Interview with Brigadier General Walter D. Leland (USAF Ret.)

I appreciate your reading a draft of the story and being willing to talk with me. You can comment on anything you like, but I'm mostly interested in the fact that you knew General LeMay.

Old Iron Ass. I knew him and served under him, and am proud to have done so. I can recognize him in that otherwise rather screwy tale you gave me. He did talk pretty much talk that way—a genuine, no-nonsense kind of guy. And he did like to chomp on his cigars until the doctors finally took them away from him, though he would cheat now and then. General Arnold and he pushed hard for their air corps. He drove home his brilliant understanding that the only way to keep the peace was to be sure every  enemy knew what would happen to them if they ever tried to attack us again or even push us too hard. If you want to know who was the real all-American hero of the Cold War, and who did more than anyone else to be sure we would defeat communism, I would nominate Curtis B. LeMay.

Quite a guy then?

You can bet that Vietnam would have turned out differently too, if they had listened to him. He couldn't go along with the striped-pants boys and Kennedy's whiz kids, especially McNamara. They didn't  understand that if you want to win a war, you've got to be able to fight it to the nth degree—especially using air power. That's what LeMay demonstrated in Japan.

The firebombings of Tokyo, Osaka, and other cities were his idea?

It was featured in some of our textbooks. He ordered the B-29s stripped of much of their armament and loaded with clusters of incendiaries to come in low—sometimes as low as five thousand feet. That took a lot of guts. He insisted until the day he died that it was that rather than the A-bombs that did the Japanese in.

I've heard estimates of over a million civilians killed in the bombing of Japan.

I've heard more—a lot of them soldiers and factory-workers too, remember. But it was LeMay who said "there are no innocent civilians in war." I heard him say it more than once. One of the major objectives was to terrorize and demoralize the home folks—to make them give up and sue for peace.

Did you know that there were over twenty thousand Korean forced laborers in Hiroshima the day the bomb was dropped?

I've heard that. A damn shame if some of them got roasted too—some Chinese and American and Brit POWs too. But terrible things happen in war. It's just the kind of thing the Japs would do—making slaves out of the poor Koreans.

Do you think LeMay knew?

I have no idea. But he understood better than a lot of others what war is really about.

You said you served under him.

I was a SAC pilot, and then wing commander in the fifties and sixties. LeMay built the Strategic Air Command from a batch of decrepit B-29s into a nuclear air force of hundreds of eight-jet B-52s. He invented what they now call "24/7"—having some of those planes in the sky every minute of every day. The Russkies could never catch us napping, but if we had to, we could them.  Give them the "Sunday punch" is what he called it. I'm convinced that's what really ended the Cuban missile crisis.

I've heard that it was the blockade, Kennedy's pledge not to invade Cuba, and the secret offer to take our missiles out of Turkey that caused the Russians to pull their missiles out of Cuba.

The missiles in Turkey weren't much good anyway, though Kennedy was chicken if that's what he promised Khrushchev.  That's what LeMay thought Kennedy was during the whole business. Of course he came to realize Eisenhower had been lily-livered too.

And Truman? After he decided against using atomic bombs in the Korean War?

LeMay wanted to use them. He never did think of them as all that different from what you could do with a lot of regular bombs.  They were just more efficient. In the end, he would argue, it is no more wicked to kill people with nuclear bombs than it is to bust their heads with rocks. Dead is dead even if it is more of them.

Even when it came to the hydrogen bombs?

He knew how scared Khrushchev and the rest of them were, and that is exactly what turned the Russians around over Cuba. It wasn't about missiles at all. It was air power—nuclear air power. We not only had our B-52s up there. We not only had them fly right to the edge of the fail-safe line. To let Khrushchev know that we were prepared to put it to him, we flew a couple hundred miles over the line and then did a lazy loop coming back. LeMay had us up to DEFCON 2 and was ready to go to DEFCON 1 on a hair-trigger's notice. I know. I was there. And you know who ordered us to do that? Curtis B. LeMay. That's who ended the Cuban missile crisis. Of course, if LeMay had had his way, the earlier invasion of Cuba would never have fizzled in the Bay of Pigs. Pigs! He told Kennedy he was ready to fry them. He knew that our handling of the whole business was a failed opportunity. And you see, there's old Fidel, probably still running Cuba, one way or another

Were you concerned that the Russians might bring their planes closer to ours or even launch a ballistic missile?

Nah. They'd never had the nerve. Even if they were lucky enough to hit one or two of our cities, they'd have ended up in the Stone Age. We had to be willing to call their bluff .

A risk worth taking?

Yes, but you see, it wasn't really that much of a risk. LeMay  knew what he was doing. I know some people tried to make fun of him, but he just laughed them off .

How did they make fun of him?

There were people in Washington. He didn't go to the right schools. Hadn't gone to the Point. And he could be a bit crude sometimes. But he would do that deliberately to get his disdain across. I didn't always approve of it myself. And then there was that movie.

Which movie?

I'm sure you know. Dr. Strangeglove or Strangelove: about the mad general ready to release the nukes.

Did you see it?

Didn't want to. But Curtis did.

Did it make him mad?

He thought it was funny as hell. "I'm General Jack D. Ripper."  He'd go into the can and leave the door open while taking a pee. He and Lyndon Johnson were alike that way. He'd flush it a couple of times and then come out waving his cigar, "I'm Jack the Ripper". He'd laugh at the story you gave me, too—at least parts of it. He would have loved that redhead dancing around the table in Salt Lake and those guys singing to Tibbets. He didn't think much of Tibbets.

Why?

Probably thought he tried to get too much credit for himself.  Tibbets was only a lieutenant colonel. LeMay was already a major general at the time and in charge of the bombing of Japan.

So what else do you think he would have thought of the story?

To be honest with you, I had trouble following parts of what was going on. It jumped around too much for me, and I had to ask, how could a guy like that be the Gay's bombardier? I don't imagine LeMay would have wanted anyone that confused in charge of our first atom bomb. If he felt that way, he should have pulled himself off the mission. And I really had trouble with the last part. If he was saying he deliberately dropped the bomb out near the bay, he ought to be court-martialed even now.  LeMay would have gone ballistic—rammed his cigar up what's-his-name's ass and tossed him out at thirty thousand feet without benefit of a parachute. Your Carsons too. Though I have trouble believing about him.

There were, however, members of the scientific community who expressed doubts about using the bomb on civilians.

Mostly after the damn fact. A lot easier then.

Even Oppenheimer came to wonder if the bomb wasn't a mistake. "An evil thing," he called it, "by all the standards of the world."

Don't get me going on Oppenheimer! You can be glad LeMay isn't here. He completely lost respect for  him. Thought he probably was a Commie. Maybe a Jewish homosexual. "Floppy Oppie" was about the nicest thing he called him. Teller was his hero. But getting back to your bombardier, whatever his name was, you couldn't say that what he thought or did made any difference in the great scheme of things.

Are you sure?

What do you think? The Japs were scared to death. They quit. A couple of weeks later MacArthur's in Tokyo, their Emperor's sucking ass and they're selling us TVs and cars for how many years now? And they've got a free market and a democracy to go with it and are grateful to us. Don't think for one minute it wasn't air power that did that. And that's another thing LeMay wouldn't like about what you gave me to read—any suggestion about the bombing not winning the war. There's plenty of evidence that it did, in Germany too. Those statistics that question that—you know who put a lot of that stuff together? It was a smart-ass young Canadian number-cruncher who turned out to be that lefty professor who was one of Kennedy's favorites. Hap Arnold showed him he was wrong, and he and Curtis showed the President and Congress how much we needed a separate air corps.  Curtis thought the numbers guy had just made them up the way he wanted them—made up his own reality. That's what people do these days. Curtis saw what happened for himself. That's what won the biggest war in history. Twenty million people died.

Some say more.

And you can say what you want about General LeMay, but he was a genuine hero of that war. And you know he was the same guy who broke the Berlin blockade with his airlift. That was his idea. He put it together and shoved it right down their throats. But the real reason we respected him was that he'd done it himself—flown a bunch of missions over Germany. Some people accused him of being a bit reckless, but what he was was fearless—a man of genuine courage. You probably know about the day in '43 when he led the squadron that bombed that ballbearing factory deep into the heart of Germany.  Over a thousand bombers went out that one day. You know how many came back?  I'll tell you. Less than half, that's how many.

A lot of lives lost.

And a lot of the planes that did make it back were full of holes—some dead and wounded fliers aboard. Your bombardier on the Enola Gay could have been one of them. It was tough—very tough. Brave men.

It does sound a bit reckless, though.

Maybe so. Maybe so. War is hell. That's a fact. LeMay took heat over it. But he knew what was  necessary. Where other people were asking questions, he was providing answers. Other people had the theories; he was the realist. And the bigwigs learned to like it. He was the guy that got promoted. People remember Eisenhower and MacArthur, but the American who did the most to win World War II and the Cold War too was Curtis LeMay. As I told you, he could have won Vietnam as well, and, believe me, we could use him now. Because of him we have the air power, the nuclear power, and the Air Force we do today, with its ability to win wars if we have to and protect our peace and freedom and also to help bring peace and freedom to the world. That's another damn fact, and there's nothing in your story that could stop that.

Speaking of Eisenhower, you are aware that he came to think that it was wrong to have used an atomic bomb on a city?

Maybe I heard that. I already told you what General LeMay thought about him. "Eisenhowever," he called him. I liked him better than that. He was a great general. Maybe not so good a president. He wasn't sitting in Harry Truman's hot seat either.

There were others: Admirals Halsey and Nimitz. Nimitz called it a barbarous weapon that was used when the Japanese were already ready to surrender. By killing women and children we had adopted an ethical standard common to barbarians.

Well, that does surprise me. It especially surprises me if it's true about Bull Halsey. He was one tough hombre. Are you sure they said things like that? People put words into other people's mouths, you know.

We could check it out. John Foster Dulles too. Even George Marshall expressed later reservations.

Well, in any case that's what makes this country great. We're a democracy and people can have different points of view and argue about them. You couldn't do that then in Japan or Germany or in Russia or China or in Iraq for that matter, before we got rid of that jerk Saddam. That's what we have been fighting for and why I'm proud to be an American.

Finally, I take it that you don't think there would be any need for forgiveness for what the bombardier did, or for that matter, what we did by dropping the first atomic bombs?

Why do you say that? I'm no philosopher, but I go to church.  My church teaches that we are all sinners, but that Jesus Christ died for our sins. Sure, the atomic bomb was a sin. Life is full of sin. There is plenty of sin to go around, but if we repent, we'll all be forgiven.

And if we don't repent?

Well, my friend, then you may get to spend a long time in the fiery pits. But I've got a hunch that God intends to rescue people even from that. He's a pretty awesome God, you know.  There's hell on earth. War's hell, but none of that in heaven.

Thank you, General Leland, for your perspective on all this.

You're welcome. Proud to be able to talk with you.