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| General Curtis LeMay - A. Y. Owen |
I'm reading Command and Control by Eric Schlosser. Around page 90 he starts talking about Curtis LeMay. Here's a couple of quotes:
- "I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people and when you kill enough of them, they stop fighting."
- "We scorched and boiled and baked more people in Tokyo than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
I knew the our firebombing raid on Tokyo near the end of WW2 killed a large number of people, but I had not heard it compared to the death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
LeMay organized the attack on Tokyo, ran the Berlin airlift and became the head of the Strategic Air Command. My mother called him 'Bomber LeMay'. I don't think she liked him. He probably took the nickname as a complement.
LeMay suffered from Bell's palsy, "a condition that causes a temporary weakness or paralysis of the muscles in the face. It can occur when the nerve that controls your facial muscles becomes inflamed, swollen, or compressed. The condition causes one side of your face to droop or become stiff."
LeMay was like Patton, hell bent for leather you want him on your side in a war, but when the war is over lock him up where he can't talk to the press.
ReplyDeleteMore people died by fire in the first Tokyo raid than at any other time in history.
ReplyDeleteCurtis LeMay was born on November 15, 1906, in Columbus, Ohio. He attended The Ohio State University and earned a Bachelor of Civil Engineering in 1928. His picture hangs on the wall in the Civil, Environmental and Geodetic Engineering Department in Hitchcock Hall at The Ohio State University. The great majority of students and many younger faculty don't recognize him. And nowadays, if they do, they likely despise him.
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