Curtis LeMay Quotes

General Curtis LeMay, commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command many years ago, used to insist that all his subordinates think positively. One day a colonel ran into General LeMay's office and shouted, "General, we have an insurmountable problem!"

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

You know the difference between a politician and a statesman? Here is the LeMay definition: a politician is a high-profile hooker looking for money to fund a campaign so that he can be in position to be owned by a political party, doing their bidding like a slave. Johnson fit that category. A statesman is a politician whose allegiance is only to their nation, and who, despite the feelings of others, does what he believes in his gut is in the best interest of his country, politics be damned. That even means doing something that may cost him his career, but he takes the moral high ground as he sees it, to do what must be done. That was Churchill. That's the difference. Ronald Reagan is a statesman, and make a note of it- we may not have any more in the future. They are a damned dying breed. That also applies to military commanders. You can have a charismatic, friendly, and amiable type of leader, but that is a difficult position to hold when you have to maintain discipline. It can be done, but it is hard. Then there is the hard-ass, no-holds-barred, get-it-fucking-done leader who pushes his men and expects ever-better results afterward. The easygoing leader may be liked more by his men, but the hard-ass will sure as shit have their attention, and if she shares the dangers with them, he will have their respect. Respect is everything.

Point is, the person in public life is bound to receive a lot of half-witted criticism. He's a natural-born target for it. It is unnecessary to go to any extraordinary lengths to maintain a picture of lily-white purity and innocence. If you let things like that worry you, very soon you run out of worrying time. There are too many real problems up there on the board. Whatever you do, somebody's going to criticize you. Forget criticism.

The German people themselves were historically responsible for the Nazi hierarchy and the Nazi war machine. No little band of hand-picked zealots alone could have wrought such a fantastic massacre. It had to be done with people. It was done with and by the German people. We can look back and salute a comparative handful of clear-minded and courageous Teutonic humans who were tortured out of existence by the Schutzstaffel or who decayed in concentration camps. But they were a distinct minority. The bulk of the German population was behind Hitler, or pretended to be. The bulk of the population applauded him, sustained him, or (in the less evil instances) stood idly by, or turned their backs on the whole thing.

Today we hear much discussion about "overkill." The people who are talking "overkill" knowingly or unknowingly support the adoption of a minimum-deterrence strategy. In advocating that strategy, they are addressing the wrong problem. Instead of belaboring our ability to destroy the population of an aggressor nation, they should consider what we require to save American lives and property by preventing war, or by gaining a decision as quickly as possible if war occurs. That is the proper and traditional task of the United States armed forces. The counterforce strategy which we are pursuing and analyzing today provides our best prospect for success in that task.

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.

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.

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?

Again they thought of those pictures of the embers of Japan, the black stuff hanging around on bulletin boards. I guess intermingled with that was the thought, "How soon can we go home?" Volunteers always think that in a war, and mainly ours was a volunteer or a drafted force, as we all know. You can't blame them for thinking that. You can thank them for working like demons, which is what they did.

I hope that the United States of America has not yet passed the peak of honor and beauty, and that our people can still sustain certain simple philosophies at which some miserable souls feel it incumbent to sneer. I refer to some of the Psalms, and to the Gettysburg Address, and the Scout Oath. I refer to the Lord's Prayer, and to that other oath which a man must take when he stands with hand uplifted, and swears that he will defend his Country.
None of those words described, or the beliefs behind them, can be sung to modern dance music. But they are there, like rocks and oaks, structurally sound and proven. They are more than rocks and oaks; they are the wing and the prayer of the future.
Whether we venture into realms of Space in our latest vehicles, or whether we are concerned principally with overhauling our engines and loading our ordinance here on the ground, we will still be part of a vast proud mechanism which must function cleanly if it is to function at all.
Crank her up. Let's go.

If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.

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.

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

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.