Where's Lemay When You Need Him?

[FC]

General Curtis LeMay led a colorful if extremely controversial career. From early on he argued that, "if you are going to use military force, then you ought to use overwhelming military force. Use too much and deliberately use too much... You'll save lives, not only your own, but the enemy's too." His men called him "Iron Ass" because he demanded so much of them. But because of his own physical courage and his military rigor most of them respected him immensely.

 

"Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."

 

"If you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."

"My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age." (Mission With LeMay: My Story, 1965; many years later LeMay would claim that this was his ghost writer's overwriting)

"I'd like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States. That doesn't mean launching an immediate preventive war. ... Native analysts may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't... That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.... China has the bomb... Sometime in the future--25, 50, 75 years hence--what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too... That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now."

"If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the ###### out of them before they take off the ground." from Kaplan, F. (1991). The Wizards of Armageddon. Stanford University Press. Page 134.

“We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?”

[Guest Guest_karlunity_*]

If we still had the will and the guts and the clarity of vision to act that way, the Islamics would NOT be a problem.

 

Karl

[AzRednek]

A now deceased realtive of mine hated Lemay. He was ordered by Lemay to fire bomb Tokyo. Lemay stripped his plane of crew, machine guns, survival supplies etc to make room and save weight for more bombs. They were forced to fly defenceless more often than not without fighter escorts into hostile territory. It took pressure from the home front to force Lemay to stop the practice. Lemay was also known for busting pilots of officer rank to enlisted staus for trivial matters.

 

[FC]

Like Patton, there were people that hated him. I met a vet that truly hated Patton.

 

LeMay took off the guns, supposedly, because of no fighter opposition. Did they have P-51 escorts?

[Guest Guest_karlunity_*]

Nice guys lose wars.

 

karl