What I really want to dwell on here, though, is a book that LeMay published in 1965, co-written with MacKinlay Kantor, called Mission with LeMay: My Story. It’s billed as a memoir, but that feels insufficient as a description. It is more like a drunken oral history, with almost no attempt by LeMay (or Kantor) to make coherent its stream of consciousness rambling.
Here’s how he talks about the firebombing of Tokyo, for example:
…Again it’s an April morning twenty-nine months later (strangely enough. Let the numerologists look into this one: instead of B-17’s we are using B-29’s). The place is the limestone-and-coral isle of Guam instead of a tired bomber base on the Bedfordshire-Northants border in England. And I’ve been pounding that floor until my feet are ready to crack at the ankles. But good news is beginning to mount up. ...Here comes Tommy Power — he’s stooged around for two hours after completing his bomb run, taking pictures of the destruction of Tokyo. We will examine those photos while they’re still wet. We have never seriously wounded the largest city in the world before, but this time—In a few hours, and operating from the seemingly suicidal altitude of only five to seven thousand feet, we have burnt the belly out of Tokyo. We know that we have shortened the war by many months. Each of those fourteen crews who went down on that mission have saved American lives, perhaps by the scores of thousands. We don’t pause to shed any tears for uncounted hordes of Japanese who lie charred in that acrid-smelling rubble. The smell of Pearl Harbor fires is too persistent in our own nostrils.
I want to emphasize that I have not edited any of the above whatsoever. The ellipses, the dangling hyphens, the strange punctuation, that is all directly from the original. Just bizarre.
If you pick up Mission to LeMay and open it to almost any page, you find just unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness madness. William Burroughs couldn’t do better. Here’s LeMay talking about the nuclear firepower of a Convair B-58 “Hustler” bomber (again, unedited):
And in that beautiful devilish pod underneath, the baby of the fuselage—half-size, but still of the same shape and sharpness, clinging as a fierce child against its mother’s belly — the B-58 carries all the conventional bomb explosive force of World War II and everything which came before. A single B-58 can do that.
