To be clear, five thousand feet is not just low. Five thousand feet is also unheard of. Twenty years later, Haywood Hansell was still astonished at the insanity of LeMay’s idea:
I have been asked whether I would have done that. I think in all honesty the answer would be no. I think I’d have gone in [at] about fifteen thousand feet.
But to go in first as low as five or ten thousand feet, without any real knowledge of the density of the antiaircraft defenses, was I think a very dangerous and a very courageous thing to do if it turned out to be right, and I think that was General LeMay’s personal decision.
A very dangerous and a very courageous thing. It really isn’t necessary to read between the lines of what Hansell said. The day when LeMay briefs his pilots, he almost has a mutiny on his hands. But had you confronted him that morning, he would have said, What choice do I have? As he put it later, “Well, I woke up one day, and I had been up there for about two months and I hadn’t done anything much yet. I’d better do something.”
Was he really just going to sit there and wait for the clouds to clear, the jet stream to move away, and his bombardiers to become Norden virtuosos? In an oral history recorded long after the war, he still had Haywood Hansell’s disgraced exit on his mind. Here is how he responded to questions about his strategy:
Question: General LeMay, where did the idea for the low-level fire attacks originate?
LeMay: We had ideas flying back and forth, a lot. It was my basic decision. I made it…Nobody said anything about night incendiary bombing. But [we] had to have results, and I had to produce them. If I didn’t produce them, or made a wrong guess, get another commander in there. That’s what happened to Hansell. He got no results. You had to have them.
2.
Almost all stories in the Curtis LeMay legend are about his cold-bloodedness, his ruthlessness, his unshakable calm.
In chapter 4 of this book, I quoted him from early on in the war, after returning from a bombing mission over Europe:
Question: Colonel LeMay, how’d the trip go today?
LeMay: Well, it went pretty well, except it was rather dull compared to some that we’ve had. There weren’t any fighters out, and flak was just moderate and very inaccurate.
He had just landed after hours of flying over enemy territory, being shot at from below and attacked from all sides by German fighter planes. It was rather dull compared to some that we’ve had.
In Europe, LeMay had insisted that his pilots not take evasive action as they flew toward their bombing targets. Every one of his pilots was terrified that if he did that, he and his crew would be gunned down by antiaircraft fire. So LeMay said, I’ll lead the first mission myself. Remember how he later put it: “It worked out. 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.”
One of LeMay’s pilots once said that when he confessed his fears to LeMay, LeMay replied: “Ralph, you’re probably going to get killed, so it’s best to accept it. You’ll get along much better.” That’s the LeMay we know.
But every now and again, there are hints of another LeMay—for example, when he says, “I’ll admit some uneasiness.” That’s code for I was terrified, but of course he couldn’t let anyone see that.i You cannot lead airmen into battle if they can sense your fear, so terror turns into a shrug and an epic bit of understatement. LeMay was uncompromising with his men in terms of how relentlessly he prepared and drilled them, but he was that way for a reason. Because he cared about them. There’s a line in one profile of LeMay written by St. Clair McKelway, who served under him on Guam, that I think explains this beautifully. LeMay did what he did because he had “a heart that revolted at the idea of what lack of discipline and training would mean to his young crews.”
In LeMay’s memoir, there’s only one moment when he truly seems to let his emotional guard down. It’s when he describes the first time he saw an airplane. He was a child, standing in the backyard of the house in the struggling neighborhood where his family lived, in Columbus, Ohio.
Suddenly, in the air above me, appeared a flying-machine. It came from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it…
Children can muster enormous strength in ideal and idea, in all their effort to grasp the trophy they desire. And nobody was holding me back, no one was standing close to say, “Look, you’re just a little child. That airplane is away up there in the air, and no matter how fast you run you can’t keep up with it. You can’t reach high enough to seize it.” I just thought that I might be able to grab the airplane and have it for my own, and possess it always. So I lit out after it.