The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara Page #5

after eight or nine months.

I proposed and she accepted.

She went with her aunt and her mother

on a trip across the country.

She telegraphed me,

' Must order engraved invitations...

...to include your middle name,

what is it?'

I wired back,

' My middle name is Strange.'

She said,

' I know it's strange, but what is it?'

Well, I mean, it is Strange.

It's Robert Strange McNamara.

And it was a marriage made in heaven.

At the end of a year,

we had our first child.

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

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