Eric Schlosser - Command and Control

On November 23, 1942, during the final approach to railway yards and submarine pens in Saint-Nazaire, France, the B-17s of LeMay’s bombardment group flew straight and level for a full seven minutes. None was shot down by antiaircraft fire. Bombing accuracy was greatly improved. And within weeks the tactics that LeMay had adopted for his first combat mission became the standard operating procedure for every American bomber crew in Europe.

LeMay’s greatest strength as a commander wasn’t a subtle grasp of the historical, political, or psychological aspects of an enemy. It was his focus on the interplay between men and machines — a vision of war designed by an engineer. He also cared deeply about the safety and morale of his men. Strategic bombing required a particular form of courage. Unlike fighter pilots, who flew alone, free to roam the skies in pursuit of targets, bomber crews had to work closely with one another, follow a designated route, and stay in formation. The seven minutes from the initial aiming point to the target could induce feelings of helplessness and sheer terror, as flak exploded around the plane and enemy fighters tried to shoot it down. The death rate among American bomber crews was extraordinarily high: more than half would be killed in action before completing their tour of duty.

Curtis LeMay was hardly warm and cuddly. He was gruff, blunt, sarcastic, socially awkward, a man of few words, with a permanent frown left by a case of Bell’s palsy and an unlit cigar perpetually stuck in his mouth. But he earned the deep loyalty of his men by refusing to tolerate incompetence and by doing everything possible to keep them alive. Instead of asking for bravery, he displayed it, flying the lead plane on some of the most dangerous missions of the war, like an old-fashioned cavalry officer leading the charge.

At the age of thirty-six, LeMay became the youngest general in the Army. During the summer of 1944, he was transferred from Europe to help fight Japan. Although incendiaries had been used on a small scale, it was LeMay who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo. “Japan would burn if we could get fire on it,” one of his deputies explained.

LeMay was involved in almost every detail of the plan, from selecting the mix of bombs — magnesium for high temperatures, napalm for splatter — to choosing a bomb pattern that could start a firestorm. He hoped that the firebombing would break the will of the Japanese people, avoid an American invasion, end the war quickly, and save American lives. The massive civilian casualties were unfortunate, LeMay thought, but prolonging the war would cause even more. The destruction of Japanese cities, one after another, fit perfectly with his philosophy on the use of military force. “I’ll tell you what war is about,” LeMay once said. “You’ve got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.”

LeMay’s managerial and logistical skills made him an ideal candidate to head the Strategic Air Command. His most recent assignment had been to organize the Berlin airlift. But he also knew a lot about the atomic bomb. He’d been involved with the preparations to drop Little Boy and Fat Man, later served as a military adviser to the Manhattan Project, supervised the aircraft during the atomic test at the Bikini atoll — and, as deputy chief of staff for research and development at the Air Force, helped to formulate the atomic blitz. LeMay recognized the destructive power of nuclear weapons but didn’t feel the least bit intimidated by them. “We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo,” he later recalled, “than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.” And he didn’t lose any sleep over the morality of Truman’s decision. Killing was killing, whether you did it with a rock, a rifle, or an atom bomb. LeMay’s appointment to run SAC sent a clear message to the Soviets: if necessary, the United States would not hesitate to fight a nuclear war.

After arriving at SAC headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska, during the fall of 1948, LeMay was angered by what he found. Bomber crews had no idea what their targets would be, if war came. Navigators lacked up-to-date maps, and pilots rarely consulted checklists before takeoff. As an exercise, LeMay ordered every SAC crew in the country to stage a mock attack on Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, at night, from high altitude, under heavy cloud cover, conditions similar to those they might encounter over the Soviet Union. Many of the planes didn’t get anywhere near Ohio — and not a single one hit the target. The bombardiers who did simulate the dropping of an atomic bomb, aiming their radar at reflectors on the ground, missed Wright Field by an average of two miles. LeMay called it “about the darkest night in American military aviation history.”

The top officers at SAC were let go, and LeMay replaced them with veterans of his bombing campaigns in Germany and Japan. He hoped to create a similar esprit de corps. Promotions weren’t given to individuals, but to an entire crew, sometimes on the spot. And when one person screwed up, the rest of the crew also paid the price. Officers lost their jobs because of accidents and honest mistakes. “I can’t afford to differentiate between the incompetent and the unfortunate,” LeMay explained. “Standardization” became the watchword at SAC, repeated like a mantra and ruthlessly pursued, with manuals and checklists and numeric measures of success created for every job. Team players were rewarded, iconoclasts and prima donnas encouraged to go elsewhere. LeMay wanted SAC to function as smoothly as the intricate machinery of a modern bomber. “Every man a coupling or a tube; every organization a rampart of transistors, battery of condensers,” he wrote in his memoir. “All rubbed up, no corrosion. Alert.”

Within hours of the Japanese surrender, LeMay had flown low over cities that his planes destroyed. The experience confirmed his belief that America needed an Air Force so overwhelmingly powerful that no enemy would ever dare to launch a surprise attack. After Pearl Harbor it had taken years for the United States to mobilize fully for war. Nuclear weapons eliminated that option. If a counterattack couldn’t be swift, it might never occur. LeMay wanted everyone at SAC to feel a strong sense of urgency, to be ready for war not next week or tomorrow but at any moment — to feel “we are at war now.” His goal was to build a Strategic Air Command that could strike the Soviet Union with planes based in the United States and deliver every nuclear weapon at once. SAC bomber crews constantly trained and prepared for that all-out assault. They staged mock attacks on every city in the United States with a population larger than twenty-five thousand, practicing to drop atomic bombs on urban targets in the middle of the night. San Francisco was bombed more than six hundred times within a month.

One of LeMay’s greatest concerns was the command and control of nuclear weapons — the system of rules and procedures that guided his men, the network of radars and sensors and communications lines that allowed information to travel back and forth between headquarters and the field, the mechanisms that prevented accidental detonations and permitted deliberate ones, all of it designed to make sure that orders could be properly given, received, and carried out. To retaliate against a surprise attack, you needed to know that one had been launched. You needed to share that news with your own forces and ensure they could immediately respond. Command and control had always been a crucial element in warfare. But in a nuclear war, where decisions might have to be made within minutes and weapons could destroy cities in an instant, the reliability of these administrative systems could be the difference between victory and annihilation. A breakdown in command and control could make it impossible to launch a nuclear attack — or could order one by mistake.