associated that successful blitzkrieg with his old Iron Ass axiom, “Hit it right the first time and we won't have to go back.” Atomic bombs made hitting the target right the first time far more probable than ordinary high explosives had allowed. Given a “war aim of complete subjugation of the enemy,” the Air Force war plans division had recently concluded, “it would be feasible to risk an all-out atomic attack at the beginning of a war in an effort to stun the enemy into submission.” The distinguished board of military and civilian experts that had evaluated the Bikini test results, headed by MIT president Karl Compton, had pushed the blitzkrieg concept a dangerous step farther, arguing that since “offensive measures will be the only generally effective means of defense… the United States must be prepared to employ them before a potential enemy can inflict significant damage upon us” — arguing, that is, for first-strike preventive war.
So when LeMay took his ideas for a SAC war plan to USAF Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg in November 1948, he proposed that “the primary mission of SAC should be to establish a force in being capable of dropping 80 % of the stockpile in one mission.” By then he was confident, he told Vandenberg, that “the next war will be primarily a strategic air war and the atomic attack should be laid down in a matter of hours.” Vandenberg agreed; in the first SAC Emergency War Plan that LeMay delivered in March 1949, his November proposal became a goal to increase SAC capability “to such an extent that it would be possible to deliver the entire stockpile of atomic bombs, if made available, in a single massive attack.” Fitted to the most recent JCS war plan, LeMay's plan for SAC meant destroying seventy Soviet cities within thirty days with 133 atomic bombs, causing at least 2.7 million civilian deaths and another four million casualties. (This scale of destruction corresponds notably to that of the firebombing of Japan, which resulted in the burning out of sixty-three Japanese cities and the killing of 2.5 million civilians. Such a relatively modest atomic-war plan, limited not by strategic restraint but simply by the exigencies of the atomic stockpile, reinforced the protective delusion that atomic war would differ from conventional war primarily in efficiency. But the bombing of Japan had been a maximum effort, while the atomic campaign could and would increase in destructive scale as the stockpile grew.) The Air Force high command signed on to LeMay's plan at a conference at the Air University in December, allotting SAC top budget priority.
American air-power strategists had a name for such an attack as LeMay was proposing: “killing a nation.” SAC had a long way to go before it could kill a nation, as the Dayton debacle would soon demonstrate. In December, LeMay told General Roger Ramey, who commanded one of SAC's two air forces, that the 509th atomic bomber group was “no damn good.” “Since the 509th had fallen so desperately low in efficiency,” LeMay's aide paraphrases, “he considered it not operational and directed that a major turnover in the entire personnel be made and other drastic action be taken to get this group into operational efficiency.” At the same meeting, LeMay ordered Ramey to modify tankers for aerial refueling “as fast as possible but to keep quiet about this as he did not desire any publicity on this whatsoever.” He also wanted the number of airmen in radar school doubled to compensate for lost reenlistments and the intelligence section improved.
“My determination was to put everyone in SAC into this frame of mind,” LeMay writes:
We took the 509th Group, the original atomic outfit. I said: “Okay, we will start with that one.” We cleaned out the supply warehouses and stocked the things that the unit needed. We equipped all the planes with the things they were supposed to have on them. Some of the airplanes didn't even have guns on them; since it was peacetime, they supposedly didn't need them, and didn't have them. We put all the things on the airplanes they were supposed to have, and then started cleaning out the people who didn't belong there, and getting people in who did.
LeMay had told Vandenberg that he intended to establish a mobile operational force by January 1, 1949, that would include two atomic medium groups[31] and one atomic heavy group, cannibalizing the rest of SAC of the best pilots and crews to do the job. “This will barely give us the capability of meeting [our] mission,” he reported. By June, he intended to double this primary mobile force. The rest of SAC he would build one group at a time as resources became available. As of January 1, SAC had ninety special crews and 124 aircraft modified to carry atomic bombs; its overall force included thirty-five of the huge new six-engine B-36s that could carry 86,000 pounds of bombs and fly above forty thousand feet, thirty-five B-50s — improved atomic- capable B-29s — and 486 B-29s. The official US atomic stockpile now numbered fifty-six Mark HI bombs; new Mark IVs would begin entering the stockpile early in 1949- The Mark IV could be stored in final assembled form; Kenneth Nichols of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project called it “the first engineered atomic weapon.”
At the beginning of 1949, and for at least a decade to come, SAC had an ace in the hole, the same ace that LeMay had counted on in 1945 when he planned the firebombing of Japan: like Japan before it, the Soviet Union was defenseless against strategic bombing. Vandenberg had reported Soviet vulnerabilities to Forrestal in December 1948. They were appalling:
Soviet antiaircraft artillery consists mainly of 88 mm heavy guns and 37 mm automatic weapons. The maximum effective ceiling of the 85 mm gun is 25,000 feet…
Jamming operations by Allied aircraft will be conducted against gun-laying radar and will greatly reduce its effectiveness…
There is no evidence that the Soviets possess any aircraft specifically designed for night or all-weather fighter operations…
Of the known types of fighter aircraft in existence or under development [in the USSR] none are suitable for such operations against B-29 type aircraft…
An adequate perimeter [fighter and antiaircraft] defense [of the USSR] is clearly out of the question…
Even if [Soviet] fighters are scrambled before identification is made, no fighter passes are possible before [a US] bomber releases its bombs…
The Soviets do not have the capability to interfere with the effective use of our airborne radar bombing equipment…
It is not believed that the Soviets have the capability of making United Kingdom bases untenable before D + 45 to 60 days at the earliest… The strategic air offensive would delay considerably or deny completely this capability.
Vandenberg reported an estimated loss of US aircraft in initial atomic attacks against the Soviet Union of 25 percent. LeMay revealed the real estimate over lunch at the National War College a year later when two Navy officers ragged him about the effectiveness of air defense. “General LeMay… stated,” his aide records, “that in his estimation, if the ‘bell were to ring now,’ certain targets could be penetrated and attacked with very little loss and that the overall losses would not exceed ten percent.” SAC only used 25 percent, LeMay observed, “for a logistical planning figure.”
However formidable on the ground, from the air the Soviets were naked unto their enemies. Building SAC would exploit that mortal vulnerability. The way to build SAC was to fly. LeMay reports sending a B-36 in December 1948 “over 8,000 miles in about 35 hours from Fort Worth, Texas, to Honolulu and back, carrying a useful load of simulated bombs which were dropped… in the ocean off Honolulu.” In February 1949, the
At Chelyabinsk-40, the conscript soldier was assigned to construction now, labor that seemed to him not much better than the
