He ran across neighbors’ backyards, vacant lots, down sidewalks. But of course he couldn’t catch it. “Then it was gone. Its wonderful sound and force and the freakish illusion of the Thing, a Thing made of wood and metal, piercing the air.”
He went back home. And he wept.
The only time LeMay could admit to real emotion was while telling a story from his childhood, when the object of his affection was a mechanical device. It is easy to understand the moral vision of someone like Haywood Hansell, or the other members of the Bomber Mafia, because they spoke the grand language of morality. Can we wage war in a way that satisfies our consciences? But LeMay is someone you have to work a little harder to understand.
LeMay’s daughter, Jane LeMay Lodge, spoke about this in a 1998 oral history.
There were a couple of very bad articles saying that he wanted to start World War III and that he was a warmonger and a hawk…Then you read an interview during the war when they did that low-level bombing—and he wasn’t able to be on that mission—when he stood on that runway, counting those planes, knowing how many planes took off.
Counting those planes. Standing there until the last plane is back. Now, a man who doesn’t have any sensibilities and is sadistic and doesn’t care where he is going or who he steps over isn’t going to do that kind of thing.
So how would LeMay have justified the firebombing he intended to inflict on Japan? Well, he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible. That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering. If you cared about the lives of your men—and the pain inflicted on your enemy—then you ought to wage as relentless and decisive and devastating a war as you could. Because if being relentless, decisive, and devastating turned a two-year war into a one-year war, wasn’t that the most desirable outcome?
Satan tempts Jesus by offering him dominion over all he sees—the chance to defeat the Roman enemy—if only Jesus will accept, as one theologian puts it, “the temptation to do evil that good may come; to justify the illegitimacy of the means by the greatness of the end.” Haywood Hansell sided with Jesus on that question: you should never do evil so that good may come. But LeMay would have thought long and hard about going with Satan. He would have accepted the illegitimate means if they led to what he considered a swift and more advantageous end.
As he put it years later, “War is a mean, nasty business, and you’re going to kill a lot of people. No way of getting around it. I think that any moral commander tries to minimize this to the extent possible, and to me the best way of minimizing it is getting the war over as quick as possible.”
That’s what he said to his crews when he laid out their new mission: What I am proposing sounds crazy, I know. But it is our only chance to end this war. Otherwise, what are our options? You want to go back to the days of Haywood Hansell, sitting on the runway, waiting for the weather to clear? We’ll all be here for years then. In Germany, the Nazis were close to surrender. The people back home in America, who had been sacrificing for four years to support the war, were exhausted. Curtis LeMay didn’t think he had any time to waste. He had to act.
3.
So: Operation Meetinghouse. The night of March 9, 1945. Curtis LeMay’s first full-scale attack on the city of Tokyo.
That afternoon, there was the obligatory press conference. General Lauris Norstad, the man who had sent Haywood Hansell packing, had flown in again from Washington. He and LeMay briefed the war correspondents and told them what they could and couldn’t reveal. Then the planes began taking off, one by one, from the airfields on Guam, Tinian, and Saipan—more than three hundred B-29s in all, an armada. They were loaded with as much napalm as they could carry. LeMay stood on the tarmac, counting the planes.
The first bombers would not reach Tokyo until early the following morning. So for the balance of the day, there was nothing to do but wait. In the evening, LeMay went to the operations room, sat on a bench, and smoked a cigar.
St. Clair McKelway, the public relations officer on the base, found him there alone, at two in the morning. LeMay had sent everyone else home. “I’m sweating this one out myself,” LeMay told McKelway. “A lot could go wrong…I can’t sleep…I usually can, but not tonight.”
McKelway would later write a long series for The New Yorker about his time with LeMay on Guam.ii His account of that endless night of waiting is worth quoting at length:
In deciding to send his B-29s in over Tokyo at five to six thousand feet, LeMay was increasing the risk his crews would run, and he has a deep feeling of personal responsibility for his crews; he was risking the success of the whole B-29 program, which…is dear to him in an emotional as well as an operational way; and he was risking his own future, not only, I think, as an Army officer but as a human being. If he lost seventy percent of his airplanes by such a decision, or even fifty percent of them, or even twenty-five percent of them, he would be through, and I imagine that a man like him would be through in every sense of the word, for he would have lost confidence in himself.