Curtis LeMay Was a Real Life Version of the Warmonger General From ‘Dr. Strangelove’
A stock character in quite a few action movies and television series is the rigid general, stick firmly stuck up his rear, whose advice in any crisis scene is a massive use of force that is bound to worsen the situation. US Air Force general Curtis LeMay (1906 – 1990) was that stock character in real life. Indeed, that stock character is actually based on LeMay.
LeMay did not start out that way. During WW2, he was a creative Eighth Air Force bomber group commander who came up with innovative tactics that reduced losses and increased bombing efficiency. They soon became standard throughout the entire Eighth Air Force. That earned him recognition and promotion, and in 1944 LeMay was sent to take command of 20th Bomber Command in China, then of 21st Bomber Command in the Pacific.
The bombing campaign against Japan had been in trouble. The B-29 Super Fortress heavy bombers deployed were designed for high altitude bombing, but a fast moving jet stream over Japan often scattered the bombs. LeMay changed the tactics. By 1945, Japanese air power was negligible, so he stripped his B-29s of defensive weapons in order to maximize bombload, and sent them on low level raids. He also switched bombs. Instead of the high explosives suitable for European cities of brick and concrete, LeMay’s B-29s dropped incendiaries that were more effective against Japanese cities, whose buildings were mostly wooden. The result was the incineration of Japanese cities and the devastation of Japan, without a corresponding devastation of B-29 squadrons.
After the war, LeMay again showed his innovativeness by organizing the Berlin Airlift in 1948. Fresh off that success, he returned to the US to head the Strategic Air Command (SAC) – America’s nuclear bomb carrying bombers. He ran SAC from 1948 to 1957, and transformed it from a ragtag entity into a finely tuned machine on a sustained 24 hour standby, capable of delivering armageddon at a moment’s notice.
It was during his years at SAC that LeMay’s mind ossified. Used to playing with big hammers for so long, he came to see all problems as big nails. That became manifestly evident during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, by which time LeMay had risen to Air Force Chief of Staff. When the crisis erupted, LeMay pushed President Kennedy to adopt a course of action that would have guaranteed WW3, starting with bombing the Russian missile sites, followed by an all out invasion. He likened Kennedy’s reluctance to trigger a nuclear holocaust to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement at Munich. Luckily for the world, JFK declined to follow LeMay’s advice, and negotiated a way out of the crisis instead. Even after the crisis was over, LeMay still urged that Cuba be invaded.
After retiring from the Air Force, LeMay went into extreme far right politics, and joined segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace as running mate in his 1968 presidential bid. He managed to come off as too extreme even for George Wallace, who came to see the former general as a liability after he made tone deaf comments about nuking rivals into the stone age. After the campaign, LeMay retired to California, where he died of a heart attack in 1990.
