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Originally Posted by dynalow
I believe the remarks TXJake posted of LeMay's refer to the Vietnam War. He was USAF COS before his retirement in 1965.
LeMay advocated a sustained strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnamese cities, harbors, ports, shipping, and other strategic targets. His advice was ignored. Instead, an incremental policy was implemented that focused on limited interdiction bombing of fluid enemy supply corridors in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This limited campaign failed to destroy significant quantities of enemy war supplies or diminish enemy ambitions. Bombing limitations were imposed by President Lyndon Johnson for geopolitical reasons, as he surmised that bombing Soviet and Chinese ships in port and killing Soviet advisers would bring the Soviets more directly into the war and destabilize the European Cold War.[citation needed]
Evidence of LeMay's thinking is that, in his 1965 autobiography (co-written with MacKinlay Kantor) LeMay is quoted as saying his response to North Vietnam would be to demand that "they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age. And we would shove them back into the Stone Age with Air power or Naval power—not with ground forces".
Curtis LeMay - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bombs Away with Curtis LeMay.... |
Shows what happens when liberal politicians with zero military experience try to be military experts. When they are so arrogant that they refuse to listen to their military professionals, things don't usually go very well.
History is strewn with such failures. Hitler that that HE was a military expert too, and it didn't work out very well for him, thank goodness. If he had let his generals make the calls, the outcome of that war might have been catastrophic for the world.