An antiaircraft gun would have to fire 377 rounds if it hoped to disable a B-17 bomber flying straight at the target. Three hundred seventy-seven rounds is a lot of ammunition, so flying straight is a risk, but it’s not a crazy risk.
So LeMay said, Let’s try it. Let’s fly in straight. A seven-minute-long, straight and steady approach. And if that sounded suicidal—which it did to all his pilots—he added, I’m going to be the first to try it. In a 1942 bombing run over Saint-Nazaire, France, LeMay led the way. He took no evasive action. And what happened? His group put twice as many bombs on the target as any group had before. And they didn’t lose a single bomber.
Robert McNamara, who later became secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, ran analysis for the Army Air Forces during World War II. In Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War, McNamara described LeMay after he heard that so many pilots were turning tail:
He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal. He issued an order. He said, “I will be in the lead plane on every mission. Any plane that takes off will go over the target, or the crew will be court-martialed.” Now, that’s the kind of commander he was.
The Bomber Mafia was made up of theorists, intellectuals who conceived of their grand plans in the years before the war from the safety of Montgomery, Alabama. But Curtis LeMay was the one who figured out how to realize those theories.
As LeMay said about the bombing mission that did away with evasive action: “I’ll admit some uneasiness on my part and some of the other people in the outfit when we made that first straight-in bomb run, but it worked.”
I’ll admit some uneasiness, he says. That’s it!
4.
One more LeMay story, because the fascination people have with LeMay—okay, the fascination I have with LeMay—is not that he was an extraordinary combat commander. There were plenty of those in the Second World War. The fascination comes from the unfathomable depths of his character—the sense that he didn’t have limits the way normal people did, which was, in one way, exhilarating, because it meant that LeMay could achieve things others could not even imagine. But at the same time, it gave people pause. Think about the word McNamara used to describe LeMay: brutal. And it’s not like McNamara himself was warm and fuzzy. He would later direct the saturation bombing of North Vietnam. Yet LeMay gave him pause.
The story that started all the whispers about LeMay in military circles happened back in 1937, when the possibility of war in Europe was growing real. The Army Air Corps wanted a chance to practice their bombing technique. Real-world practice, only with dummy bombs: fifty-pounders filled with water. LeMay would talk about this exercise years later: “The Air Force has been battling to make a contribution to the defense of the country ever since I’ve been around. Nobody paid much attention to it…We wanted an exercise where we would drop bombs on a battleship. Find the battleship.”
For the practice run to work, the Army Air Corps needed the Navy to play along. Hide a battleship out on the seas. Give out its coordinates at the last minute and dare the bombers to find it. This was before sophisticated radar and navigation aids. To find a battleship, you had to see it with your eyes, then hit its narrow decks with a bomb, from thousands of feet up—all while flying at hundreds of miles an hour.
The Navy was not enthusiastic.
“Finally they agreed that they would have an exercise. And it would be in August off the West Coast. Now, in August off the West Coast there’s nothing but fog for a thousand miles out there. And they deliberately picked it at this time, I’m sure,” LeMay said.
How could you spot a battleship in a thousand miles of fog? To make matters worse, the Navy bent the rules. The agreement was to have the war game run for twenty-four hours—from noon the first day until noon the next. But the Navy didn’t give out the coordinates of its ship—the USS Utah—until late the first afternoon. And the coordinates they gave were wrong. They were off by sixty miles. One thousand miles of fog. Late directions. Fake directions. A needle in a haystack would have been easier to find.
At ten minutes before noon—at the very last moment—LeMay found the ship and dropped his bombs. Now, of course he found the ship. There was nothing LeMay could not do if he put his mind to it. That’s not the point of the story. The point is what was going on just before he dropped his bombs.
The Navy was certain the ship couldn’t be found, so it took no precautions. The sailors were just going about their business. They were supposed to take cover in a bombing exercise. They didn’t.