LeMay by Warren Kozak

Author:Warren Kozak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2010-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

The semblance of shyness that McKelway thought he saw ceased to exist when it came to command. LeMay took over the Twenty-first like a force of nature hitting the tiny South Pacific Island. The first thing that caught LeMay’s eye was the Navy’s construction schedule for Guam, which aroused his substantial anger. Because the Navy was in charge of bringing in all the supplies, including the Army Air Force’s bombs and fuel, it also supervised all engineering and construction on the island. Given the high cost in American lives to secure these islands (almost exclusively Navy and Marines), LeMay was outraged to see that tennis courts had been built before barracks for his air crews.

LeMay managed to get hold of a construction priority list and found it was not until page five that plans dealt with building anything for fighting. “Thousands and thousands of young Americans died on those islands in order to give us a base of operations against the Japanese homeland,” he observed with dismay. “And here people were, piddling around with all this other stuff, and not giving us anything to fly from or fight with.” When the head of one of his Wings arrived with his complement of B-29s, the crews had to sleep under the planes on the runways.

LeMay also discovered what he considered a completely foolish formality in protocol on Guam. Upon his arrival, he had quickly received an invitation to dine with the theater commander who “had built himself a splendid house, way up on the very highest peak,” complete with Filipino houseboys. The next invitation came from the island commander who had also “built himself another nice house.” The third invitation came from the submarine commander who was living on the Vanderbilt yacht, which had been requisitioned for wartime service, again with fine linens and houseboys.

LeMay never excelled in these social situations, and with everything on his mind, these nightly visits struck him as an obscene waste of time and money. But he got this point across in his own unique style. After dining with each commander, he extended reciprocal invitations to all three commanders to join him in his tent where they ate canned rations like all the rest of his crews. “I did promote a bottle of liquor, but I had to wheedle that from a Neptune (Navy) type.” The point was made, “and eventually they came up with the facilities we needed. And they built fine quarters for us.”39 LeMay eventually acknowledged that no one could have built things fast enough for him. But he was still steamed every time he saw those tennis courts.

Throughout the first month, LeMay’s performance was as poor as Hansell’s. In his first mission on January 23, LeMay sent seventy-three B-29s against the aircraft-engine plant in Nagoya. One B-29 crashed on takeoff. One was downed by Japanese fighters. Only twenty-three Superfortresses managed to bomb the plant through the thick cloud cover, and of those, only four bombs and a few incendiaries hit the target.

LeMay found the constant bad weather over Japan particularly vexing.

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