You Might Want to Know: Butler III--The Mission of the "Strategic Air Command"
General George Lee Butler became the Commander in Chief of the Strategic Air Command in 1991. What, exactly, was its mission?
SAC had been created in 1946 as part of the big reorganization of the forces that was undertaken after World War II. General Curtis LeMay (1906-1990), the second Commander in Chief of SAC, in that post from 1948 to 1957, is universally acknowledged to be the Commander in Chief who made the Strategic Air Command into the elite Air Force unit it had come to be.
Here we’ll be looking not so much at how LeMay made SAC into the elite force it became but at what he made SAC good for.
From the beginning, SAC’s mission was, as the name suggests, to conduct our “strategic” operations. What were “strategic” operations? How were they different from other kinds?
The concept of a “strategic” bombing operation first became salient in World War II, the first war in which we’d had the big bombers that could enact it.
The idea of a “strategic” bombing attack was that you’d be attacking the resources that allowed the enemy to make war: railroads, roads, bridges, factories, refineries, dams, power plants, airfields, storage depots, if you knew where they were. Food supplies, maybe. You would not necessarily be bombing enemy soldiers, and of course not the civilian populations, at least not on purpose. Nor would you be bombing things like hospitals and schools.
Attacking strategic targets would almost always affect civilian populations, if you thought about it. Just not on purpose.
Attacking enemy soldiers directly would be considered a “tactical” attack. That wasn’t something big bombers were suited for. The damage they caused was too general and couldn’t be targeted precisely enough. Your fighter airplanes could attack the enemy forces directly using smaller bombs or the fighter’s machine guns.
Attacking civilians or civilian structures like schools and hospitals directly would run counter to the international law of war that had been established at the Hague in 1907. Any such attack could not be considered “strategic.” That meant that cities and their populations couldn’t be “strategic” targets.
Even so, the Nazi Germans had attacked cities—Guernica in Spain in 1937 (Have you seen the powerful painting by Picasso with that name?) and London in 1940-41 in what was called the “Blitz.”
Later in the war, the British had turned around and attacked not just strategic targets in Germany but German cities.
Nearer the end of the war, they had begun to employ a technique called firebombing.
Firebombs, or “incendiaries,” have in them sticky substances like napalm, invented early in World War II by a chemist at Harvard, that ignite after they strike and set fires. Some bombs may contain something like phosphorus to help with ignition. Conventional bombs may have been used earlier to break up buildings to make material that catches fire more readily.
Firebombing causes its damage not by blast but by causing widespread fires that may join together into firestorms, tornados of fire. Firebombing causes the destruction not just of any strategic targets in an area but of everything in the area that can burn. It was therefore considered a kind of “area bombing,” as distinguished from “precision bombing.”
The people subjected to a firebomb attack would be burned to death or sometimes suffocated because the firestorms would consume the available oxygen.
Late in the European war, in 1944, we had joined the British in firebombing the cities of Hamburg and Dresden, which bothered some of us. I was too young to be bothered—I’d been born in 1941—but some adults were bothered, like our Secretary of War, Henry Stimson.
Why did it bother some adults?
Because the bombing of cities isn’t strategic bombing and firebombing by big flights of bombers can only have cities and their populations as targets. Cities themselves aren’t legitimate “strategic” targets.
In Europe in World War II, General LeMay had commanded bombers in some of the strategic attacks in Germany that used conventional bombs. He’d insisted on piloting the lead bomber in some of the attacks. This was brave, unquestionably. In some attacks a third of the bombers were being lost to Nazi fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft ground fire.
Back home, some of our war leadership had begun to wonder how well our strategic attacks were working. The attacks by the Nazis in Britain hadn’t worked very well. They’d just stiffened British resistance. Maybe ours had done the same thing in Germany.
Near the end of the war in Europe, in 1944, Secretary Stimson had ordered a “Strategic Bombing Survey” to see how well our strategic attacks had worked. The people in charge of doing the surveys would be civilians. You can see why, can’t you? Maybe even if you are in the military?
The verdict was mixed. Many of the bombs seemed to have missed their targets. By a lot. By five miles, not infrequently. The attacks had had some effect on industrial production, especially when it came to oil, but not as much as had been hoped. One very costly attack on some ball bearing factories, costly to us, didn’t seem to have had much effect at all.
The survey had been undertaken partly to figure out how best to conduct strategic bombing in Japan, with whom we were still at war. So what happened in Japan?
Our Army Air Forces had for a while been conducting “precision” strategic bombing attacks in Japan, dropping conventional bombs from high altitude. They didn’t need a study to tell them these attacks hadn’t been accomplishing much. The results in Japan were probably worse than they had been in Germany. It was cloudier in Japan and the winds aloft were stronger.
Our Army Air Force leaders had learned, you have to think, about the firebombing we’d recently done in Germany with the British. They probably also knew that the Japanese had done firebombing in China. They might also have known that the Japanese had floated balloons carrying incendiary devices over to the United States on that strong west wind and that some had made it. Not enough that we’d all know. Our leaders decided not to tell us about this so the Japanese wouldn’t know that some of their balloons had made it all the way over.
In late 1944, our Army Air Force leaders had decided to try firebombing in Japan from high altitude. That looked to be doing more damage than the “precision” bombing they’d been doing but not that much more.
In January 1945, General LeMay was assigned to take over the strategic bombing campaign in Japan. He began by conducting some high-level firebombing, again with disappointing results.
In March 1945, he ordered a low-level firebombing attack on Tokyo. That would be more risky but air defenses in Japan certainly weren’t what they had been. LeMay thought it would be worth the risk. Especially if they went in at night. Not everyone agreed.
The first low-level firebombing attack at night was conducted on March 10, 1945. In it, 279 B-29s firebombed Tokyo. It worked very well indeed. The attack completely burned out sixteen square miles of the city. Only forty bombers were lost. Only.
How many people were killed? That’s hard to tell in something like this, you can imagine. But all the estimates I’ve seen have put the number at more than would be killed later in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in either of the atomic bomb attacks.
If that’s true, this one firebombing attack is the most lethal bombing attack in human history. So far.
By the beginning of August 1945, when the atomic bombs were dropped, General LeMay had firebombed more than 60 Japanese cities. After the atomic bombs fell and before the Japanese surrendered, he had firebombed two more Japanese cities. The firebombing campaign on Japanese cities had killed four or five times as many people as the atomic bombs did.
Both the firebombings and the attacks with atomic bombs were being called “strategic.” But they couldn’t have been. Not in the original sense of the term. They couldn’t target only military targets. Because of their nature, they could target only cities. And, of course, the people living in them.
LeMay and others argued later that the firebombings were strategic attacks in the original sense. After the houses in a large area had been burned up, LeMay said, you could see some drill presses sticking up in the ashes.
I don’t think he believed it finally. Even later he also said, “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.” (That “I” could make you wonder, he didn’t think he personally had won the war, did he? In his favor, he had ordered the low-level firebombing attacks, but hadn’t been the first American to order firebombing.)
Still later, after he had stepped down as CINCSAC, LeMay said, “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.” (Which could make you wonder, did he think it was okay to go to war against a “people”? As the Germans had done against the Jews? Isn’t that “genocide”? Or to attack “communist countries” even if most of the people in those countries weren’t members of the Communist Party and some might even be opposed to Communism? Or not even know what it is?)
The atomic bomb attacks had also been called “strategic,” but they weren’t, not in the original sense. Bombs of that size can’t target only military targets. President Truman seemed to have realized this after he saw photographs of what had happened in Hiroshima. He ordered no more attacks with atomic bombs without his explicit order.
Some people felt the atomic bombs had a moral argument on their side. Secretary of War Stimson made the argument in February 1947 in an article in The Atlantic called “The Decision.”
In it, he argued that the two atomic bombs were what made the Japanese surrender in August 1945, that if the bombs had not been dropped maybe a million American lives would have been lost in the invasion of Japan and even more Japanese lives, many more than had been lost in the atomic bomb attacks. Even more Japanese lives would have been lost through starvation if the islands had simply been blockaded and besieged.
None of this could be known with certainty, of course. But to some people, that didn’t matter. Some in our country argued that if the atomic bombs had saved even one American life, dropping them was justified.
The firebombing too, presumably.
General LeMay was not among those who believed the atomic bombs were what had made the difference. “The real work had already been done,” he said. The work he had done, he must have meant, in the “strategic” firebombing raids.
What had happened here, in any case, is that the meaning of “strategic” had changed. The bombing of cities and the killing of civilians, whether by firebombs or atomic bombs, could now be considered “strategic.” As long as this might shorten a war and help one win it.
Had anyone noticed this change in thinking?
It was to become even simpler than that. An attack that used a nuclear weapon as powerful or more powerful than the first ones—with yields greater than the equivalent of 15 thousand tons of TNT—would thenceforth be considered “strategic.” What was “strategic” was now simply a matter of whether a nuclear weapon was used.
At first, we were the only country to have nuclear weapons and we might not have been realizing that, because nuclear weapons now existed, one way a war could be shortened was by mutual annihilation. Both sides would “win” and both sides would lose it all.
At a National Security Council meeting in 1960 President Eisenhower said: "Our imagination could not encompass the situation which would result from an attack on this country involving the explosion of 2,000 megatons....War no longer has any logic whatsoever."
In the same year, our first secret Strategic Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war was completed by a highly secretive entity called Joint Strategic Targeting Staff.
When General Butler became CINCSAC in 1991 and thus also Director of the JSTPS, the first task he set himself was to find out just what was in the SIOP.
Next: SAC’s Capabilities