information — I was going to take some action at least to get ready to do something…
What I am trying to say is that SAC was the only force we had that could react quickly to a nuclear attack. It did not make much sense to me to be in a position of not being able to act because I had no weapons. We had no idea of what confusion might exist, or who the president might be, or where, if a bomb hit Washington… I doubt if I would have retaliated if Washington were the only target hit. But I certainly would not have waited until half the country were destroyed. The main thing is that by making agreements to get the weapons we had some options rather than having none at all.
A Vandenberg staff officer told LeMay in response to LeMay's request that he “could see the desirability of [Vandenberg's] approval” of LeMay's
Targeting was another area where LeMay fought for control. Kenneth Nichols recalled in his memoirs that targeting “developed considerable controversy on the Joint [Chiefs] Staff and even within the Air Force. Should cities be the main targets, or should targeting be confined strictly to military and industrial targets?” (Nichols also noted that “One study I saw showed little difference in overall casualties in either case.”) LeMay was a realist and understood that bombing at night by radar in a strange country over which you have never previously flown meant unavoidable inaccuracy; he stood for industrial bombing — meaning city bombing — first and last. The US Strategic Bombing Survey had concluded that knocking out the German electric power grid during the Second World War would have crippled that nation's war effort; the target panel in Washington in the early 1950s therefore favored a major effort against Soviet electrical power stations even though such stations would be hard to spot from the air and were essentially local targets, not connected together into a national grid as those in Germany had been. LeMay appeared before the target panel and told the generals that “any target system picked that failed to reap the benefits derived from urban area bombing… was wasteful.” Rather, LeMay argued, “we should concentrate on industry itself which is located in urban areas… ” If a plane missed its aiming point, then “a bonus will be derived from use of the bomb.” LeMay won the panel's agreement to send target lists to SAC for comment before seeking JCS approval. “Bonus damage” and “catastrophe bonus” became terms of art at SAC; another popular euphemism was “precision attacks with an area weapon.” In the years ahead, target planning served as a royal road to increasing SAC's share of the national defense budget, since target requirements dictated bomb requirements, which dictated in turn how large the air force should be.
But in June 1950, the US faced real war in Korea. General Douglas MacAr-thur had some five hundred aircraft available in the Far East to throw into the fighting (including one B-29 bomber group), of which about three hundred were combat-operational; the North Koreans had more aircraft than expected, about two hundred. MacAtthur wanted more B-29s; the order came through to LeMay on July 1 to send ten aircraft to shore up MacArthur's group — “ten of your standard mediums,” General Roger Ramey told LeMay, “that are not especially… modified [for atomic bombing], that will hurt you the least.” LeMay immediately howled to Vandenberg's deputy Lauris Nor-stad. “I just wondered if Van[denberg] knows that we can fritter away this [strategic] force pretty quickly,” he asked. “Is this going to be the last [requisition of aircraft and crews] or not?” Norstad, trying to save a war that looked as if it might be over in Kim II Sung's predicted three days, communicated his distress:
Gen. Norstad:… Unless the situation changes. God only knows what will happen, but that group [in Korea] has got to be brought up, otherwise, Curt… we are not going to operate effectively with it.
Gen. LeMay: I know it's not worth a shit. I can tell that from here.
Gen. Norstad: That is exactly right…
Ten B-29s were not to be the last requisition. The next day, July 2, LeMay received orders to send two full groups of bombers; “their job,” his aide noted, “will be to destroy the necessary targets north of the 38th parallel and not to directly support tactical operations.” LeMay proposed to go to Korea himself and command the operation, but Vandenberg overruled him and he stayed in Omaha. At the same time as it moved two groups of conventional B-29s to the Far East, the Air Force shifted two atomic-capable SAC wings to forward bases in England with Acheson's approval, to encourage the British in their alliance with the US. Truman authorized sending along a supply of unarmed atomic bombs to England with the planes.
LeMay's resistance to supporting the war in Korea was not merely the whim of a strategic-bomber man. The commander told an NBC correspondent off the record a few weeks after the war began that “SAC was the USA's Sunday punch and… every effort must be made to make sure that it stayed intact and able to strike and not be pissed away in the Korean war.” In April, the CIA had published a top secret “Estimate of the effects of the Soviet possession of the atomic bomb upon the security of the United States and upon the probabilities of direct Soviet military action” in which the armed services had participated. The study estimated that two hundred atomic bombs exploded over the major cities of the United States “might well knock the US out of [a] war” and concluded that the Soviets might have that many bombs “some time between mid-1954 and the end of 1955” Such a historic capability would mean that “the continental US will be for the first time liable to devastating attack.”
For the US military, 1954 thus became the year of maximum clanger. LeMay identified it in a May 1950 memorandum to Thomas K. Finletter, the Secretary of the Air Force, as “the critical year at which time we must be prepared to meet, and effectively counter, the full military force of the USSR… ” SAC would not have long-range jet bombers by then; the B-52 was not scheduled to begin coming on line until 1955- LeMay would have to make do with B-50s, capacious but lumbering B-36 propeller-jet hybrids and light, medium-range all-jet B-47s. That was why he was ferociously reluctant to piss away his Sunday punch.
Whether the Soviet Union would be able to deliver its presumed arsenal was another matter. The CIA was skeptical, particularly since the only bomber of any range that the Soviets had built since the war was the TU-4, a copy of the B-29 made to measure from the three American bombers lost in Siberia in 1944. “If there are doubts about the ability of the B-36 to deliver the atom bomb against the USSR,” the April CIA estimate argued, “how much greater the doubts that the Soviet B-29 could deliver it successfully against an effective and alert US defense.” One important condition that the Soviet leadership would probably require before launching atomic war, however, was “virtual certainty that effective US retaliation could be prevented.” The CIA concluded that the Soviets would only initiate a war if they could do so with “a successful surprise attack that would seriously cripple or virtually eliminate US retaliatory capabilities.” Retaliation was the least that LeMay expected SAC to accomplish.
In the meantime, there was a war on, even if it was officially only a “police action,” and Stalin had been right: the United States did not believe it could afford to lose. The Joint Chiefs were even willing to postpone
In their first month of operations, the detached SAC groups dropped four thousand tons of bombs in tactical support of UN ground operations. They began as well a little-known strategic bombing campaign that would quickly devastate North Korea, dropping three thousand tons of bombs on strategic targets by mid-August. Their mission directive, cut on July 11 at the order of General George E. Stratemeyer, the commanding general of the Far East Air Forces, listed destroying the “enemy communication system” first, including “highway, railroad and port facilities,” ordering the aircraft to keep “‘well clear’ of the Manchurian border.” Second in priority would be “North Korea industrial targets.” The directive disguised an Air Force campaign to bomb out North Korean cities with the standard qualification that strategic bombing enthusiasts had invented during the Second World War: “The Commanding General, Far East Air Forces Bomber Command will not attack urban areas as targets. The attack within urban areas of specific military targets as set forth above is authorized.” Urban-area bombing had not been precision during the Second World War and it would not be precision in Korea.
The results were devastating. The FEAF commander announced in October that the strategic air war was over as far as North Korea was concerned; “eighteen major strategic targets had been neutralized.” LeMay in
