Unlike many of the great ground commanders of World War II, most of the great air force generals other than Jimmy Doolittle are ciphers to even aficionados of World War II history. One of the least studied and arguably most significant of these is General Curtis Lemay.
LeMay’s life is not only one of a great general who intuitively understood the capabilities of strategic air power it was also one that rivaled any Horatio Alger story. The eldest son of a ne’er-do-well, LeMay was a breadwinner for the family at an early age. At an age when most boys were delivering newspapers, LeMay was a newspaper distributor. He worked his way through college in a steel mill, working 9 hour shifts at night, six days a week, and then going to class. This ingrained in young LeMay life long habits of self-reliance, frugality, and loyalty. He continued to be the primary means of support for his family and a surrogate parent to his siblings all through his life.
As an ROTC cadet at Ohio State he decided very early that he wished to be a pilot in the Army Air Corps and demonstrated his ability to master a bureaucratic process. He discovered that the easiest path to flight school was by way of the National Guard and showing a sophistication much beyond his years managed to get himself enrolled as a flight candidate that way. LeMay’s intelligence, work ethic, and luck ensured he passed flight school and his class rank was high enough to see him posted as a fighter pilot.
In the interwar period, LeMay became enamored of heavy bombers and left the higher prestige world of fighters to become an expert in in-flight navigation and bombing tactics. When war broke out in 1941, LeMay found himself promoted at a staggering rate of speed. In 1940 he was a lieutenant, 24 months later he was a lieutenant colonel and commander of a bomb group.
When LeMay finally arrived in England in November 1942 he was appalled to find a bombing campaign that was accomplishing little. Morale was at rock bottom and the US Army Air Forces were on the verge of following the British example of restricting bomb raids to the hours of darkness. The prevailing wisdom was that a B-17 flying more than 10 seconds on the same course and altitude was sure to be hit by flak. It was impossible, of course, to hit anything but random bits of European countryside under those conditions. LeMay set out to see if mathematics provided the same solution as the conventional wisdom:
He had pulled the covers over himself because of the cold damp weather, “but I was too excited to freeze,” he remembered. LeMay calculated the lift required to place the shells that high, the target size (seventy-four feet, nine inches from a B-17s forward gun to its tail), the number of shells the German gun batteries could cover, the dispersion of those rounds and, finally, their accuracy. All of this was based on the number of guns he thought the Germans were using, according to intelligence reports. Finally, he had it: 372.
Actually post war analysis found the number was closer to 1800. The first time it was tried was on November 23, 1942 when the 305th Bomb Group hit the rail yards and submarine pens at St. Nazaire. A near riot broke out in the briefing when it was revealed that the raid would culminate in a straight and level run of 420 seconds. The riot ended when LeMay declared that he was flying lead. Two of his planes were lost, both to fighters, and resistance to his tactics not only evaporated but quickly became the standard for B-17s.
This became a recurring theme in LeMay’s career. He was given the toughest problems, bringing the troubled B-29 into action, setting up the Strategic Air Command, etc. He approached the problem quietly and analytically. And when he arrived at a conclusion he used vigorous personal leadership to carry out the necessary actions to ensure success.
Where Kozak’s book does a good job on LeMay in World War II, it is deficient in other areas. His role in integrating the Air Force is asserted but not explored. In light of his future role as the running mate of Alabama Governor George Wallace in 1968 this is a critical omission.
At several places Kozak assures us he was not a Jack D. Ripper character and respectful of the idea of civilian supremacy over the military, troubling instances that suggest he possessed a much more ambivalent view. Duke University Political Science professor Peter Feaver states in Armed Servants: Agency, Oversight, and Civil-Military Relations that when LeMay was told that his policy of “launch-on-warn,” that is, launching a retaliatory nuclear strike based on a warning that Soviet missiles were being launched, was not national policy he replied, “I don’t care. It’s my policy. It’s what I’m going to do.”
A greater deficiency in the book is the relatively short shrift given LeMay’s decision to join George Wallace’s presidential bid in 1968. Any legacy that LeMay retained which hadn’t been damaged by lampooning from the peace movement in the 50s and 60s was mortally wounded by his joining Wallace’s campaign. Kozak also, in my view, reduces Wallace to a caricature of the sort Kozak protests against in his book. But a more careful and detailed study of the the 1968 campaign would have solved that problem as well as clarifying LeMay’s role.
On the whole, the book leaves a lot more questions asked than answered. The prewar jockeying for position between the Army and Navy is glossed over, and in the case of the Joint Air Exercise 4 of August 1937 perhaps wrongly described.
Much is made of LeMay’s lack of social polish yet his biography is one of a man who became the youngest general in the history of the United States, a man who amassed a formidable array of patrons, and who was able to run rings around successive administrations in funding and carving out autonomy for the Strategic Air Command and the Air Force. How was this possible?
Despite LeMay’s devotion to strategic bombing there is an ample amount of information that suggests that strategic bombing was not the decisive weapon LeMay thought in World War II, or in any war thereafter. To fully evaluate the man this is a question that should have been explored.
And as we’ve mentioned, the whole 1968 campaign is given short shrift.
Having said that, Warren Kozak’s new book, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay, provides an accessible starting point to anyone interested in the career of one of the most important figures of World War II. Hopefully, Kozak’s book is a welcome first step in dispelling the aura of a bomb-happy reactionary that has been attached to LeMay and will serve as the basis for serious academic scholarship on his life in the future.
