LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak

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. (more…)

Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton

The Global War on Terror, if we’re allowed to call it as much anymore, has produced wide array of books with a cacophony of voices. At one end of the spectrum are those which profess to predict the future through the lens of our Vietnam experience (Tom Ricks’s Fiasco and George Packer’s Assassin’s Gate fit in here) the other, and currently dominant end of the spectrum are the soldier’s narratives in the tradition of Joe Galloway’s We Were Soldiers Once… And Young and Mark Bowden’s Blackhawk Down. These would include Thunder Run by Mark Bowden’s colleague Dave Zucchino and Not a Good Day to Die by Sean Naylor. Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers fits squarely within the latter category.

Stanton eschews political posturing and Monday morning quarterbacking in favor of telling a small but important story from the viewpoint of a handful of Special Forces officers and non-commissioned officers who supported the Northern Alliance in October-December 2001. (more…)