The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara Page #6

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.

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