Curtis Lemay

Curtis Emerson LeMay (1906–1990) was a United States Air Force general whose name became synonymous with strategic bombing doctrine in the twentieth century. He directed the firebombing campaign against Japanese cities in 1945, built the Strategic Air Command into the world's most powerful nuclear strike force during the 1950s, and ended his career as the fifth Chief of Staff of the Air Force.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, he graduated from Ohio State University as a civil engineer and was commissioned in the Army Air Corps in 1929. He pioneered long-range navigation techniques in B-17 bombers before the Second World War, and in 1942 took command of the 305th Bombardment Group in England, devising the formation flying and straight-in bomb run that became standard.

Transferred to the Pacific in 1944, he assumed command of XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas and ordered the switch from high-altitude precision bombing to low-altitude incendiary night raids. The 9–10 March 1945 firebombing of Tokyo destroyed sixteen square miles and killed an estimated one hundred thousand people in a single night; subsequent raids hit more than sixty Japanese cities.

As commander of SAC from 1948 to 1957 he transformed an underprepared force into a round-the-clock nuclear deterrent of bombers and missiles. He served as Air Force Chief of Staff from 1961 to 1965, clashing with Defense Secretary McNamara, and ran for vice president on George Wallace's segregationist American Independent Party ticket in 1968. He died in California at eighty-three.

The name Curtis derives from the Old French curteis, meaning "courteous" or "refined." The cigar-chomping general it labelled was famously anything but, lending his career one of military history's more striking ironies.