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One day last week a heavy-jowled, stocky general officer of the U.S. Army Air Forces flew the 100-odd miles back to his Guam headquarters from his B-29 bases at Saipan and Tinian. His aide, waiting with new orders, showed them to the boss. Major General Curtis Emerson LeMay read them without a flicker of expression. Said he, seeming scarcely to open his lips: "File them and we will move tomorrow."
Next day General LeMay moved out of the double Quonset hut which had been his headquarters since January—first, as commanding general, 21st Bomber Command, lately as commanding general, Twentieth Air Force. When he moved 1,500 ft. beyond the road to a cramped, three-man office he took with him a Lucite name plate, a box of cigars, a black walnut tobacco humidor, a letter opener made from a B-29 throttle by some of his boys in India long ago, and a leather folder containing pictures of his wife Helen and six-year-old daughter Jane, who wait in Lakewood, Ohio.
The General was giving up his office and his job as C.O. of the Twentieth to a veteran of the early Pacific and the Mediterranean air wars, Lieut. General Nathan F. ("The Champ") Twining (TIME, Aug. 6). In turn, LeMay was taking a new assignment: the orders had made him chief of staff of the U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces. In that executive capacity, just when the B-29s were getting a new atomic weapon which might change the whole concept of war, he would run the B-29 show under the overall supervision of the U.S.'s top strategic airman, wise, imperturbable General Carl Spaatz. In Spaatz's command were both Twining's Twentieth and Lieut. General "Jimmy" Doolittle's Okinawa-based Eighth Air Force.
Indispensable Man. Thus, the most spectacularly successful airman produced in the Army's Pacific war was no longer his own on-the-spot boss. Some of LeMay's devoted associates in the Twentieth did not take kindly to the change, just as they instinctively resented him when he replaced the first commander of the B-29s in the Marianas—friendly, brown-eyed Brigadier General Haywood S. ("Possum")
Hansell. But there were good reasons for LeMay's new orders.
Imposing as the B-29 forces under Curt LeMay had become, it was only a part of the power to be turned against Japan in a vast offensive that even more conservative airmen hoped would knock the enemy out of the war before a U.S.
foot soldier ever touched a beach on Honshu. To command this force, "Tooey" Spaatz, director of the strategic campaign against Germany, was an obvious choice, both by seniority and accomplishment.
Spaatz already had his team — Doolittle and Twining — who had done the job for him in the European theater. He also had in Curt LeMay a brilliant tactical commander; LeMay's know-how in Pacific battle and B-29 operations had to be spread through the enlarged strategic air forces. So while LeMay's officers grumbled a bit at a good man and a crack leader being taken from tactical command, their black-browed boss was moved up.