Which is, of course, delusional. Schweinfurt was not a turning point of the war. But if you asked Hansell why he believed that, he would have given you his reasons. They were still learning. They got unlucky with the weather. They should have gone back the next week and hit it again, and then again, until every plant was completely destroyed.ii Or maybe ball bearings weren’t the best targets after all. But there were others, weren’t there? What about oil refineries? That’s how a true believer’s mind works.
But outside that tight-knit circle was another man: Curtis LeMay. Like everyone else, he’d been to the Air Corps Tactical School, down at Maxwell, for his obligatory training. Yet he was never part of the Bomber Mafia circle. There was something in LeMay’s makeup—in his obsession with the how and the what—that resisted any intellectual enthusiasms. He could make sure the pilots flew long and straight toward the target. He could instill in them the discipline not to bail out in panic along the way. He could train them to take off in fog. He was drawn to practical challenges. But doctrine left him cold.
In a 1971 interview, LeMay was even more blunt. He said he’d never been convinced by the elaborate logic behind the Schweinfurt raids: “The idea was, they found the ball-bearing plants over there—some of these swivel-chair target analysts back in the Pentagon—and the idea was, if we knock out that plant, which supposedly had the bulk of the ball-bearing production in the country, then the war would grind to a halt because there were no bearings.”
Some swivel-chair target analysts back in the Pentagon. He’s talking about Haywood Hansell and the Bomber Mafia, with their fanciful conjecture about how to disable the enemy.
LeMay continued, “The plan was okay—basically okay—but here we are trying to find something to win the war the easy way, and there ain’t no such animal.”
All that mattered to Curtis LeMay was the final outcome. He lost twenty-four planes on the decoy mission to hit Regensburg. Each of those bombers had a crew of ten, which meant that 240 men did not return to base. That’s 240 letters that had to be written the next day by LeMay and his squadron leaders. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Your son…Dear Mr. and Mrs. Jones. Your son—240 times. And for what?
An Air Force officer named Ken Israel knew LeMay in the general’s final years. They used to hunt together.iii Once, Israel went to LeMay’s house, in Southern California, to deliver some pheasants they had shot at Beale Air Force Base, just north of Sacramento. As Israel recalled:
I rang the doorbell. He answered it, and he invited me to come in. I said, “Sir, I have your pheasants here.” You walk into his foyer, and it was all marble. There on the wall to the left was a huge mural of Regensburg…On the opposite wall was a mural…a picture of Schweinfurt.
So I said, “Sir, is that Regensburg and Schweinfurt?” He said, “Yes, sonny.” He just said, “Yep, we lost a lot of good men.”
In the end, Curtis LeMay would have one of the most storied careers any Air Force officer would ever have. He planned or commanded countless missions more consequential than the Regensburg-Schweinfurt Raid. In 1948 and 1949, he would run the Berlin Airlift, one of the pivotal events at the start of the Cold War. He would eventually control America’s nuclear arsenal as head of the Strategic Air Command. During his time in the service, he met every world leader imaginable, posed for pictures with the kinds of people the rest of us only read about in history books. He could have hung mementos of any of those things in his foyer. But he didn’t. In the entryway to his house, he hung a reminder from his first real encounter with the orthodoxy of the Bomber Mafia, a reminder of failure and loss.
Footnotes
i By the way, the same is still true today for many kinds of military drones. They need to see the target in order to aim at it.
ii In his memoir, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, provides a detailed account of the Schweinfurt missions and what he calls “the enemy’s error.” He notes: “The attacks on the ball-bearing industry ceased abruptly. Thus, the Allies threw away success when it was already in their hands. Had they continued the attacks…with the same energy, we would quickly have been at our last gasp."
iii LeMay also had a shooting range in his basement. Naturally.
Part Two
The Temptation
Author’s Note
Part Two of The Bomber Mafia takes place in Guam and Japan and all points east. But before we get to that, I want to tell a story from closer to the present.