to tel the truth, I don’t know – haven’t heard about them. But, if true, they appear to be attempts at recon, not events designed to provoke a hostile response and to actuivelt plunge us into war, which was Ripper’s action, and which LeMay seems to have avoided, even when he thought such war desirable.
I’m not sure offhand about the 1949 story, but the idea that LeMay was using reconnaissance flights to try to provoke the Soviets into a nuclear exchange in the 1950s has become fairly well accepted as a possibility. To cite the secondary source you’ve already nodded towards, see Rhodes’s Dark Sun (Simon & Schuster, 1995), p564-6.
Didn’t SAC (under Gen. Lemay) fly bombers over the Artic (close to Soviet airspace) in the 1950’s? Quite a few aircrews were lost on these missions 9which were attempst to probe the Soviet air defenses). Lemay was a man who thought wars could be won by bombing. But as for being a nutbag, I think that’s never ben proven.
One of the most interesting characters of the 20th century, for sure. References to/caricatures of him have appeared in several movies over the years. One could argue that both Gregory Peck’s General Savage in Twelve O’ Clock High and Clark Gable’s General Dennis in Command Decision are based on LeMay, as is Frank Lovejoy’s General Hawkes in Strategic Air Command.
LeMay was not much concerned about enemy civilian casualties, either in WW II or afterwards. He took the Sherman-like attitude that war is hell, and that winning and winning quick was the only way to go.
Richard Rhodes talks about him at length in both The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun. From those books and from other information, I conclude that LeMay was profoundly affected by the Pearl Harbor attack, the Air Forces’ lack of readiness at the beginning of the war, and the high loss rate during the first months of the European strategic bombing campaign.
As a result, he was fiercely determined to have the best equipment and the most highly-trained and motivated people, and to use them first to defeat any potential threat. Rhodes quotes him repeatedly saying that the US atomic arsenal was a “wasting resource”; it accomplished nothing if it wasn’t used and actually decreased in value the longer it sat while the USSR developed its own arsenal.
He apparently never realized that the threat of nuclear war would be enough to both sides from striking. He also saw wars as total victories or total defeats. That too was a very WW II attitude.
I don’t excuse his attitudes at all. Thankfully he was not President during the Cuban Missile Crisis, nor was he able to convince Kennedy to attack the USSR. I just note that his bloodthirsty reputation has an explanation behind it.
As was Patton. One can only wonder what the world would be like today if he had been able to sell Ike on the concept of driving straight through Berlin into Moscow.
The sense that I get from here is that the flights were authorised. Surveillance overflights were standard practice regarding Cuba, in fact, Major Rudolph was one of a pair of USAF pilots whose Cuba overflights discovered and confirmed the Soviet missiles in the first place.
The Cold War practice of probing the other side’s airspace was practiced by both sides. LeMay was not acting in an unauthorised manner. Having said that, the civilian leadership wanted enough room for plausible deniability. PD failed miserably during Eisenhower’s term when Powers crashed in the USSR during a CIA overflight…
An ex-SAC guy once told me “The Russians may not be intimidated by our President, but they are intimidated by SAC.” LeMay deserves the credit for making SAC a credible deterrent. He knew that they had to be ready to execute today, on a moment’s notice.
And to prove that, when he first took over, he ordered an mock bombing raid against Dayton, Ohio… over 50% of the bombs missed their targets by over 1 mile. General Curtis Lemay - father of the Strategic Air Command