Word: lemay
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...middle of a nation pursuing a faraway war in a faraway mood, a tough, hard-driving Air Force bombardment expert had tirelessly trained the Sunday punch to battle fitness. Lieut. General Curtis Emerson LeMay, commanding general of the Strategic Air Command, was leaning on no hope that the world might get better or the U.S.S.R. more reason able. His 16 air bases, strung across the nation from Puerto Rico to California-and his outposts in England, Japan and Okinawa-bristled with readiness. His officers wore their sidearms at desks, at meals and in the air; his "A.P.s" (air police...
...quick, certain fate awaited any LeMay man who betrayed the slightest sign of the milkshaky unpreparedness that enveloped the occupation troops of Germany and Japan. The Strategic Air Command (known to the Air Force as SAC) was a $310 million-a-year business, a top-priority task force with 1,100 planes, some 60,000 pilots, crewmen and groundmen. For 22 rugged months Curt LeMay had been holding them all to a relentless, competitive training schedule. With an impersonal assortment of charts and graphs -his "numbers racket," he called them -he kept a sharp, hazel-eyed watch on everything from...
Every month he waved the numbers in the faces of his wing and group commanders. "Al, your maintenance is down to 62%," LeMay might say. "Joe's is up to 72%. He's got the same problems you have. How come? Now, Joe, don't look so damned smug. Your costs are up . . ." One colonel complained that he was being marked down for "an act of God," because an eagle had damaged one of his planes in flight. LeMay sucked on his pipe, replied in a flat, low voice: "I'm not interested in distinguishing between...
...Plane. SAC's complicated and outsize bombers demand ice-cold thinking, endurance and guts from the men who fly them. The Consolidated Vultee B-36, a cigar-shaped aerial monster, is LeMay's blue-ribbon flying warship. It costs $4,700,000 before it ever gets off the ground (a small submarine costs $6,000,000). The tanks in its 230-ft. wing can swallow 2½ tank-car loads of gasoline, enough to feed its six pusher engines for nearly two days. It can cruise over the enemy out of sight of earth-and, the Air Force...
...commander of a B-36 is usually a captain or a major, on the average a seasoned "old man" of 29 years and 3,000 hours' flight experience. LeMay laced SAC with veteran pilots, navigators and bombardiers from his old World War II bomber commands in England, India and the Marianas. Around them he has tailored the individual B-36 flight crews, trains them for weeks in ground school and on the Consolidated assembly line before he allows them to set foot in the super-plane...