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Curtis LeMay Quotes

Curtis Emerson LeMay was a general in the United States Air Force. LeMay is credited with designing and implementing an effective, but also controversial, systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force from 1961 to 1965.

LeMay joined the United States Army Air Corps while studying civil engineering at Ohio State University. He had risen to the rank of major by the time of the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbor. He commanded the 305th Operations Group from October 1942 until September 1943, and the 3rd Air Division in the European theatre of World War II until August 1944, when he was transferred to the China Burma India Theater. He was then placed in command of strategic bombing operations against Japan, planning and executing a massive fire bombing campaign against Japanese cities and Operation Starvation, a crippling minelaying campaign in Japan's internal waterways.

After the war, he was assigned to command USAF Europe and coordinated the Berlin airlift. He served as commander of the Strategic Air Command from 1948 to 1957, where he presided over the transition to an all-jet aircraft force that focused on the deployment of nuclear weapons. As Chief of Staff of the Air Force, he called for the bombing of Cuban missile sites during the Cuban Missile Crisis and sought a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

After retiring from the Air Force in 1965, LeMay agreed to serve as pro-segregation Democratic Governor George Wallace's running mate in the 1968 United States presidential election. The ticket won 13.5% of the popular vote, a strong tally for a third party campaign, but the Wallace campaign came to see LeMay as a liability. After the election, LeMay retired to his Newport Beach, California, home and died in 1990. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. November 1906 – 1. October 1990
Curtis LeMay photo
Curtis LeMay: 13 quotes2 likes

Famous Curtis LeMay Quotes

“There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”

Curtis LeMay

Sherry, Michael (September 10, 1989). <i>The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon</i>, p. 287 (from "LeMay's interview with Sherry," interview "after the war," p. 408 n. 108). Yale University Press. ISBN-13: 978-0300044140.

“My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces.”

Curtis LeMay

Mission With LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 565. In an interview two years after the publication of this book, General LeMay said, "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"; reported in The Washington Post (October 4, 1968), p. A8. Many years later LeMay would claim that this was his ghost writer's overwriting.

“China has The Bomb. […] Sometime in the future--25, 50, 75 years hence--what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too. That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now.”

Curtis LeMay

Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 561.

“Apply whatever force it is necessary to employ, to stop things quickly. The main thing is stop it. The quicker you stop it, the more lives you save.”

Curtis LeMay

Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 565.

“I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting.”

Curtis LeMay

Quoted by Richard Rhodes in Wikipedia: The Making of the Atomic Bomb

“We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?”

Curtis LeMay

Strategic Air Warfare: An Interview with Generals (1988), p. 88.

“Actually, I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more. if you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle.”

Curtis LeMay

Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 382.

“…Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.”

Curtis LeMay

Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 560-561.

“Actually, I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more.”

Curtis LeMay

if you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle.
Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 382.

Curtis LeMay Quotes about war

“I'd like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States. That doesn't mean launching an immediate preventive war…”

Curtis LeMay

Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965), p. 559.

“As far as casualties were concerned I think there were more casualties in the first attack on Tokyo with incendiaries than there were with the first use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The fact that it's done instantaneously, maybe that's more humane than incendiary attacks, if you can call any war act humane. I don't, particularly, so to me there wasn't much difference. A weapon is a weapon and it really doesn't make much difference how you kill a man. If you have to kill him, well, that's the evil to start with and how you do it becomes pretty secondary. I think your choice should be which weapon is the most efficient and most likely to get the whole mess over with as early as possible.”

Curtis LeMay

The World at War: the Landmark Oral History from the Classic TV Series, p. 574

“Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time… I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal…. Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.”

Curtis LeMay

On the morality of the firebombing campaign http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/peopleevents/pandeAMEX61.html)

“We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?”

Curtis LeMay

From his autobiography, also requoted in Rhodes, 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', p. 596

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