When the first raids aimed at precision failed to strike their intended targets owing to bad weather and bad bombing, LeMay was put in command.
The B-29 was a complement to the A-bomb program. When LeMay took over, crews were training for the A-bomb mission in a godforsaken corner of Utah, near Wendover, living in barracks little better than huts. But the plane had been ineffective in carrying out the high-altitude precision bombing for which it was designed and which was the key tenet of LeMay’s airpower theory. So he tried something new — gambling the lives of his crews. He turned to terror bombing: firebombing whole cities. Now his target problem was simpler: find the areas of cities that were the oldest and had the largest proportion of wooden buildings. The first target was Tokyo’s Shitamichi district.
Stripping the bombers of most of their guns and sending them in low and at night, on March 9, 1945, LeMay dispatched 334 bombers from bases in the Marianas, each carrying about seven tons of incendiary bombs.
The bombs burned more than the sixteen square miles targeted and killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people. In no other six-hour period of human history had so many people lost their lives. The firestorm was so powerful it sent updrafts that tossed the bombers about as their crews breathed the sickening smoke of burning houses and flesh.
Survivors reported that from the ground the bombers silhouetted against the sky sometimes looked like the black blades of knives and sometimes, when the flames lit them from below, like silver moths trapped in the amber reflections. The bombs themselves seemed to fall like a liquid silver rain rather than a series of solid, deadly objects.
Women fleeing, carrying babies on their backs, continued walking, seemingly unconscious that the bundles had burst into flame. Bodies twisted and turned into the pumice of Pompeiian victims. Those who dropped into canals or pools seeking refuge boiled to death.
The fires died down fairly quickly, and processions of silent refugees moved under moonlight amid the burning ruins. One man paused to light a cigar at a still burning telephone pole.
Time magazine called the raid “a dream come true.” It showed that “properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves.”
Approximately as many people died in this, the first great triumph of airpower, as did in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings combined. The step to the atomic bomb was now only a technical one.
The dominance of airpower was ratified in 1947 by the establishment of the Air Force as a separate branch of the military, equivalent to the Army and Navy. The same year brought the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency, the declaration of the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan. It saw the invention of the transistor and Chuck Yeager’s breaking of the sound barrier over the dry lake at Muroc.
One of the first tasks of the new Air Force was to explain reports of mysterious craft — possibly craft from distant stars.
They were as shiny as mirrors, pilot Kenneth Arnold reported. He saw nine objects near Mount Rainier, Washington, on the afternoon of June 24, 1947, in loose formation, shaped like boomerangs or flying wedges, moving at tremendous speed.
After landing in Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold described his sighting to Nolan Skiff, a columnist for the East Oregonian, and told him how the objects “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water.” The Associated Press picked up Skiff’s story, and in its version the objects changed from flying like a saucer into “saucer-like” objects, then into “flying saucers.”
The flying saucer would come to inhabit many of the the dreams of the postwar era, focusing fears and hopes like the lens whose shape it shares, reflecting the wider culture like its mirrored surface. Nothing says more about its origins than the birth of its name in the press. For the image of the saucer was about to become a new kind of mythological figure, a Hermes or Puck, a unicorn or leprechaun, that flourished not in oral tradition but in the mass media. The first folk emblem to emerge from the realm of technology, it turned into the most flexible sort of cultural icon, with overtones ranging from the cosmic — dark visions of potential invasions — to the comic — a thousand magazine cartoons with stubby saucers piloted by little green men.
In the days after Arnold’s sighting, dozens of additional reports flowed in from around the world. In July, the Air Force boldly issued a press release claiming the “capture” of a flying disc, at Roswell, New Mexico, then decided that the object had in fact been a weather balloon. The Roswell story quickly dropped from the headlines — to be reexamined only decades later — but within two months, polls showed that 90 percent of Americans had heard of flying saucers.
Arnold at first thought he had seen advanced military aircraft. The flying saucer was “discovered” amid almost daily announcements of wildly new technologies and rising tensions, which in the new atomic age threatened the end of the planet. The saucer became a fact of life, like the nuclear threat, and soon it was common enough to be treated lightly. Billy Ray Riley and his Little Green Men had a hit record with the rockabilly number “Flying Saucer Rock and Roll,” and by 1957 there was a new toy in American backyards: the saucer-shaped Frisbee, product of the Wham-O company.
The embodiment of airpower in its new guise as the atomic deterrent force would be the Strategic Air Command, and its leader Curtis LeMay.
LeMay took charge in October 1948 and declared the SAC a shambles, with untrained crews who couldn’t hit their targets. He staged a mock bombing attack on Dayton, Ohio. It was a dismal failure — most crews missed. LeMay called it the darkest day in the history of airpower. He proceeded to get the SAC into shape.
He gave SAC its motto: “Peace is our profession.” It said so on its seal, a shield bearing an armored hand glinting like an airplane against a blue sky — an image like a knight painted by Piero della Francesca. But the SAC seal had three lightning bolts and only one olive branch. LeMay’s premise was: We are at war already. Since the next war would be one of deterrence, won or lost before it started, we were in effect already fighting World War III. So LeMay kept some of his planes in the air at all times. All were designed to scramble quickly, with a red button for one-touch start-up inside the nose wheel wells where you boarded the plane, for a kind of Le Mans start.
He had no hesitancy about striking first if attack seemed imminent. With every passing year, the margin of advantage for the United States grew smaller. SAC’s advantage, LeMay said, was a “wasting asset.” It seemed crazy to him to let the other guys strike first. “Hit ’em with their pants down,” as George C. Scott urges, portraying the general in Dr. Strangelove modeled after LeMay.
In June 1950, SAC staged an exercise involving dozens of bombers that targeted Eglin Air Force Base. In Mission with LeMay, the autobiography LeMay wrote with MacKinlay Kantor,[5] he described his methods of constant practice: “We attacked every good-sized city in the United States. People were down there in their beds, and they didn’t know what was going on upstairs. By the time I left SAC,… every city in the United States of twenty-five thousand population or more had been bombed on innumerable occasions. San Francisco had been bombed over six hundred times in a month.”
LeMay had an obsession with security and a fear of sabotage. He gained national publicity when he staged a surprise visit to a SAC hangar and found the security guy eating lunch. “I saw a man guarding our planes with a ham sandwich,” he said. He had crack Air Police patrolling SAC bases, like the commando units depicted in Dr. Strangelove. He dispatched trained “penetrators” to plant notes that said, “This is a bomb.” This obsession shows up in the film Strategic Air Command, in which mild-mannered Jimmy Stewart goes back to the Air Force and is baffled by the rough security checks at the base gate. It’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Omaha,” and it may be one of the least convincing military movies ever made.
5
Published in 1965,
One of its most fascinating passages is LeMay’s effusive comparison of SAC’s organization to a B-58 bomber “weapons pod.” He did not latch on to the obvious Freudian conclusions with which the thing fairly screamed; instead he compares it to a jack-in-the-box in describing an inspection:
The chief of the ground crew and one of his men are up on the dock, engaged in removing a metal plate from the fuselage of the aircraft. We stand and watch. Off comes the plate, and there is exposed a labyrinth of silver and wire and plastic… tiny colored blobs and shreds. That’s a meager crumb, a mere sample of the electronic equipment which is stuffed and geared throughout the stiff flesh of the B-58… Something like the business of that old-fashioned jack-in-the-box you had as a child… You look up at that plate, and the fuselage aperture, and vaguely you wonder: how are they going to get that snake back in there?
They’ll get it back. And every tuft and every peg and every threadlike wire, and every infinitesimal jewel of the complex array will have been tested and found to be functioning, before that slice goes back on the aircraft — with reptiles arranged in designated position, before the plate is locked. The B-58 is crammed with those thousands and thousands of working warming cooling bits of metal and wire and tubing. Every available cubic inch within the body is occupied by such little monsters and treasures.
… And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage — half-size, but still of the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother’s belly — the B-58 carries all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A single B-58 can do that. It lugs the flame and misery of attacks on London… rubble of Coventry and the rubble of Plymouth… Blow up or burn up fifty-three per cent of Hamburg’s buildings, and sixty per cent of the port installations, and kill fifty thousand people into the bargain. Mutilate and lay waste the Polish cities and the Dutch cities, the Warsaws and the Rotterdams. Shatter and fry Essen and Dortmund add Gelsenkirchen, and every other town in the Ruhr. Shatter the city of Berlin. Do what the Japanese did to us at Pearl, and what we did to the Japanese at Osaka and Yokohama and Nagoya. And explode Japanese industry with a flash of magnesium, and make the canals boil around bloated bodies of the people. Do Tokyo over again. The force of these, in a single pod.
One B-58 can load that comprehensive concentrated firepower, and convey it to any place on the globe, and let it sink down, and let it go off, and bruise the stars and planets and satellites listening in.
Every petard, every culverin, every old Long Tom or mortar of a naval ship in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, every turret full of smoky cannon at Jutland… Big Bertha bombarding Paris… musketry of the American Revolutionary battles or the Napoleonic ones. Spotsylvania and Shiloh and the battles for Atlanta. All the paper cartridges torn with the teeth, and all the crude metallic cartridges forced into new hot chambers.… Firepower. All the firepower ever heard or experienced upon this earth. All in one bomb, all in one B-58.
He went on: “The B-58 was and is symbolic of SAC… If you removed that plate from the body of SAC, you could look in and see people and instruments. They would be as the intricate electronic physiology of an airplane today: each functioning, each trained, each knowing his special part and job — knowing what he must do in his groove and place to keep the body alive, the blood circulating. Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers. All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.”
The book also includes LeMay’s statement that while the Air Force had never intentionally concealed information on UFOs, there were many sightings for which it was never able to satisfactorily account.