Wonder what Gen. LeMay and Adm. Anderson would have thought if they knew that Comdr. Ecker ("It was a cakewalk, sir." had just lied to their faces??
"Has anybody ever told you you have a SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM??"
The LeMay we think we know from history, a cigar chewing hard ass, would have broken the pilot. But Lemay would also have known if shots were fired or not long before the pilot was debriefed. The base commander where those jets landed should have that information before anyone else.
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Good points. Yeah, the base commander would have known before anybody else.
"Has anybody ever told you you have a SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM??"
And yet LeMay didn't know. If he had, he would have insisted on retaliation.
shareA good book on Lemay for interested viewers of 'Thirteen Days and readers of 20th century military history is 'LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay' by Warren Kozak.
Frank: Just a man.
Harmonica: An ancient race.
He has an amazing history of service to the nation. I liked his leadership in WWII even if he seemed to be on a constant rampage. He made some real nasty things happen to our enemies in the war. But I am still most impressed by leaders who actually do the job well enough themselves to run up the bottoms of others when they need improvement or realignment to the mission. Still, its hard to imagine issuing an order that would incinerate 100,000 people in one mission. But he was facing an enemy unafraid to die and take everyone else with them out of fanatical worship of something. I guess we know a little about that today facing our own bunch of suicidal enemies.
I think its very important to fill top leadership slots with guys like him who didn't get processed through the cookie academies. His work after the war, balancing his view of commie expansion and his oath to political leadership, was also impressive. I can barely imagine what that was like dealing with the budget cuts, public opinion, and that constant soviet threat.
I'd love to see a movie about LeMay on scale with the one about Patton. Of course, Hollywood is broke and rotten with PC production values so any depiction of LeMay would to be more influenced by his run with Wallace than his run in European and the Pacific theaters in the war.
Still, its hard to imagine issuing an order that would incinerate 100,000 people in one mission.Whatever one may think about such an order, LeMay gave such orders with complete confidence that the Japanese could not retaliate by incinerating 100,000 Americans. In contrast, during much of the Cold War, the Soviet Union possessed the capacity to destroy the U.S. In short, nuclear war was unwinnable. Do you think LeMay made the mental transition necessary to deal with that fact? And do you think he was fairly portrayed in Thirteen Days?
Werewolves Ate My Platoon!share
His lines about "those god damn Kennedys" may have been Hollywood, but everything he said to the President was taken from recorded transcripts of their meetings.
shareIf you watch the Thirteen Days DVD, there's special information there, including tracks with Dino Brugioni, who was a senior official at the National Photographic Interpretation Center, or NPIC. He talks about LeMay during the crisis, and says that someone once asked LeMay what he'd do about Cuba, and, according to Brugioni, LeMay said, "I'll fry it." "And," Brugioni goes on to say, he meant it." I think he was fairly portrayed in Thirteen Days, but I also think the portrayal is actually tame, when compared to the real person.
"Has anybody ever told you you have a SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM??"
Yes, he was a pretty extreme person. I always like from the real tapes the conversation he has with Shoup and others from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They have no idea they are being recorded and they are just ripping into the President. Really revealing look at those men in uniform and the balance between civilian and military control at the top that this country has always maintained.
Frank: Just a man.
Harmonica: An ancient race.
Yep....listen to Dino Brugioni on the "Infinifilm" version -- he talks about how LeMay would blow cigar smoke into others' faces, including Gen. Taylor (technically, his boss, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff), and he'd go into the john and flush it repeatedly....definitely a very extreme personality. :)
"Has anybody ever told you you have a SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM??"
I have little knowledge of Gen. LeMay, but from what I do know, he seemed to be a war monger and revelled in the fight, he come across in this film as a man with his own agenda, so confident in his own abilities and seemingly adamant his way was the only way forward for the good of everybody else.
I once heard a good quote about LeMay and the kind of person he was 'If you get into a fight with LeMay, protect your genitals, that is where he will kick you'.
I would like to see LeMay get the biographical treatment he seems like an interesting character
The atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as bad as they were, did not do as much damage as the B-29 incendiary bombings of every Japanese city near the end of WWII orchestrated by Robert McNamara and Curtis Lemay.
In The Fog of War, McNamara states that if Japan had won the war, he and Lemay would have been tried as war criminals for the vast lost of civilian life due to the fire bombings.
Im suprised that McNamara believes that there would be any trials, anywhere, had Japan won the war.
shareThanks for bringing up "Fog of War". If anyone wants a little more insight into Lemay they should watch that. McNamara talks about Lemay pretty fairly in my opinion. He talks about what a great commander Lemay was in WW2 and says a lot of good things about his WW2 service. However, McNamara is honest about Lemay, and the other chiefs, pushing for extreme action during the crisis.
shareFor what it's worth, Ecker said he was never contacted by O'Donnell or anyone else from the White House. And he said his plane was never hit by bullets.
"It was 'Hollywoodized,'" he said. "They really spiced it up. They had us getting shot, which didn't happen."
His comments are here:
http://www.vfp62.com/Ecker_Comments.html
That doesn't surprise me at all--that they 'Hollywoodized' it. They did something similar in Apollo 13--portraying Fred Haise accusing Jack Swigert of somehow causing the explosion in the service module, and an argument ensuing--which never happened. (Although, I'm actually surprised there weren't serious arguments--you had three guys crammed into a vehicle no bigger than a couple of telephone booths, worried, cold, tired, and hungry--tempers had to be short!)
"Has anybody ever told you you have a SERIOUS IMPULSE CONTROL PROBLEM??"