MOST TRAGIC SLIDING DOORS MOMENT IN HISTORY:

By war's end his command, operating more than 1,000 Superfortresses, was the deadliest air force on earth, having killed at least 220,000 Japanese civilians, possibly more than 500,000, and left five million homeless. When he stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri to witness the signing of the peace treaty, LeMay saw to it that hundreds of his B-29s thundered overhead.

As World War II transitioned into the Cold War, LeMay relocated to England in charge of the new USAFE, United States Air Forces in Europe, rebuilding the downsized command just in time. When the USSR blockaded West Berlin, he recommended immediately bombing Soviet air bases in East Germany. "I think we would have cleaned them up pretty well, in no time at all," he boasted.

Instead Western powers opted for an airlift. LeMay threw himself into the effort with equal enthusiasm, commandeering cargo planes from all over the Free World to fly supplies into the beleaguered city. Cynics called the Berlin Airlift "LeMay's Coal and Feed Company," but at the height of operations it was delivering almost 13,000 tons of supplies daily, with a transport touching down in West Berlin every 30 seconds. LeMay found it personally gratifying to sustain the city, still full of rubble from his bombs. "We had knocked the place down....Now we were doing just the opposite," he noted. "We were building and healing."

With his demonstrated expertise in assembling air forces from scratch, LeMay was called upon to take over what was to be America's main weapon of the Cold War, the new Strategic Air Command. "This had occurred right at the time [1948] when the Air Force had gone to utter hell," he asserted. "...We didn't have one crew, not one crew in the entire command who could do a professional job."

On his principle that "A force that cannot fight and win will not deter," LeMay had just started building up SAC when the Cold War flared hot again. "I suggested informally, when the Korean flap started in 1950, that we go up north immediately with incendiaries and delete four or five of the largest towns," he recalled. 

Needless to say, his advice was not followed. The fighting raged down almost to the tip of South Korea, up to the border with Red China and back down to the Demilitarized Zone, a draw. "And what happened?" LeMay demanded. "We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both."

Accused of being heartless, LeMay thought himself pragmatic. "Actually I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more," he reasoned. "If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle."

To that end LeMay, now a four-star general, molded SAC to win a war--a nuclear war--from the outset. Its motto was "Peace is Our Profession," but its task was to prevent a Soviet first strike, stop any Warsaw Pact advance into Europe and then carry the war to the Russian heartland, obliterating 70 picked cities within 30 days. LeMay kept America's ever-growing fleet of B-36 Peacemakers, then B-47 Stratojets, B-58 Hustlers and B-52 Stratofortresses, in a constant state of readiness, with bases around the world, midair refueling, aerial command centers and strategic bombers flying 24 hours a day, prepared to strike on a moment's notice. 

Yet SAC--and LeMay, a man of proven will­ingness to kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of victory--was a weapon too terrible for Washington to unleash. Even as he rose to chief of staff of the Air Force, LeMay found himself butting heads with presidents. John F. Kennedy cancelled his pet project, the supersonic XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, in favor of intercontinental ballistic missiles. (LeMay oversaw SAC's ICBM program but was not a proponent. "Missiles are spectacular and they play their role," he said, "but they have no sense of loyalty; they can't think; they can't be recalled.")

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy refused to let LeMay bomb the island's launch sites, and during the Vietnam War Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara also restricted bombing, lest it draw the Soviets and Chinese into the war. "He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war," McNamara said of LeMay, "but he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal." 

LeMay's answer to the North Vietnamese was, unsurprisingly, "Tell them they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age." Author Kantor was accused of inventing that quote for LeMay's biography, but it came to exemplify his approach to war.

Arguably Operation Linebacker II, the strategic bombing of North Vietnamese military and industrial targets in December 1972--the largest USAF bomber operation since World War II--proved LeMay right. It forced Hanoi back to the negotiating table and gave the U.S. a way out of the conflict. By that time LeMay had retired--some would say he was eased out--but not before wearing four stars longer than any other general in American military history. 

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