The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara Page #3

The delivery costs were $100,

and we paid that $10 a month.

Those were some of the happiest

days of our lives.

And then the war came.

I'd been promoted to assistant professor.

I was the youngest at Harvard.

And on a salary, by the way,

of $4000 a year.

Harvard Business School's market was drying up.

The males were being drafted or volunteering.

So the dean, being farsighted,

brought back a government contract...

...to establish an officer candidate

school for what was called...

...Statistical Control in the Air Force.

We said, ' Look, we're not gonna

take anybody you send up here.

We're gonna select the people.'

You have a punch card for every human being...

...brought into the Air Corps.

We're gonna run those punch cards

through the IBM sorting machines...

...and we're gonna sort on age,

education, accomplishment...

...grades, et cetera.

We were looking for the best and the brightest.

The best brains,

the greatest capacity to lead...

...the best judgment.

The U.S. Was just beginning to bomb.

We were bombing by daylight.

The loss rate was very, very high.

So they commissioned a study.

And what did we find?

We found the abort rate was 20 percent.

Twenty percent of the planes leaving England...

...to bomb Germany turned around

before they got to the target.

That was a hell of a mess.

We lost 20 percent of our capability.

I think it was called Form 1 -A...

...or something like that was a mission report.

And if you aborted a mission,

you had to write down why.

So we get all these things

and we analyse them...

...and we finally concluded:

It was baloney.

They were aborting out of fear.

Because the loss rate

was four percent per sortie.

The combat tour was 25 sorties.

It didn't mean 100 percent would die...

...but a lot of them were gonna be

killed. They knew that...

...and they found reasons

to not go over the target.

So we reported this.

One of the commanders was Curtis LeMay.

Colonel in command of a B-24 group.

He was the finest combat commander

of any service I came across in war.

But he was extraordinarily belligerent,

many thought brutal.

He got the report.

He issued an order.

He said, ' I will be in the

lead plane on every mission.

Any plane that takes off

will go over the target...

...or the crew will be court-martialed.'

The abort rate dropped overnight.

Now, that's the kind of a commander he was.

The U.S. Air Force had a new

airplane, named the B-29.

The B-17 s and B-24s in Europe

bombed from 15, 16,000 feet.

The problem was that they

were subject to antiaircraft fire...

...and to fighter aircraft.

To relieve that, this B-29

was being developed...

...that bombed from high altitude...

...and it was thought we could destroy

targets more efficiently and effectively.

I was brought back from the 8th Air Force...

...and assigned to the first B-29s,

the 58th Bomb Wing.

We had to fly those planes from

the bases in Kansas to India.

Then we had to fly fuel

over the hump into China.

The airfields were built with Chinese labour.

It was an insane operation.

I can still remember them

hauling these huge rollers...

...to crush the stone and make them flat.

Somebody would slip,

the roller would roll over him...

... everybody would laugh and go on.

We were supposed to take these B-29s...

There were no tanker aircraft there.

We were to fill them with fuel...

...fly from India to Chengdu,

offload the fuel, fly back to India...

...make enough missions

to build up fuel in Chengdu...

...fly to Yawata, Japan, bomb

the steel mills and go back to India.

We had so little training on this

problem of maximizing efficiency...

...we actually found, to get

some of the B-29s back...

...instead of offloading fuel,

they had to take it on.

To make a long story short,

it wasn't worth a damn.

And it was LeMay who really came to

that conclusion and led the chiefs...

...to move the whole thing to the

Marianas, which devastated Japan.

LeMay was focused on only one thing:

Target destruction.

Most Air Force generals can say

how many planes they had...

...how many tons of bombs they

dropped, or whatever it was.

But he was the only person that I knew...

...in the senior command in the

Air Force who focused solely...

...on the loss of his crews

per unit of target destruction.

I was on the island of Guam,

in his command, in March of 1945.

In that single night,

we burned to death...

...100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo.

Men, women and children.

Were you aware this was going to happen?

Well, I was...

...part of a mechanism that,

in a sense, recommended it.

I analysed bombing operations,

and how to make them more efficient.

I.e., not more efficient in the sense of

killing more...

...but more efficient

in weakening the adversary.

I wrote one report analysing...

...the efficiency of the B-29 operations.

The B-29 could get above the fighter

aircraft and above the air defense...

...so the loss rate would be much less.

The problem was, the accuracy

was also much less.

Now, I don't want to suggest

that it was my report...

...that led to...

I'll call it the firebombing.

It isn't that I'm absolving myself

of blame for the firebombing.

I don't want to suggest that it was I...

...that put in LeMay's mind...

...that his operations

were totally inefficient...

...and had to be drastically changed.

But, anyhow, that's what he did.

He took the B-29s down to 5000 feet...

...and he decided to bomb with firebombs.

I participated in the interrogation...

...of the B-29 bomber crews

that came back that night.

A room full of crewmen

and intelligence interrogators.

A captain got up,

a young captain said:

'Goddamn it, I'd like to know who

the son of a b*tch was...

...that took this magnificent airplane,

designed to bomb from 23,000 feet...

...and he took it down to 5000 feet,

and I lost my wingman.

He was shot and killed.'

LeMay spoke in monosyllables.

I never heard him say...

...more than two words in sequence.

It was basically, 'Yes,' ' No,' 'Yep'...

...'That's all,' or ' Hell with it.'

That was all he said.

And LeMay was totally intolerant of criticism.

He never engaged in discussion with anybody.

He stood up.

'Why are we here?

Why are we here?

You lost your wingman.

It hurts me as much as...

...it does you.

I sent him there.

And I've been there,

I know what it is.

But you lost one wingman...

...and we destroyed Tokyo.'

Fifty square miles of Tokyo were burned.

Tokyo was a wooden city,

and when we dropped firebombs...

...it just burned it.

The choice of incendiary bombs...

... where did that come from?

I think the issue...

...is not so much incendiary bombs.

I think the issue is...

...in order to win, should you kill

By firebombing or any other way?

LeMay's answer would be,

clearly, 'Yes.'

' McNamara, do you mean to say...

...that instead of killing 100,000...

...burning to death 100,000 Japanese

civilians in that one night...

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