The Day We Lost the H-Bomb

Nagoya, steel mills in Osaka, and the port of Kobe, destroying thirty-three square miles of those cities. He bombed Japan until he ran out of bombs and started again when the Navy brought him more. Throughout April, May, and June 1945, LeMay’s bombers pounded the cities of Japan. By summer, LeMay announced that strategic bombing could probably force Japan’s surrender by October.

The end came even sooner. On August 7, 1945, U.S. forces dropped an atomic bomb named “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. Nine days later, they dropped a second, “Fat Man,” on Nagasaki.

That evening, Japan surrendered. The war was over.

The Japanese surrender confirmed one of LeMay’s long-standing beliefs: the value of massive, overwhelming force. In his eyes, the widespread bombing had shortened the war and saved lives. “I think it’s more immoral to use less force than necessary than it is to use more,” he wrote. “If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle.” It was far more humane, he argued, to cut off a dog’s tail with one quick flick of the knife than to saw it off one inch at a time.

On September 2, LeMay attended the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. As he stood on the ship’s crowded deck, thinking of the Americans who had died and “where I’d gone wrong in losing as many as we did,” a roar filled the air. Four hundred sixty-two B29s flew overhead in a massive, deafening salute. To LeMay, the atomic bombs had been impressive but anticlimactic. In his opinion, those B-29s had won the war.

In the months after VJ Day, LeMay and his fellow air generals toured the United States, drumming up support for an independent Air Force. Despite his initial ambivalence, LeMay soon realized that the atomic bomb was a major boon for his cause. In LeMay’s biggest raid over Japan, hundreds of planes had dropped thousands of bombs, adding up to the power of about 3,000 tons of T.N.T. A single atomic bomb, dropped onto Hiroshima by a single plane, exploded with five times that power — the equivalent of 15,000 tons of T.N.T. One bomb could now destroy a city. Whoever controlled this new weapon owned the future of war.

The Army Air Forces had a head start. The early atomic bombs were far too big and heavy (the bomb dropped on Nagasaki weighed 10,000 pounds) to be launched by a soldier, tank, or battleship.

Only a few, specially modified B-29s could actually drop one of these behemoths on a target. Some airpower advocates gleefully claimed that the atomic bomb had made the Army and Navy obsolete.

The famed pilot Jimmy Doolittle said that the Navy’s only purpose now was ferrying supplies, the Army’s only job to occupy a country after bombers had crushed it into submission. LeMay wasn’t quite so harsh but argued that this new atomic age required a strong, vigilant Air Force to protect America. “Being peace-loving and weak didn’t stop us from getting into a fight,” he told the Wings Club in October 1945. “Maybe being strong and ready will do it.” Congress, the president, and even the Army agreed that World War II and the atomic bomb had enhanced the status of airpower. With the Army’s blessing, the AAF broke free. In September 1947, the U.S. Air Force became an independent service.

The Air Force started life with three distinct commands. The Tactical Air Command (TAC) handled fighter planes and tactical support, the Air Defense Command (ADC) defended America against air attack, and the Strategic Air Command (SAC) took care of the bombers and atomic weapons. Most of the new Air Force generals believed that strategic bombing had won them independence, and they saw SAC as the key to the Air Force’s future. In the postwar scramble for planes, bases, and personnel, SAC grabbed the lion’s share.

Not that there was much to grab. After the war ended, President Harry Truman rapidly demobilized the military, reducing defense spending from 40 percent of the gross national product in 1944 to a mere 4 percent by 1948. He slashed Air Force personnel from a high of 2.4 million to only 300,000 by May 1947. He sent soldiers home to their regular jobs and ordered planes and jeeps sold for scrap. Records were dumped into boxes and thrown away. “We just walked away and left everything,” said Leon Johnson, a bomber pilot who became an influential Air Force general. “We started from nothing, from nothing, to rebuild the Air Force.” For several years after the war, SAC floundered under limited budgets and weak leadership. But by 1948, there was a sense of urgency; the uneasy postwar alliance between the Soviet Union and the United States was rapidly crumbling. The two countries had never shared an easy friendship, even while allies in World War II, but now the relationship was worsening by the day. The Communists were gobbling up territory in Eastern Europe, and their hunger for more seemed insatiable. Then, in 1948, the tension reached a new height, focused on the German city of Berlin.

After World War II, Germany had been divided into four sectors, under American, French, British, and Soviet control. Deep within the Soviet sector, the city of Berlin was subdivided into four sectors.

The Soviets had long bristled at this arrangement, and in June 1948 they ramped up their efforts to assert themselves in the city by blocking all road, rail, and barge traffic to the western sectors of Berlin, leaving the Berliners marooned without adequate food or fuel. The United States responded with a massive airlift, hauling tons of milk, flour, medicine, and coal into the starving city. But Western leaders feared that the Berlin blockade was merely a prelude, that the USSR would soon try to push beyond Berlin and deep into Western Europe. If the Soviets made a move, Washington might need the bumbling Strategic Air Command to intervene. On October 19, 1948, SAC got a new commander: Curtis LeMay.

LeMay, who had been running the Berlin airlift, started his new job by visiting SAC headquarters at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. The situation shocked him. “Not one crew — not one crew — in the entire command could do a professional job,” he said. “Not one of the outfits was up to strength — neither in airplanes nor in people nor anything else.” LeMay grew annoyed when people at SAC told him that “everything was rosy.” He knew that pilots had been running practice bombing raids and asked about their accuracy. The commanders bragged that bombardiers were hitting targets “right on the button.”

They produced the bombing scores, and they were so good I didn’t believe them…. I found out that SAC wasn’t bombing from combat altitudes, but from 12,000 to 15,000 feet…. It was completely unrealistic. It was perfectly apparent to me that while we didn’t have much capability, everyone thought we were doing fine.

LeMay saw history repeating itself. SAC was just like the ragtag bomber groups he had initially commanded in Europe. But this time, America faced an even bigger threat: the Soviet Union would undoubtedly have its own atomic bomb soon. LeMay felt a tremendous sense of urgency. “We had to be ready to go to war not next week, not tomorrow, but this afternoon, today,” he said. “We had to operate every day as if we were at war.”

With Air Force leadership backing him, LeMay sprang into action. Seven days after taking command, LeMay put Tommy Power, his old friend from the Pacific, into the deputy commander slot. Power was not well liked (even LeMay said he was a “mean sonofabitch”), but he got things done. LeMay replaced virtually all SAC’s commanders and headquarters staff with his pals from the Pacific bombing campaign. Their first mission was to prepare at least one group for atomic combat.

They started with the 509th Bomber Group at Walker Air Force Base in Roswell, New Mexico. The Army had created the 509th for the sole purpose of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now it was the only group even close to atomic readiness. LeMay’s staff stocked their warehouses with supplies and made sure that the planes had parts, guns, and gas. They weeded through personnel, replacing dead wood with crack crews.

LeMay worked nearly every day, from eight in the morning until well into the evening, and his housecleaning touched every corner of SAC. “My goal,” he said later, “was to build a force that was so professional, so strong, so powerful, that we would not have to fight. In other words, we had to build this deterrent force. And it had to be good.” He argued to Air Force leaders that SAC must be their top priority in funding, research, planes, and personnel. Aided by his reputation and zeal and the growing Soviet threat, LeMay convinced them to give him carte blanche. He created a recruitment and screening system that filled SAC’s ranks with bomber crews handpicked for their self-discipline and maturity. He arranged for new housing to be built so the airmen would have decent places to live. He made his leaders write detailed manuals for every job and train the airmen relentlessly. SAC developed elaborate war strategies, which it planned to change every six months.

It built a million-dollar telephone and teletype system to link all SAC bases with the new headquarters at Offutt Field in Omaha, Nebraska. In six months, LeMay had turned SAC around and landed on the cover of Newsweek. Underneath his scowling portrait ran the headline “Air General LeMay: A Tough Guy Does It Again.” Inside the magazine, a glowing article called LeMay a genius and described how he had turned SAC from a “creampuff outfit” into an atomic force with real teeth. “When LeMay first came in, we were nothing but a bunch of nits and gnats,” one young officer told Newsweek. “Today, we’re a going concern.” LeMay had done more than shape SAC up; he had created a religion. The gospel he preached was a simple parable: the schoolyard bully and the gentle giant. The Soviets were the schoolyard bullies, aiming to seize