I was wondering if someone could help me out with a Cold War historical tidbit that I may or may not be remembering right.
That is, I thought I remembered hearing or reading “somewhere” that, after the USSR tested it’s first A-Bomb in 1949, SAC head Curtis LeMay went to president Truman and advocated immediately attacking Russia, while we still had a nuclear advantage. (Truman, as I recall, didn’t think much of the scheme.)
So…did this really happen, or am I remembering a fever dream or an urban legend or something?
He said that all 177 abombs should be dropped in Russia.,hitting 70 different cities in 30 days. according to winkipedia. He pretty much wanted to bomb everybody and would have fit well in this administration.
If Sherman was the total warfare advocate for the US Civil War, then Curtis LeMay was cast in a similar vein. General LeMay advocated and executed the strategic bombing raids against Germany during WW II, and was an early advocate of a strong Air Force, in conventional terms and in nuclear terms.
His advocacy of using nukes in such a fashion wans’t unique: MacArthur advocated using nukes on the Korean/Chinese border…
A basic doctrine of US post-WW II strategy in balancing the Soviet threat was the leveraging of superior Red forces with nuclear deterrent. And it took awhile for the US to deemphasize the plans involving tactical nuclear munitions.
TROJAN (U.S.48) An early plan prepared by the United States Air Force for waging a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. TROJAN called for 133 bombs to hit seventy Soviet cities. This plan was later used as a basis for CHARIOTEER. Never executed. See DROPSHOT and FLEETWOOD.
DROPSHOT (U.S. 49) A 1949 American plan for war against the Soviet Union using nuclear weapons. This plan assumed such a war would begin with the forces available on 1 January, 1957; in many respects it was more an academic study than a contingency plan. The goal was to limit the spread of Soviet power beyond the Rhine. This plan was released in 1977 under the Freedom of Information Act. See TOTALITY.
FLEETWOOD (U.S. 48) A plan for an American nuclear attack on the Soviet Union prepared in response to the Berlin blockade which began in June, 1948. A variation of CHARIOTEER, this plan assumed a war would begin about 31 December 1948. The Soviet rail system was a prime target. While CHARIOTEER had many aspects of an academic study, FLEETWOOD was an actual contingency plan. Never executed.
Weird guy, Curtis LeMay. I’ve heard this about his wanting to bomb Russia. He also appaently wanted to nuke Cuba during the missile crisis in 1962.
But – and this is crucial – in neither case did he actually do these things. He obeyed the president, and didn’t try to manipulate things or exceed his authority in such a way as to precipitate his actions. Jack D. Ripper he was not.
From what Richard Rhodes has to say about him, he did an admirable job of “waking up” the crews and structure responsible for delivering the bombs, completely revamping their operations and makibng them more successful. Overall, LeMay was a definite plus.
LeMay’s plan made sense if you accepted the premise that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. I have the impression that Patton would have been happy to keep on advancing east until he reached Moscow.
In any case, I learned a lot from that book. For example these is a difference between a million-seller and a million in your cellar. The print run was about 3,000 and we moved about 2,500 of them. It almost paid my $3,000 advance.
He might have been satisfied to stop at the Soviet border, just kicking them out of Eastern Europe. He was a scholar of military history- he knew that the Russian steppe, while it might be a great playground for armor, is no place to spend a winter (ask Napolean and Hitler about that).
According to Robert McNamara, when Kennedy declared to his Cabinet that “We won…”, LeMay responded with “Won hell…we lost…we should go in and…wipe 'em out today.”
I think LeMay was supposed to be represented by Gen. Buck Turgidson–walking around with his binder marked “Megadeaths in Megatons” and talking about "rapidly approaching a moment of truth–not the latent homosexual/psychopath Gen. Ripper.
Analogous to Hyram Rickover and his effect on the Nuclear Navy, LeMay was responsible for not only shaping docterine but also overseeing technical policy regarding safety, handling, and deployment of nuclear weapons. As with Rickover, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t a cast-iron son of a bitch.
Yes and yes. Fortunately in the former case cooler heads prevailed, though LeMay was not alone in his thinking; the Herman Kahn camp at RAND were advocating various levels of “survivable” nuclear exchange through the mid-Sixties. Kahn makes many good points in his seminal (if widely reviled) book On Thermonuclear War, and his willingness to think rationally about “the unthinkable” offered up an alterantive perspective to both the pro- and anti-nuclear camps, but on the whole, I think we’re all better off for not having indulged in a nuclear exchange.
As for an extended European land war invasion into Soviet Russia, we can “what if?” that topic all day, but I’ll note that such invasions have never gone well for the offensive party. A stronger line against post-war Soviet expansion might have been a better policy than slicing up the continent, but a full-on invasion would have been a disaster, especially as the US was (at that point) more concerned about a continued front in the Pacific.
Here is a really interesting blog entry about Japan giving LeMay a prestigious medal. Yeah, you read that right – Japan. On, uh, December 7th – the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
Fascinating. Is there any info on the Russian war plans? Were they ever actually planning to invade Germany? From what I read, Kruschev was always bluffing-on the one hand, he made very bellicose speeches, but on the other, he was constantly worried that the U2 spy plane flights would show Russia to be weak.
Thank God we had cool heads (Eisenhower) in charge.
I shouldn’t have to point this out, but I will: when I said that LeMay wasn’t Jack D. Ripper I was specifically noting that he did not attempt to set up a situation where he could nuke the enemy, as Ripper did, and as LeMay was arguably in a very good position to do. Whether he was the model Kubrick and Sothern et al. had in mind when they created their characters is irrelevant.
Well, Cal. there is the matter of LeMay’s unauthorized U2 flights over Cuba during the Missile Crisis, which resulted in the loss of a plane and pilot. And didn’t he also conduct highly provocative recon flights over the Soviet Union from Finland during the 1950’s without authorization as well?