Command and Control

The problems at the Strategic Air Command extended from its enlisted personnel to its leading officers. General George Kenney, the head of SAC, had little prior experience with bombers, and his deputy commander hadn’t served in a combat unit since the late 1920s. During the spring of 1948, as tensions with the Soviets increased, Charles A. Lindbergh was asked to provide a secret evaluation of SAC’s readiness for war. Lindbergh found that morale was low, landings were rough, training was poor, equipment was badly maintained, and accidents were frequent. A month after Lindbergh’s findings were submitted, General Kenney was relieved of command.

Kenney’s replacement, General Curtis E. LeMay, was a bold, innovative officer who’d revolutionized bombing practices in both the European and Pacific campaigns of the Second World War. Admired, feared, honored as a war hero, considered a great patriot by his supporters and a mass murderer by his critics, LeMay soon transformed the Strategic Air Command into a model of lethal efficiency. He created a vast organization dedicated solely to nuclear combat and gave it a capacity for destruction unmatched in the history of warfare. The personality and toughness and worldview of Curtis LeMay not only molded an entirely new institutional culture at SAC, but also influenced American nuclear operations in ways that endure to the present day. And his nickname was “Iron Ass” for good reason.

Curtis LeMay was born in 1906 and raised mainly in Columbus, Ohio. His father was a laborer who held and then lost a long series of jobs, constantly moving the family to new neighborhoods in Ohio, to Montana, California, and Pennsylvania. His mother sometimes worked as a domestic servant. Again and again he was the new kid in school, shy, awkward, bullied. To counter the unsettled, anarchic quality of his family life, LeMay learned self-discipline and worked hard. At the age of nine, he got his first paying job: shooting sparrows for a nickel each to feed a neighbor’s cat. He delivered newspapers and telegrams, excelled at academics but felt, in his own words, “cut off from normal life,” earning and saving money while other kids played sports and made friends. He graduated from high school without ever having been to a dance. He’d saved enough, however, to make the first tuition payment at Ohio State University. For the next four years, LeMay attended college during the day, then worked at a steel mill from early evening until two or three in the morning, went home, slept for a few hours, and returned to campus for his nine o’clock class.

After studying to become a civil engineer, LeMay joined the Army Air Corps in 1929. Flying became his favorite thing to do — followed, in order of preference, by hunting, driving sports cars, and fishing. Socializing was far down the list. While other officers yearned to become fighter pilots, like the air aces of the First World War, LeMay thought that long-range bombers would prove decisive in the future. He learned to fly them, became one of the nation’s finest navigators, and showed that planes could find and destroy battleships at sea. When LeMay led a bomber group from the United States to England in 1942, he was the only pilot among them who’d ever flown across an ocean.

Within days of arriving in Great Britain, LeMay began to question the tactics being used in daylight bombing runs against the Nazis. American B-17s zigzagged to avoid the heavy antiaircraft fire; the conventional wisdom held that if you flew straight and level for more than ten seconds, you’d be shot down. But the evasive maneuvers caused bombs to miss their targets. After some late-night calculations about speed, distance, and rate of fire, LeMay came up with a radically new approach. Planes flying straight went much faster than planes that zigzagged, he realized — and therefore would spend less time exposed to enemy fire. He devised a “combat box,” a flight formation for eighteen to twenty-one bombers, that optimized their ability to drop bombs and defend against enemy fighters. When his men questioned the idea of heading straight into antiaircraft fire, LeMay told them that he’d fly the lead plane — the one most likely to be shot down.

On November 23, 1942, during the final approach to railway yards and submarine pens in Saint-Nazaire, France, the B-17s of LeMay’s bombardment group flew straight and level for a full seven minutes. None was shot down by antiaircraft fire. Bombing accuracy was greatly improved. And within weeks the tactics that LeMay had adopted for his first combat mission became the standard operating procedure for every American bomber crew in Europe.