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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Everything about Curtis Emerson LeMay begins with his love of airplanes. In his memoirs, which are otherwise written in plain straight-ahead prose, there's one moment of pure poetry. Suddenly, in the air above me, appeared a flying machine. It came from nowhere. There it was, and I wanted to catch it. It was 1910.
LeMay was five. He was in the backyard of the struggling neighborhood where his family lived in Columbus, Ohio. He goes on. 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 a way 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. Little Curtis ran across neighbors' backyards, vacant lots, down sidewalks. 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.
Reading that made me think, oddly enough, of something I wrote years ago about Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player of all time. His parents remember that when he was not yet two years old, long before he knew much about the game of hockey, Wayne would sit right in front of the television when a hockey game was on. He was enraptured. And watch out now, Lars-Erik Lundvall.
And then he would cry and cry uncontrollably when the match was over because he could not understand how something so sublime should have to come to an end. That's Curtis LeMay running after the flying machine in the sky. Something about that particular object, that act of flying, perfectly fit the contours of his imagination. And from that point on, the airplane was everything.
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to tell the story of Curtis LeMay and what he did on a cold night in March of 1945. This is a love story about what happens when someone falls head over heels for a magnificent piece of machinery and a brilliant bit of technology.
and what happens when that love starts to cloud every other human consideration. The events I'm going to talk about all took place a lifetime ago, at the end of the Second World War, but everything about LeMay's story seems very modern to me, mostly because everything about LeMay seems very modern. I think that's why I've decided to devote so much of this season to him. It feels like he started something that we're still in the middle of.
LeMay was a bulldog, thick through the chest, oversized square head, hair parted triumphantly, just a shade off the middle. A brilliant poker player, a crack shot. He was an innovator, utterly without fear, a mind that moved only forwards, never sideways, rational and imperturbable and incapable of self-doubt.
Were he alive today, he would be in command of some high-tech powerhouse, crushing all competition, seizing the future. I find myself sometimes falling for Curtis LeMay because of his many gifts. His logic and rigor and commitment and resolve in the face of the longest of odds seem like things we need more of right now, not less. There is a chance you will fall for him too. And all I can say is that if you do,
try to remember the following fact. If you make a list of the people responsible for the most civilian deaths in the 20th century, at the top are Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot and Hitler, the familiar names. And not too far behind, uncomfortably close behind, is Curtis Emerson LeMay. 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, it's impossible. And to me, the best way of minimizing it is getting the war over as quick as possible. In its earliest days, the U.S. Air Force was not a separate branch of the military. That wouldn't happen until after the Second World War.
Back in the 1930s, the Air Corps, as it was known, was a combat division of the Army. It existed to serve the interests of the ground forces, to support, assist, accompany. The legendary Army General John Blackjack Pershing, who commanded the American forces in World War I, once said of air power that, quote, "...it can, of its own account, neither win a war at the present time nor, as far as we can tell, at any time in the future."
That's what the military establishment thought of airplanes. But in the years between the world wars, a small group of airmen began to challenge the idea that airplanes were superfluous to winning a war. The group was centered at Maxwell Airfield in Montgomery, Alabama, at what was called the Air Corps Tactical School. Everyone in this group had once been that little boy who spotted a plane in the sky and ran after it blindly.
They were in love with planes. They gave themselves a motto: "Pro ficimis morae irritante" – "We make progress unhindered by custom." They thought that technological advances in aviation were about to revolutionize warfare forever. And they weren't talking about fighter planes, the romantic daredevil pilots who engaged in dogfights with the enemy. They had disdain for small planes.
They were in love with bombers. They looked across the ocean at Europe and the threatening noises being made by Germany, and they said a fleet of long-range high-flying bombers could do so much damage and would be so difficult to defend against that the Air Corps could win a war all by itself. The group of insurgent pilots at the Air Corps Tactical School were known as the Bomber Mafia.
They were a group of individuals coming together to construct ideas about applying the technology of bombing at the day in order to win a war against Germany. That's the historian Robert Pape, who wrote a book called Bombing to Win about the origins of many of the ideas taught at the Air Corps School.
The bomber mafia gave lectures to select groups of officers, arguing, theorizing. They were not really investigating the psychology of bombing. They're not investigating the sociology of bombing. They're not really even investigating the politics of the bombing. That is the implications of bombing would have for populations, societies, and for governments.
What they're really doing is focusing on what the technology of the bombing of the time, what target sets it would allow the bombers to hit. In one of the most famous tactical school lectures, Major Muir Fairchild gave a two-day presentation in April of 1939 on what a single bombing attack on New York City could do to America's will to fight. Fairchild was a charter member of the bomber mafia.
He would later rise to number two in the Air Force. He says, imagine that Germany and the United States are in the midst of a brutal land war in Europe. Germany decides to take out New York. Could they do it? Fairchild says, easy.
Wait, so they have a kind of hypothetical scenario. And do they imagine that a group of well-equipped bombers could bring the United States or at least New York City to its knees in an event of any kind of conflict? Yeah, absolutely. The bombing that they're focusing on are, number one, the bridges. Number two, they have the bombing of the aqueducts. The
The bombing of the aqueducts is important because what they want to do is they want to cause massive thirst in the New York population. They basically want to create a situation where there's almost no potable water for the population to drink. And then number three, they target electric power. In his lecture, Major Fairchild argues that the aqueducts are the most obvious of targets.
Then there's the power grid. Fairchild directs his students to a chart, the aerial bomb versus traction electric power in the New York City area. Quote, we then see that 17 bombs, if dropped on the right spots, will not only take out practically all of the electric power of the entire metropolitan area, but will prevent the distribution of outside power.
17 bombs could bring the most important city in the world to its knees. The old idea was that you would just bomb the whole city, reduce it to rubble with wave upon wave of costly and dangerous bombing attacks. Fairchild's point was, why would you do that if you could use your intelligence and the best of modern technology to disable a city with a single surgical strike?
You would put amazing stress on the, quote, will of the enemy, meaning the civilian population, which was already under stress. And then they just led to the conclusion that the civilians would crack and demand an end to the war. Are they really thinking of the Air Force in this way?
in this thinking, in this teaching, as the primary arm of the American military in this kind of conflict? They're certainly thinking that the bomber alone or air power alone is going to win the war. And what they're thinking is that it's going to win the war and prevent mass carnage like occurred in World War I, where the armies clashed together year after year after year, and millions and millions of people died in the meat grinder of the trenches in World War I.
For thousands of years, wars had been about armies of men fighting more or less in hand-to-hand combat on fields of battle. The bomber mafia believed that bombs carried by airplanes were about to make the armies of men obsolete. The Air Corps Tactical School was never very large. In 20 years of existence, it produced just over a thousand graduates, but it was enormously influential.
Of the 320 Air Force generals on duty at the end of World War II, 261 came out of the tactical school. And one of those graduates was Curtis Emerson LeMay.
Only a handful of American military leaders in the 20th century achieved real public stature. Douglas MacArthur, of course, with his corn-caught pipe and limitless charisma. Dwight Eisenhower, because he commanded the Allied war effort in World War II. And in more recent times, Colin Powell. In his day, LeMay's fame exceeded them all. People who couldn't name their congressman still knew who he was.
In 1964 alone, three movies came out with a character plainly based on LeMay. He's the model for the Air Force General in Sidney Lumet's thriller Fail Safe. He's clearly Burt Lancaster's character, General Scott in Seven Days in May, where the president chews him out. I am prepared to brand you for what you are, General. A strutting egoist with a Napoleonic power complex and an out-and-out traitor.
And as if that's not enough, in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, the LeMay character is General Jack Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden, chomping on a cigar. Your commie has no regard for human life, not even his own. And for this reason, men, I want to impress upon you the need for extreme watchfulness. In 1964, when Dr. Strangelove came out, Americans were exhausted from anxiety about nuclear destruction.
It felt good to laugh at a Cold War fanatic like General Jack Ripper, but the actual General LeMay was a more complicated matter. Curtis LeMay put himself through the engineering program at Ohio State, going to school by day and working all night at a foundry on the other side of town. He joined the Air Corps right out of college.
He was a captain by 33, then in short order, a major, then a colonel, a brigadier general, and by the age of 37, a major general. After the Second World War, he ran the Strategic Air Command, SAC, the arm of the Air Force that controlled the bulk of America's nuclear arsenal. Russell Daugherty, who followed LeMay as head of SAC, loved to tell a story about the time LeMay was briefed about a new airplane called the F-111B.
The briefings lasted about two and a half days, sometimes one hour, sometimes two hours. And finally they wrapped up the briefing. LeMay hadn't said a word the whole time. He was just sitting there. After he got all through, General LeMay says, is that it? Yes, sir, that's it. And he got up and he says, it ain't big enough, and walked out. That was his only comment. Curtis LeMay commanded by silence. He liked to have a cigar in his mouth at all times, and he really didn't like to remove it.
There was another illustration I had, first person with LeMay. I went with him out to CIA to get the briefings on what later became known as the Bay of Pigs. This was 1961. The Bay of Pigs was one of the signature crises of the Cold War, a clandestine invasion of Cuba by a group of Cuban exiles backed by the CIA. We spent about three hours out there. Got the full entire briefing down in the CIA briefing room. And when it was over, a
They said, "General, do you have any comments?" General LeMay got up, head for the door and says, "It won't work." That was his only comment. "It won't work." And boy, he was dead right. It didn't work. Three words. That's it. And of course he was right. LeMay made his reputation after the U.S. entered the Second World War. He was put in charge of the 305th Bombardment Group out of Chelveston Air Base in England. It was a desperate time.
The Air Corps was losing hundreds of planes on its bombing runs over Germany to anti-aircraft fire and German fighter planes. The airmen knew they were essentially flying suicide missions. And the problem got so bad that the Air Force calculated that 20% of their pilots were aborting before they reached their targets. One of the commanders was Curtis LeMay, colonel in command of a B-24 group.
That's Robert McNamara, who would later become Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in the war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent. Many thought brutal. In World War II, McNamara was an analyst for the Air Force.
Here he is in Errol Morris' brilliant documentary Fog of War, describing what LeMay did after he heard that so many pilots were turning tail. He issued an order. He said, "I will be in the lead plane on every mission. Any plane that takes off will go over the target or the crew will be court-martialed." The abort rate dropped overnight. Now that's the kind of a commander he was. But that was just the beginning, because the air war over Europe still faced huge problems.
Years later, in an interview, LeMay talked about it. One of the things that was very apparent was that the bombing was not very good. Bombers have cameras that take pictures of where their bombs fall, strike photos. And when LeMay looked at the strike photos after the crews had come back to base, he could see that the bombs were landing everywhere but the target. Not only were the targets not being destroyed, but
But they didn't have any records of where most of the bombs actually fell. They were taking strike photos, of course, but you could not locate over half the bombs that were hauled over to the continent. The problem was that the pilots were not flying straight at the targets. They believed that would make them sitting ducks for anti-aircraft fire.
Because enemy artillerymen on the ground would simply estimate the plane's speed and altitude and aim accordingly. So the pilots were taking evasive action, not flying directly at the target until the last few seconds of their bombing run, which is why the bombs were falling wide. How could you hit your target if you were lined up over it only at the very last moment? So something had to be done to give the bombardier a chance to hit the target.
This meant a longer bomb run. They were giving him ample time to get the bomb site level and get the rate and drift killed in order to do a good job. LeMay saw only one solution.
The pilots had to stop taking evasive action. They had to fly straight in over the target. All of the people that I talked to that had been in combat were of the opinion that if you did this, anti-aircraft guns would shoot you down. Key phrase, of the opinion.
LeMay was an empiricist. He went back and studied his old artillery manuals, did some calculations. How many rounds from an anti-aircraft gun would it take to bring down a B-17 bomber? And it worked out it required, I think, 377 rounds to hit it. This didn't look too bad to me. 377 rounds is a lot of ammunition, so flying straight is a risk, but it's not a crazy risk.
So LeMay says, "Let's try it. Let's fly in straight. Instead of a 10-second run, let's fly a 7-minute long straight and steady approach." And if that sounded suicidal, which it did to all of his pilots, he says, "Once again, I'm going to be the first to try it." So LeMay led the way. November 1942, over Saint-Nazaire, France. No evasive action.
And what happened? His group put twice as many bombs on the target as any group had before and didn't lose a single bomber. So we did it, and 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. I'll admit some uneasiness, he says. That's it. Some uneasiness.
After the war in 1949, there was a movie starring Gregory Peck called 12 O'Clock High about that moment in the air war. It won a couple of Oscars. The lead character, General Frank Savage, was based in part on LeMay. And in the movie, General Savage is under so much stress trying to keep his pilots flying on these impossible missions that he has a nervous breakdown. Screenwriters love the idea that beneath a stoic exterior is a hurricane of repressed emotion.
But that's Hollywood's LeMay, not the actual LeMay. One of LeMay's pilots later said that when he shared his fears about flying a combat mission, LeMay replied, "Ralph, you're probably going to get killed, so it's best to accept it. You'll get along much better." Now, that's LeMay. He reserved his emotions for the thing he truly loved: flying.
Here he is, years later, rhapsodizing about a mission some of his bombers ran against an aircraft factory in occupied Poland. We have done some very accurate bombing in some of our jobs. I remember Russ Wilson's group within my position doing an attack on Marienburg over in Poland, which is an aircraft factory over there.
He put down a beautiful pattern on that thing, meaning that when LeMay looked at the strike photos from the bombing run the next day, back at base, the marks left by the bombs on the roof of the factory took on a shape that pleased his eye.
In the early years of the Second World War, Curtis LeMay and the bomber mafia were frustrated. They felt no one was listening to them. "The air was just getting the back of the hand. Get out of the way, son. I'll tell you what to do." "The air was just getting the back of the hand," LeMay says, meaning when the top brass sat down in Washington to plot the course of the war, they didn't understand what the bomber could do, that it was capable of winning a war all by itself.
Years later, LeMay still felt the sting of that attitude. Our own airport up in Washington consisted of a bunch of dollar-a-year characters, people that didn't know much about it, sending out stuff that I didn't much agree with, but orders were orders. Carried them out the best you could. Redemption, when it finally came, would happen on the other side of the world. Vandal havoc wrought by the Japanese bombers.
At the upper part of the screen, there you can see them. The people are bewildered by the blow without warning. With the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the U.S. was dragged into a hard and costly battle against the Japanese Empire in the Pacific. And as that war ground on, one thing slowly became clear. The only way to beat Japan was to take the fight to Japan, directly.
One option was a land invasion, but that was a terrifying prospect. It could easily end up being one of the deadliest and costliest campaigns of the whole war. The Second World War was supposed to be winding down. No one had any appetite for a land invasion. So was there a way to bring about Japan's surrender through the air? Yes, the bomber mafia said, we can do it. The story begins in 1939.
When the far-sighted Army Air Forces said, we want a plane for our defense that can fly a bomb load thousands of miles out to sea and return. When the bombing mafia first set up shop back in the early 1930s, their theorizing was hypothetical. They imagined fleets of bombers flying deep into enemy territory, dropping bombs from the safety of high altitudes.
But there was no airplane actually capable of doing that at the time. It was a bomber mafia fantasy, until the arrival, midway through the war, of the B-29 bomber. The Superfortress. The most expensive project of the war. $43 billion in today's dollars. When the workers reported for the first time, few of them guessed the exact nature of what they were building.
They knew that a giant plane would result, but beyond that it was largely conjecture. The War Department made newsreels about the superfortress. Americans watched them in movie theaters around the country. But then the day came, inevitably, when the pieces of their jigsaw began to fit together.
The day when the mountains of material and the millions of man-hours all combined to confirm the assembly line rumor, the washroom gossip, and their honest-to-God American curiosity. They were building the mightiest aircraft in history. The B-29's predecessor, the B-17, was known as the Flying Fortress. It was the workhorse bomber of the early years of the war.
The Flying Fortress is what bombed most of Germany, but the B-17 had a great limitation: range. It was good for just over 3,700 miles. There's no way it could get across the Pacific to Japan.
The B-29 changed that. It could carry twice as many bombs as the B-17. It could outrun fighter jets. It could fly higher than the B-17, upwards of 30,000 feet, out of the reach of all but the most powerful of anti-aircraft weapons. And it could fly more than 5,800 miles in a single run. They were building the Boeing-designed B-29 Super Fortress. And this is how they built it.
The newsreel just keeps going and going like this. It's like they're talking about the birth of a prophet. "Identical miracles of modern machinery, nursed and tended and made productive by people who look and think like these people: the fair, the dark, people with deft hands and unblinking eyes, the old young, the young old, working together in intimate harmony, their product death."
Their goal, peace. The motto of the bomber mafia, remember, was proficamus more irritante. We make progress unhindered by custom. And they sold that vision to the American public. Technology, American technology, could win the war. Their product, death. Their goal, peace. For the true believers, the B-29 was gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
If the bomber mafia were the three wise men, they would have brought the B-29 to the baby Jesus. There's a book I ran across years ago by a researcher at the Rand Corporation named Carl Bilder. It's called The Masks of War, and it's a cultural explanation of the differences among the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy. The Army, in Bilder's view, is the servant of the people, understated, secure in its position.
The Navy is heir to a grand tradition. It measures itself by the number of its ships, its reach. But what happens with the rise of the bomber mafia midway through the war? The pilots and airmen begin to chart a whole new course. Modern, disruptive, technologically focused, they're the only part of the military entirely born of the 20th century.
The Air Force, Bilder writes, sees itself as the embodiment of an idea, a concept of warfare, a strategy made possible and sustained by modern technology. And then, Bilder quotes this passage from a historian named Perry McCoy Smith, which is worth repeating in full.
Objectivity about this weapon, meaning the airplane, was absent within Air Corps circles for many reasons. Perhaps the foremost reason was the psychological attachment of the airman to his machine. To him, the airplane was not just a new and exciting weapon. It was what carried him miles behind enemy lines and brought him back.
It was a personal possession which was given a personal, usually feminine name, kissed upon return from a mission and painted with a symbol for each enemy plane shot down or bombing mission completed. The affinity of the pilot for his airplane has a parallel in the history of the cavalry soldier and his horse.
The airman, like the cavalryman of the past, was not known for his modesty or his objectivity when it came to the employment of his chosen steed. The B-29 arrived and the bomber mafia said, we've got this. A few well-placed bombs, boom, it's over. The tanks will have to be filled, the engines given a final check, the guns armed, the bombs set in the racks, and then briefing.
And the assembled airmen will listen to words that a few years ago would have been fantastic, but today roll casually off a briefing officer's lips. The target, gentlemen, is Japan. If only it were that simple. Coming next week in part two, Curtis LeMay has the bomber he wants and the challenge he wants, but not the weapon.
For that, he needed a group of mad scientists at Harvard University. Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Lee Mangistu with Jacob Smith, Eloise Linton, and Anna Nijm.
Our editor is Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Guerra. Mastering by Flan Williams. Fact-checking by Beth Johnson. Special thanks to the Pushkin crew. Hedda Fane, Carly Migliore, Maya Koenig, Maggie Taylor, Jason Gambrell, and of course, Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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On August 29th, Sauron has returned. Prime Video invites you to return to Middle-earth for the epic new season. Sauron will fall. You can't kill me. War is coming to Middle-earth.
I will not stop until he is destroyed. Every soul is in peril. Shall we begin? The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power. New season, August 29th. Only on Prime Video.