By 1950, the Air Force was riding high. At the start of the war, it was a fledgling subservice of the U.S. Army; by the end of the war, it had monopoly control over the weapon that finally brought Japan to its knees. In 1946, the Strategic Air Command was created as guardian over the new weapon, and shortly thereafter the Air Force was made an independent service. In the early years of postwar demobilization, the Air Force was the only service of the armed forces to get practically as much money from the President and Congress as it wanted.
Arguments were breaking out, however, over just what the nature of air power was and how it should be used in the next war. Military planning was essentially Air Force planning, and Air Force planning was still very much dominated by putative lessons of World War II. Conflicts over planning were rooted in disagreements over what those lessons were. And those disagreements were based on the different wartime experiences of the various planners involved in the intramural fighting.
General Vandenberg and many of his aides on the Air Staff were trying to devise a targeting plan that would aim at destroying particular types of industries, the specific sectors of the Soviet economy on which the war machine uniquely and critically depended. Vandenberg’s assistants in the Air Intelligence Division devised a concept called “killing a nation.” On how to pull it off, they had taken a few pages from the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, the most comprehensive study on the effects of the strategic bombing of the last war.
The Survey pointed to two industries that looked promising for the future: liquid fuel and electric power. The bombing of liquid-fuel plants toward the end of the war made it impossible for Nazi panzer divisions to move their tanks or for the Luftwaffe to fly its planes. From an airman’s point of view (and this view almost always ignored the tremendous pressures on the demand for fuel created by the Allied invasion on the ground), the bombing of liquid-fuel targets knocked the German war economy flat on its back.
The German electric-power system was never made an explicit target by the Allied air forces, partly because they assumed that the German power grid was highly developed, that losses in one area could be regained by switching over to the power source of another. However, the investigation by the Strategic Bombing Survey economists revealed that this assumption was wrong. The “electric power situation was in fact in a precarious condition from the beginning of the war and became more precarious as the war progressed…. Fears that their extreme vulnerability would be discovered” were constantly expressed in sessions of the Nazi Central Planning Committee. An explicit emphasis on bombing these power plants, concluded the Survey, “would have directly affected essential war production.”
Then there was a third critical target, unique to the atomic age—the Soviet Union’s atomic-energy plants; their destruction would ensure that the Russians could no longer produce the decisive weapon.
The Air Intelligence Division worked out a targeting plan for the Air Force that would emphasize blowing up those three critical types of targets, which they thought constituted the vital center, the solar plexus, of the Soviet war-supporting economy.
This effort was one facet of a targeting plan that had been approved by the Joint Chiefs, known in shorthand as “Delta-Bravo-Romeo.” The critical industries fell under Delta, “the disruption of the vital elements of the Soviet war-making capacity.” Bravo called for “the blunting of Soviet capabilities to deliver an atomic offensive against the United States and its allies.” Romeo stood for “the retardation of Soviet advances into Western Eurasia.” Destroying the critical targets of each category would destroy the Soviet war effort.
The officers of the Strategic Air Command, the airmen who would have to fly or coordinate the mission, had no objection to the Delta-Bravo-Romeo categories. But they thought the idea of separating out specific industrial sectors in some delicate and discriminating fashion was a disastrous notion. To SAC, that simply was not the way to fight a war.
General Curtis E. LeMay, the commanding general of SAC and its living personification, fought this targeting battle against the Air Staff with determination. LeMay had the ultimate clout. The Joint Chiefs might toy with fancy ideas and theories, but LeMay was the one who would route the bombers to their destinations; he was the one who would be pressed to deliver; he had the bombs. And most of the Air Force officers knew that, on a tactical level anyway, LeMay pretty much did as he pleased.
During the final phase of World War II, LeMay commanded the XXI Bomber Command, part of the Twentieth Air Force, planning the bombings and fire bombings over Japan. They were terrifying raids, almost unimaginably massive. One attack over Tokyo, delivered March 9, 1945, involving incendiary bombs dropped from 334 B-29s, burned to a crisp nearly sixteen square miles of territory, leveling 267,171 buildings, killing 83,793 Japanese, wounding 40,918 others. During the month of March alone, LeMay’s crews poured a similar rain of destruction upon thirty-three cities across the Japanese map. The Joint Chiefs had sent LeMay a target priority list earlier that spring. Heading the list were select aircraft plants, followed by other particular industrial factories; at the bottom of the list were industrial areas. But the weather was terrible in Japan, even worse than it had been in Europe, and a bombardier had to see specific targets before he could hit them. During the best month for bombing Japan, visual bombing was possible for seven days. The worst had only one good day. LeMay struck a deal with a Chinese insurgent named Mao Tsetung to set up a radio station and report on the weather. That helped, but not enough.
LeMay had the tool, air power; he could hit industrial areas, but not precision targets; so he threw out his instructions and did what he could. He looked up the size of the large Japanese cities in the World Almanac and picked his targets accordingly. Square miles—that’s all he could hit, and he figured if he hit enough of them, that would do the trick.
By late spring the results were pretty clear. Fire bombing had been particularly effective, since so many Japanese buildings were made of wood. The fire took hold, and the flames spread, toppling buildings like a blaze of dominoes. General Henry “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, visited LeMay in the Pacific and, after hearing a briefing, asked him when the war would be over.
LeMay assembled his officers and ordered them to count how many square miles they had left to hit, how many bombs it takes to cover that much area and how long it would take, given logistics and so forth, to get to them. “The war will be over the first of September,” LeMay told Arnold. That would be when the XXI Bomber Command would run out of targets to hit.
To LeMay, demolishing everything was how you win a war. He thought that strategic bombing in Europe had been handled all wrong, too much fussing with “bottleneck” targets and “precision bombing,” that the whole point of strategic bombing was to be massive, a campaign of holy terror. The atom bomb only made this point stronger. LeMay thought that the advent of the atomic bomb blasted all doubts that air power could win a war by itself.
LeMay kept three big pictures framed next to one another on the walls of his office at SAC headquarters. The first was a painting of Napoleon’s army retreating from Russia. The second was a painting of Hitler’s armies retreating from Russia. The third displayed a passage from Winston Churchill’s 1949 speech delivered at the Mid-Century Convocation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proclaiming, “For good or ill, air mastery is today the supreme expression of military power, and fleets and armies, however necessary and important, must accept subordinate rank.”