LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay

by Warren Kozak

Regnery Publishing, Inc.; ISBN: 1596987693

Paperback - 434 pages (October 2011)

Your Free Excerpt from the Fascinating Bio of America’s Most Controversial General

The firebombing of Tokyo. Strategic Air Command. Dr. Strangelove. George Wallace.

What do all these have in common?

General Curtis LeMay—one of the most misunderstood military men in American history.

Until now.

In the new paperback edition of the critically-acclaimed LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay, military biographer Warren Kozak traces the trajectory of LeMay's controversial career and personal life, revealing professional achievements and aspects of LeMay's personality that many people know nothing about.

And as a valued Regnery reader, we're offering you a free excerpt from Kozak's book right now.

Keep reading to learn more about General Curtis LeMay—a commander who was gruff yet compassionate, brilliant yet misunderstood, accomplished yet forgotten.

From LeMay

He never fit the image of the American flyboy—dashing, handsome, and suave. He was, instead, dark, brooding, and forbidding. He rarely smiled, he spoke even less, and when he did, his few words seemed to come out in a snarl. Most people found him frightening.

Yet somehow, Curtis Emerson LeMay, the youngest and longest serving general in modern American history, rose from obscurity, lacking social graces, old-boy connections, or lineage, to become America's most innovative and—to this day—controversial military commander.

In 1945, LeMay was a national hero, celebrated in victory parades and on the cover of Time magazine. Twenty years later, everything had changed.

Hollywood and the press vilified him for two minor marks in his life: a statement he did not actually make (about bombing North Vietnam back to the Stone Age) and a brief political affiliation with George Wallace despite their deep disagreements over racial politics.

Unfortunately, these parts of Curtis LeMay's life have overshadowed his outstanding military accomplishments.

LeMay played a major role in so many important military events of the last century: he turned the air war in Europe from a dismal failure to a great success, he helped defeat Japan without a costly land invasion, he commanded the start of Berlin Air Lift, and he was on the Joint Chiefs during the Cuban Missile Crisis. However, the LeMay legacy that has survived into the 21st century paints LeMay as a crude, trigger-happy, cigar-chomping general who joined political forces with one of the most famous racists in American history, George Wallace.

If a country is lucky, it will produce a Curtis LeMay in times of extreme danger. Nations need men like LeMay when survival is at stake. But once safe, these men are often rejected because they become walking reminders of events most people would rather forget. As with Curtis LeMay, sometimes these men contribute to their own downfall by continuing to display the belligerence that was necessary during battle but that does not fit in a world at relative peace.

More than sixty years and three generations after the end of World War II, it is very difficult for anyone born twenty, thirty, or forty years after the event to fully comprehend what it was really like to have the entire world at war. Rather than two or three nations fighting against each other, practically every country on the planet, every individual, and every resource was committed to the conflict. It was a war with huge ramifications for the future of mankind.

This country needed a man like Curtis LeMay in World War II and the Cold War. But a generation after the end of conflict, it is hard for many people to remember why....

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