elmat,
Re: Power vs LeMay was a dispute for money for the USAF (Powers) of to buy more submarines (LeMay).
I cannot find much on the net that goes into any detail about the head butting between Powers and LeMay. Both were SAC Commanders, with Powers replacing LeMay. Considering that LeMay was the model for General Jack D. Ripper in the movie "Dr. Strangelove", when LeMay called Powers a "sadist", he must have really been a piece of work.
Powers wrote this:
General Thomas S. Powers, "Ballistic Missiles and the SAC Mission" in John Loosebrock's Space Weapons (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1959) p. 93.
airpower.maxwell.af.mil
What that is all about, I have no idea. Powers replaced LeMay as SAC Commander and worked under LeMay in the late 1950s.
Here's a brief biographical sketch of LeMay:
geocities.com
A completely reprehensible man, IMO. I'd forgotten that he was a segregationist and running mate of George Wallace in 1968. These right wingers are sure a strange breed. Burning 100,000 innocent Japanese civilians in one night in Tokyo didn't trouble him. Nuking a larger number in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was swell. And then he comes home and tries to provoke WW III with the Soviet Union. I'd say the man had a screw loose.
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Late Edit, here's the LeMay-submarine story:
"LeMay was in policy conflicts with the Joint Chiefs. He battled with Admiral Arleigh Burke over the control of the nuclear Polaris submarines. LeMay wanted them under his command and actually achieved some control in the Pacific theater. But Burke successfully fought the Air Force every way he knew--in the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in Congress, and in the press--any way to prevent LeMay's power grab."
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Could LeMay have been instrumental in the assassination of JFK? Here's an interesting conjecture:
"He was even more disgusted with Kennedy, whom LeMay believed to be a coward. LeMay talked openly about a preemptive attack in which one hundred million people would be killed.
If ever there were a mad, rogue general who would lead a coup, it would appear to have been General Curtis LeMay." |
