Word: lemay
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...Ironpants." A longtime friend of Curtis LeMay was once asked whether he had ever seen the General smile. The answer: "I think so, but I can't remember when." LeMay talks in such a low voice that his staff say they have bent ears, none of them can remember hearing him raise his voice. This relaxed calmness was well illustrated one day during an air raid over Germany when a B-17 side gunner shouted over the intercom to Pilot LeMay: "Colonel, my guns won't work...
...Said LeMay impersonally: "You're going to look pretty silly when the 190s start coming...
After an Ohio boyhood (his father was an ironworker in Columbus) LeMay went to Ohio State University, was near to graduating when he quit to be a flying cadet in the Army. In due course he became a fighter pilot (later as an Army officer he went back to Ohio, got his degree). Once, when he was stationed at Self ridge Field, Mich., he almost quit the Air Corps to fly trimotored planes for Henry Ford. But he stuck and studied, and by 1937 he was recognized as one of the Corps's ablest celestial navigators. This...
...LeMay's fame as a combat leader began after he took the 305th Bombardment Group to England in 1942. In the early bombing of Europe, U.S. airmen were often less than successful and Colonel LeMay perceived the reason: the bombers were taking evasive action in the face of heavy German ack-ack and fighter interception; pilots would shirk from holding their course the five or six minutes necessary to make good, sound bombing runs. LeMay announced that he would bomb the Brest submarine yards himself, and that he would hit the target...
With cold courage LeMay held the course seven minutes, although planes around him were going down and his own plane was hit by flak. Upon landing he posted a new order, ruthless but necessary: no more evasive action over the targets. ("Having paid the price of admission to get over the target, we've got to get the benefits.") His men saw the casualty list go up, tagged the skipper "Old Ironpants." But LeMay got bombing results. He led many a flight himself, including the famed raid on the Messerschmitt plant at Regensburg in August...