Curtis LeMay

General Curtis Emerson LeMay (November 15, 1906 – October 1, 1990) was a United States Air Force general who served as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force from 1961 to 1965, having previously commanded Strategic Air Command (SAC) from 1948 to 1957 and directed the strategic bombing of Japan in the closing months of World War II. LeMay is cited in UFO research for his alleged control of Roswell-era crash materials and for his reported response to Senator Barry Goldwater's request to visit the "blue room" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — reputedly a storage location for recovered craft — in which LeMay is said to have refused flatly and threatened court-martial if Goldwater ever raised the subject again.

Early life and education

LeMay was born on November 15, 1906, in Columbus, Ohio, to Erving Edwin LeMay, an itinerant ironworker and handyman, and Arizona Dove (Carpenter) LeMay. His ancestry was predominantly English with distant French Huguenot roots. The family relocated repeatedly in search of work, moving through Montana and California before returning to Columbus. He attended Columbus South High School and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Ohio State University, where he joined the National Society of Pershing Rifles and the Theta Tau professional engineering fraternity.

LeMay enrolled in Army ROTC at Ohio State in September 1924 and enlisted in the Army Air Corps as an aviation cadet in September 1928. He received a second lieutenant's commission in the Air Corps Reserve on October 12, 1929, and a regular commission in the United States Army Air Corps on February 1, 1930. He completed flight training at Norton Field in Columbus in 1931–1932. On June 9, 1934, he married Helen Estelle Maitland.

Early military career

LeMay served initially as a pursuit pilot at Selfridge Field with the 27th Pursuit Squadron before transitioning to bombers in 1937. While stationed in Hawaii, he received specialized training in aerial navigation. In August 1937, acting as navigator under pilot Caleb V. Haynes aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress, he helped locate the battleship USS Utah during fleet exercises off California despite incorrect coordinates provided by the Navy. The bomber group was awarded the Mackay Trophy in 1939 for a goodwill flight to Buenos Aires in March 1938. In May 1938, LeMay navigated three B-17s 620 nautical miles into the Atlantic to intercept the Italian liner SS Rex, a demonstration of land-based airpower's reach. In 1940, he navigated Haynes on the prototype Boeing XB-15 on a survey flight over Panama and the Galapagos. By late 1940, he was operations officer of the 34th Bombardment Group at Westover Air Reserve Base.

LeMay's guiding principle was "You fight as you train" — a conviction that crews would perform under combat stress only through intense, repetitive preparation. Among troops, he acquired the nicknames "Old Iron Pants" and "The Big Cigar", the former a reference to his demanding standards and refusal to tolerate procedural failure.

World War II

European theatre

By December 1941 LeMay held the rank of major and commanded the newly formed 305th Bomb Group, equipped with B-17s. He deployed to England in October 1942 as part of the Eighth Air Force and led combat operations there until May 1943, contributing to the development of the combat box formation. In September 1943 he became the first commander of the 3rd Air Division. LeMay personally flew dangerous missions, including the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission of August 17, 1943, in which he led 146 B-17s to Regensburg beyond escort-fighter range, continuing on to bases in North Africa and losing 24 bombers.

Heavy losses on deep-penetration missions through autumn 1943 forced the Eighth Air Force to restrict operations to within escort-fighter range until the P-51 Mustang entered service in January 1944. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara later described LeMay as "the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war," while also characterizing him as "extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal"; McNamara recounted that upon learning of high abort rates LeMay issued an order placing himself in the lead aircraft of every mission, warning that any crew that aborted without going over the target would be court-martialed. The abort rate dropped overnight.

Bombing of Japan

In August 1944 LeMay transferred to the China-Burma-India Theater, commanding first the XX Bomber Command and then the XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas. In January 1945 he relieved Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell and assumed command of strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands. After concluding that European-developed high-altitude precision techniques were unsuited to Japanese weather, jet stream conditions and concealed industrial dispersal, LeMay shifted tactics to low-altitude nighttime incendiary attacks on Japan's largely wooden cities.

On the night of March 9–10, 1945, Operation Meetinghouse — the firebombing of Tokyo — became the single most destructive bombing raid of the war. LeMay ordered defensive guns removed from 325 B-29s, loaded them with M-47 incendiary clusters, magnesium bombs, white phosphorus and napalm, and sent the stream in at 5,000–9,000 feet. Pathfinders marked targets with flaming "X" patterns after midnight; over the following three hours the main force dropped 1,665 tons of incendiaries, killed approximately 100,000 civilians, destroyed 250,000 buildings and burned out 16 square miles of the city. LeMay later described the mission by saying "the US had finally stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile."

Between March and August 1945, strategic bombing directed by LeMay is estimated to have killed over 500,000 Japanese civilians and left five million homeless; the United States Strategic Bombing Survey placed the figure at 220,000 dead. Some 40% of the built-up areas of 66 Japanese cities were destroyed. LeMay simultaneously oversaw Operation Starvation, an aerial mining campaign against Japanese waterways that supplemented the Allied submarine blockade and that postwar analysts concluded could have defeated Japan independently had it begun earlier. LeMay later remarked, "I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal" — a comment recounted by Robert McNamara in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War.

In September 1945, LeMay piloted one of three specially modified B-29s flying from Japan to the United States, setting several records including greatest USAAF takeoff weight and longest USAAF non-stop flight; the War Department instructed him to land in Chicago with the accompanying aircraft rather than continue to Washington, D.C.

Cold War

Berlin Airlift

After the war LeMay briefly served at the Pentagon as deputy chief of Air Staff for Research and Development. In 1947 he returned to Europe as commander of United States Air Forces in Europe. When the Berlin Blockade began in June 1948, General Lucius D. Clay contacted LeMay, who initiated the airlift using Douglas C-54 Skymasters with a 10-ton cargo capacity each. LeMay, recognizing that the logistical scale required specialist expertise, brought in Lieutenant General William H. Tunner to take over operations. Over eleven months, 213,000 flights by aircraft from six countries delivered 1.7 million tons of food and fuel to West Berlin, averaging 5,000 tons a day by late 1948 and ultimately forcing the Soviet Union to reopen land corridors.

Strategic Air Command

In October 1948, LeMay returned to the United States to command Strategic Air Command (SAC) at Offutt Air Force Base, replacing General George Kenney. He found SAC understaffed, poorly trained, and weakly secured; a mock bombing exercise against Dayton, Ohio produced aim-point errors of a mile or more, and he famously remarked that not one crew in his entire command could do a professional job. He transformed SAC from a disorganized postwar holdover into a round-the-clock nuclear strike command with standardized procedures, global reach, and hair-trigger alert status, nicknamed "Old Iron Ass" for his demanding standards and refusal to tolerate procedural failure.

In November 1948, LeMay and Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg agreed that SAC's primary mission should be the delivery of 80% of the nation's atomic arsenal in a single strike. The first SAC Emergency War Plan, delivered by LeMay in March 1949, called for dropping 133 atomic bombs on 70 Soviet cities within thirty days. LeMay received his fourth star in 1951 at the age of 44, becoming the youngest four-star general in American service since Ulysses S. Grant; he remains the longest-serving person to hold that rank in American military history. In 1956–1957 he instituted 24-hour bomber-and-tanker alert exercises that kept a portion of SAC's force continuously airborne.

During his tenure LeMay's SAC also acquired a substantial role in America's alleged covert management of non-human materials. U.S. Army Sergeant Harry B. Cooper, father of researcher Tim Cooper, reportedly received a special citation from LeMay "for his work on the quote-unquote USAF UFO program," establishing a documentary paper trail that UAP researchers cite as linking LeMay to structured UFO-material management at the institutional level. Upon LeMay's departure from SAC in 1957, the command comprised 224,000 airmen, nearly 2,000 heavy bombers, and almost 800 tankers; his tenure over SAC was the longest American military command of any single organization in nearly a century.

Korean War

As SAC commander LeMay also participated in the Korean War (1950–1953) in support of United Nations Command forces. In a 1988 interview with U.S. Air Force historians he stated that he had, at the outset of the war, "slipped a message in 'under the carpet' in the Pentagon that we ought to turn SAC loose with some incendiaries on some North Korean towns," adding that the campaign eventually "burned down every town in North Korea anyway" and killed roughly 20% of the Korean population. In Anthony B. Herbert's 1973 book Soldier, LeMay is quoted as saying that SAC "killed off over a million [civilian] Koreans and drove several million from their homes."

Roswell connection and alleged MJ-12 role

The 509th Bombardment Group, whose base was at Roswell Army Air Field, operated under SAC during LeMay's command, placing him at the apex of the institutional chain that managed the initial recovery associated with the 1947 Roswell UFO crash. According to material attributed to Gary McKinnon's computer intrusion into NASA and Pentagon systems, a list of alleged fleet-to-fleet transfers between non-Navy vessels included ships named the USSS LeMay and the USSS Hillenkoetter — the latter named for Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the first CIA director and a purported member of MJ-12. The naming of an alleged space-fleet vessel after LeMay is cited by exopolitics researchers as evidence of his inclusion in a second generation of MJ-12 principals.

Vice Chief and Chief of Staff of the Air Force (1957–1965)

LeMay served as Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force from July 1957 to 1961, then succeeded General Thomas D. White as the fifth Chief of Staff. His belief in the primacy of strategic air campaigns over tactical strikes and ground support became Air Force policy during his tenure. As chief of staff, LeMay clashed repeatedly with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Air Force Secretary Eugene Zuckert, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Maxwell D. Taylor. He described McNamara's "Whiz Kids" as "the most egotistical people I have ever seen in my whole life" who "had no faith in the military at all." LeMay was skeptical of ICBMs, calling ballistic missiles "toys", though he strongly supported military space programs for reconnaissance and electronic intelligence. He lost budget battles over the Skybolt ALBM and the North American XB-70 Valkyrie as a B-52 replacement, but largely succeeded in expanding Air Force budgets overall.

Cuban Missile Crisis

During the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, LeMay served on the EXCOMM together with Joint Chiefs Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer. He argued repeatedly for a full conventional strike on the Cuban missile sites and opposed the naval blockade that John F. Kennedy ultimately chose, a position that brought him into direct conflict with Kennedy and McNamara. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has observed that LeMay and Lemnitzer were among those pressing Kennedy toward direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union during the thirteen days of the crisis, in opposition to the diplomatic track the president eventually pursued. LeMay reportedly told Kennedy that the decision not to invade Cuba was "almost as bad as the appeasement at Munich" and "the greatest defeat in our history." Twenty-five years later, he maintained that a more aggressive line could have removed not only the missiles but the Communist government itself.

The Goldwater incident and the blue room

The most widely cited episode linking LeMay to alleged UFO crash materials is his exchange with Senator Barry Goldwater. Goldwater, himself a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, had heard from pilots and contacts that a secured room at Wright-Patterson AFB — reputedly designated the "blue room" — contained recovered craft or materials of unknown origin. He asked his friend LeMay — then Chief of Staff — to arrange access. In archival footage preserved in the documentary series Alien Disclosure and Area 51, Goldwater recounted the exchange in his own words: "I called Curtis LeMay and I said, General, I know we have a room at Wright Patterson where you put all this secret stuff. Can I go in there? I've never heard him get mad. But he got madder'n hell. Cussed me out, said, 'Don't ever ask me that question again.'"

Dr. Steven Greer reportedly heard a more detailed account directly from Goldwater at the senator's home in Paradise Valley, Arizona, with a witness present: LeMay "turned to him and said, 'God damn it, Barry, I can't even get into that area anymore, and if you ever ask me about this again I will see that you are court-martialed out of the Air Force.'" Greer asked Goldwater whether LeMay had been serious. Goldwater allegedly replied "he was serious as a heart attack and he never inquired about this again." David Grusch independently described the same exchange, noting that a video interview in which Goldwater recounted the LeMay interaction was publicly available: "General Goldwater is like, 'yeah, one day I called Curtis LeMay, who's a very famous Air Force general... and LeMay got madder than hell at me and told me never to ask about that again.'" Colonel Philip Corso's Art Bell interview corroborates the same account from the Corso side: "At one time, Barry Goldwater asked General LeMay about seeing the secret room, some secret room at Wright-Patt Air Force Base, and Goldwater actually cussed at him and said, never ask me about it again."

Vietnam War

LeMay's distaste for tactical aviation foreshadowed Air Force difficulties in Vietnam, where existing fighters and standard attack profiles proved vulnerable to North Vietnamese air defenses. He said "Flying fighters is fun; flying bombers is important" and advocated sustained strategic bombing of North Vietnamese cities, harbors, ports, and industrial targets — advice largely ignored in favor of the incremental Operation Rolling Thunder interdiction campaign. In his 1965 autobiography Mission with LeMay, co-written with MacKinlay Kantor, LeMay was quoted as demanding that North Vietnam "draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age." He later rejected the quotation in a Washington Post interview: "I never said we should bomb them back to the Stone Age. I said we had the capability to do it. I want to save lives on both sides." Some historians have argued that LeMay's theories were later vindicated by President Richard Nixon's Operation Linebacker II in December 1972, which used B-52s against previously untouched targets in Hanoi and Haiphong and preceded the Paris Peace Accords.

1968 vice-presidential candidacy

Owing to unrelenting opposition to Johnson-administration Vietnam policy and widely perceived hostility from McNamara, LeMay was effectively forced into retirement on February 1, 1965. He moved to California and declined a conservative approach to challenge the moderate Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel in 1968. For the 1968 presidential election, LeMay initially supported Richard Nixon and twice declined requests from former Alabama governor George Wallace to join his newly formed American Independent Party, believing a third-party candidacy might harm Nixon. (By coincidence, Wallace had served as a sergeant in a LeMay-commanded World War II unit before his transfer to the 477th Bombardment Group.)

LeMay ultimately agreed to become Wallace's running mate. His candidacy was complicated by several campaign-event remarks speculating about the utility of nuclear weapons — including, at the press conference introducing him as running mate, a statement that many situations made nuclear weapons efficient and that nuclear detonations could produce positive environmental outcomes. LeMay's argument that the American public harbored a nuclear "phobia" failed to alter public perception of the ticket. The Wallace–LeMay ticket received 13.5% of the popular vote and carried five southern states for 46 electoral votes, the last significant third-party showing in American presidential history.

Later life and death

LeMay lived in Newport Beach, California from 1969 onward, and in 1989 moved to Air Force Village West, a retirement community for former Air Force officers near March Air Force Base in Riverside. He died from complications of a heart attack at the 22nd Strategic Hospital on March Air Force Base on October 1, 1990, and is buried at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His wife Helen died in 1992; they had one daughter, Patricia Jane ("Janie") LeMay Lodge.

Other activities

LeMay was an active amateur radio operator, using the successive call signs K0GRL, K4FRA and W6EZV while stationed at Offutt, Washington, D.C. and in California retirement; K0GRL is retained by the SAC Memorial Amateur Radio Club. Working with Arthur A. Collins of Collins Radio and Heathkit engineers, LeMay established single-sideband as the SAC bomber radio standard in 1957. He was a sports-car enthusiast who owned an Allard J2 and opened SAC base facilities to the Sports Car Club of America, hosting the SCCA National Sports Car Championship at Offutt in 1953 — a practice Congress investigated and ended in 1954. He received the SCCA's Woolf Barnato Award in 1954 and was inducted into the Nebraska Auto Racing Hall of Fame (2004) and the SCCA Hall of Fame (2007). In 1964, with generals Paul Tibbets and Olbert Lassiter, attorney Bruce Sundlun, and entertainers James Stewart and Arthur Godfrey, LeMay was a founding board member of Executive Jet Aviation, the world's first private business-jet charter and management company. He was a promoter of judo's postwar revival, having made judo training a routine Air Force duty in occupied Japan under Douglas MacArthur, and was awarded a shihan license for his support of the discipline.

Honors and legacy

LeMay received two badges and thirty-two different medals and decorations from thirteen countries, including the Distinguished Service Cross, Army Distinguished Service Medal with two oak-leaf clusters, Silver Star, Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak-leaf clusters, Air Medal with four oak-leaf clusters, the French Légion d'honneur (Commander), and the Japanese Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (First Class), conferred on December 7, 1964. He was inducted into the International Air & Space Hall of Fame at the San Diego Air & Space Museum in 1977 and named class exemplar for the United States Air Force Academy class of 2013. The Air Force awards the annual General Curtis E. LeMay Award to the best large-installation Force Support Squadron.

See also

• Crash retrieval
• 509th Bomb Group
• Blue Room (Wright-Patterson)

References