page_title: Curtis LeMay
section_title: Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, 1961–1965
hierarchical_section_title: Curtis LeMay / Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force, 1961–1965
caption_attribution_description: English: President Kennedy visited SAC's Headquarters with Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay and Commanders-in-Chief of The Strategic Air Command General Thomas S. Power.
context_page_description: Curtis Emerson LeMay was an American Air Force general who implemented an effective but controversial strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific theater of World War II. He later served as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force from 1961 to 1965.
  LeMay joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, the precursor to the U.S. Air Force, in 1929 while studying civil engineering at Ohio State University. He had risen to the rank of major by the time of Japan's Attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and the United States's subsequent entry into World War II. He commanded the 305th Operations Group from October 1942 until September 1943, and the 3rd Air Division in the European theatre of World War II until August 1944, when he was transferred to the China Burma India Theater. He was then placed in command of strategic bombing operations against Japan, planning and executing a massive fire bombing campaign against Japanese cities and Operation Starvation, a crippling minelaying campaign in Japan's internal waterways.
  After the war, he was assigned to command USAF Europe and coordinated the Berlin airlift.
context_section_description: Following service as USAF Vice Chief of Staff (1957–1961), LeMay was made the fifth Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force on the retirement of Gen Thomas White. His belief in the efficacy of strategic air campaigns over tactical strikes and ground support operations became Air Force policy during his tenure as chief of staff.
  As Chief of Staff, LeMay clashed repeatedly with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Air Force Secretary Eugene Zuckert, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Maxwell Taylor. At the time, budget constraints and successive nuclear war fighting strategies had left the armed forces in a state of flux. Each of the armed forces had gradually jettisoned realistic appraisals of future conflicts in favor of developing its own separate nuclear and nonnuclear capabilities. At the height of this struggle, the U.S. Army had even reorganized its combat divisions to fight land wars on irradiated nuclear battlefields, developing short-range atomic cannon and mortars in order to win appropriations. The United States Navy in turn proposed delivering strategic nuclear weapons from supercarriers intended to sail into range of the Soviet air defense forces. Of all these various schemes, only LeMay's command structure of SAC survived complete reorganization in the changing reality of Cold War-era conflicts.
  LeMay was not an enthusiast of the ICBM program, considering ballistic missiles to be little more than toys and no substitute for the strategic nuclear bomber force.
  Though LeMay lost significant appropriation battles for the Skybolt ALBM and the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress replacement, the North American XB-70 Valkyrie, he was largely successful at expanding Air Force budgets. Despite LeMay's disdain for missiles, he did strongly support the use of military space programs to perform satellite reconnaissance and gather electronic intelligence. For comparison, the US Army and Navy frequently suffered budgetary cutbacks and program cancellations by Congress and Secretary McNamara.
caption: Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Strategic Air Command's Commander General Thomas S. Power at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska.
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