt a ridiculously ill-timed West Coast test launch of a nuclear missile. On October 19, 1962, as Kennedy was about to announce a blockade, LeMay denigrated the idea and said it would encourage the Soviets to attack Allied forces in West Berlin. Here’s a portion of the secretly recorded White House conversation:
GENERAL LEMAY: If we don’t do anything to Cuba, then they’re going to push on Berlin, and push real hard because they’ve got us on the run.… This blockade and political action, I see leading into war.… This is almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich.… I just don’t see any other solution except direct military action right now. A blockade, and political talk, would be considered by a lot of our friends and neutrals as being a pretty weak response to this. And I’m sure a lot of our own citizens would feel that way, too. You’re in a pretty bad fix, Mr. President.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: What did you say?
GENERAL LEMAY: You’re in a pretty bad fix.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: Well, you’re in it with me.
Given LeMay’s habit of imprudent behavior, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, released in 1964, was on relatively solid ground picturing the commanding generals of the Air Force as maniacal sociopaths eager to instigate nuclear holocaust. Designed as dark satire, Kubrick’s classic was inadvertently as faithful in its truth-telling as any documentary.
The plot of Dr. Strangelove is incited by the fully psychotic General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden). Certain that the communists are conspiring to pollute the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people through fluoridation, General Ripper personally authorizes his 843rd Bomb Wing at Burpelson Air Force Base to attack the Soviet Union. At the Pentagon’s War Room, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) makes the case to President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers) that Ripper’s lunacy has a silver lining, providing the United States with a golden opportunity to flatten the Soviets once and for all and to do so with only a few million dead. Read the script slowly. It is a wholly accurate rendering of the mind-set of the Cold War U.S. Air Force:
GENERAL TURGIDSON: One, our hopes for recalling the 843rd Bomb Wing are quickly being reduced to a very low order of probability. Two, in less than fifteen minutes from now the Russkies will be making radar contact with the planes. Three, when they do, they are going to go absolutely ape, and they’re gonna strike back with everything they’ve got. Four, if prior to this time, we have done nothing further to suppress their retaliatory capabilities, we will suffer virtual annihilation. Now, five, if on the other hand, we were to immediately launch an all-out and coordinated attack on all their airfields and missile bases we’d stand a damn good chance of catching them with their pants down. Hell, we got a five-to-one missile superiority as it is. We could easily assign three missiles to every target, and still have a very effective reserve force for any other contingency. Now, six, an unofficial study which we undertook of this eventuality, indicated that we would destroy ninety percent of their nuclear capabilities. We would therefore prevail, and suffer only modest and acceptable civilian casualties from their remaining force, which would be badly damaged and uncoordinated.
Indeed, there was little daylight between the intemperate warmongering as portrayed by the bomb-happy General Buck Turgidson and the principal model for the role, Curtis LeMay. More than any other Cold War figure, LeMay would modernize and normalize the concept of indiscriminate and catastrophic aerial destruction and, by doing so, put the world on notice that anyone could be a target—anytime, anyplace, anywhere.