Background For War: MAN IN THE FIRST PLANE

• Share

(5 of 7)

The Staff. To help him get going in a hurry, he wangled the best officers he knew. Slight, short Brigadier General John B. Montgomery, one of the Air Force's rising young (38) one-stars, moved into SAC's new headquarters at Offutt. For his deputy commander LeMay picked handsome, high-polished Thomas Sarsfield Power, 45, a bold, skillful pilot and something the Old Man is not: a diplomat and smoother-over. LeMay's chief of staff, tall, soft-spoken Major General August Walter Kissner, 44, is two other things LeMay is not: a West Pointer and a man who can do paper work and like it.

Neither the staff nor anybody else fawns—for long—around Curt LeMay. His friends are few and he works them the hardest. "They know how I feel about them," he once explained. "They know I wouldn't hesitate to send them out on a one-way mission if it ever became necessary." For his commanders he has one stock warning: "You will make some mistakes, and I will back you up—until you make the same one the second time. But don't ever try to fool me. That will be your last mistake."

The Ambition. Curt LeMay's fierce single-purpose first showed itself back in high school in Columbus, Ohio. Boyhood friends recalled that he paid girls little attention, preferred to spend his leisure building crystal "wireless" sets or prowling through the hills of southern Ohio with a gun and a bowie knife.

His one ambition even then was to fly for the Army. He tried to make West Point, but couldn't get a congressional appointment. So at Ohio State* he began an alternate route to flying. He busied himself in R.O.T.C., graduated (in 1928) to a National Guard summer camp with a reserve commission. In the fall he began training as a flying cadet at California's March Field.

LeMay loved flying (has since logged 7,000 hours), but he was no comic-strip fly boy. While his classmates swooped off for weekends in Los Angeles, he often hung back to take engines apart, work at machine guns, pore over weather charts and navigation logarithms. Result: after seven years in fighters, he was called from Hawaii to fly the first of the Army's Flying Fortresses because he was the rare Army airman who could find his way around with a navigator's sextant and chart. From then on his career was set as a big-plane man.

In World War II he became a legend —a brigadier general at 36, a major general six months later. In England, LeMay decided that too many of his B-17s were missing enemy targets because they zigzagged out of the way of heavy antiaircraft fire. He clamped a cigar in his jaw, led the next raid over Saint Nazaire, held his plane on course up to the bomb drop through murderous ack-ack for a grim seven minutes. Next day he issued a flat order: no more evasive action on the final bombing run. Plane damage went up, but results went up more.

In the Pacific, where he ran the 300-plane B-29 raids against Japan, he suddenly pulled the high-tailed bombers down from the clouds, took out their guns and gunners, and overloaded them with fire bombs to dump on Japan from low level. It was a risk that could have wrecked an air fleet and a career, but it caught the Japanese off guard, ripped Tokyo and three other industrial centers as devastatingly (over a period of ten days) as the atom bomb tore up Hiroshima.