Question: How about your bombardier—was he operating all right?
LeMay: He worked 100 percent as usual. [laughter]
Question: Major Preston here—did he perform his duties properly?
LeMay: Yes, he was right on the ball, same as he always is.
LeMay speaks with no inflection. No elaboration. It is safe to say that Colonel LeMay did not serenade his men with “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.”
Question: How about the men—did they perform their duties?
LeMay: Crew’s right up to par.
Question: You don’t have any complaints, in other words.
LeMay: No complaints at all.
No complaints at all. Curtis LeMay was not the sort to complain—not to an outsider, anyway. Had the film crew interviewed Haywood Hansell, he would have waxed eloquent, dropped a few smart remarks at his own expense, then invited everyone back to his officer’s quarters for a drink. Hansell was the anti-LeMay.
When Hansell was at Maxwell Field, before the war, he was part of a group of daredevil pilots led by the flying ace Claire Chennault. They performed impossibly dangerous stunts in planes that were not designed for that kind of adventure. As Hansell himself would admit, it’s a miracle he survived. Hansell would join a daredevil group. It suited his romantic flair. LeMay? He was the opposite of romantic.
Russell Dougherty, one of LeMay’s fellow Air Force generals, loved to tell a story about a time, much later, when LeMay was briefed about a new airplane called the FB-111:
The briefings lasted about two and a half days…And finally, they wrapped up the briefing, and LeMay hadn’t said a word the whole time. He was just sitting there…After they got all through, General LeMay said, “Is that it?” “Yes, sir! That’s it.” And he got up, and he says, “It ain’t big enough,” and he walked out. That was his only comment.
A two-and-a-half-day briefing, dismissed with four words.
In the fall of 1942, LeMay came to Britain with the Eighth Air Force. He headed up a squadron of B-17 bombers based out of Chelveston. And he made his mark immediately.
Here’s one example: If you fly a fleet of B-17 bombers deep into enemy territory in order to precision-bomb from twenty thousand feet, how do you protect yourself from enemy fighter planes? Bombers had guns and armor plating, but it quickly became obvious, once the shooting started, that that still wasn’t enough. So LeMay devised something called the combat box formation—a way for a group of bombers to fly together so that they could most easily defend themselves against enemy attack. It was an idea quickly adopted by the whole Eighth Air Force. Then LeMay turned his attention to an even bigger problem: his pilots.
As LeMay put it in an oral history long after he’d retired: “One of the things that was very apparent was that the bombing was not very good.”
Bombers have cameras that take pictures, called strike photos, of the area where their bombs fall. And when LeMay looked at the strike photos after the crews had come back to base, he could see that the bombs were landing everywhere but the target. “Not only were the targets not being destroyed, but we didn’t have any records of where most of the bombs actually fell. They were taking strike photos, of course, but you could not locate over half of the bombs that were hauled over to the Continent.”
The problem was that the pilots were not flying straight at the targets. They believed that would make them sitting ducks for antiaircraft fire, because enemy artillerymen on the ground would simply estimate the planes’ speed and altitude and aim accordingly. So the pilots were taking evasive action, not flying directly at the target until the last seconds of their bombing run. Which is why the bombs were falling wide. How could the bombardier working the bombsight do his job if the plane was lined up over the target only at the very last moment?
LeMay explained, “Something had to be done to give the bombardier a chance to hit the target. This meant a longer bomb run to give him ample time to get the bombsight level.”
LeMay saw only one solution. The pilots had to stop taking evasive action. They had to fly straight in, over the target. This went directly against received wisdom. “All of the people that I talked to that had been in combat were of the opinion that if you did this, antiaircraft guns would shoot you down,” he said.
But that was just opinion. LeMay was an empiricist. He went back and studied his old artillery manuals and did some calculations. How many rounds from an antiaircraft gun would it take to bring down a B-17 bomber? As he recalled, “It required I think 377 rounds to hit it. This didn’t look too bad to me.”