LeMay, Great Generals Series

Air & Space Power Journal, Summer, 2008 by David R. Mets

LeMay, Great Generals Series, by Barrett Tillman. Palgrave Macmillan (http://www.palgrave-usa.com), 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010, 2007, 224 pages, $21.95 (hardcover).

The cover of my advance copy of LeMay proclaims it the "First Major Biography" of the sixth chief of staff of the Air Force and the second commander of Strategic Air Command (SAC). A major biography it certainly is not. Its brevity alone disqualifies it for that designation. The research is superficial, dealing primarily with the most common published sources. Twenty of the first 35 citations come straight out of LeMay's own Mission with LeMay: My Story (1965) (with MacKinlay Kantor). Nothing in the current work would prove objectionable to the authors of that volume or to LeMay's heirs. Barrett Tillman has published 40 books, mostly for the popular market. His writing is good, but the depth of his research is minimal. Stuffing the story of the life of a major actor in so much of our air history (including World War II, Korea, and Vietnam) into such a short narrative is out of the question.

As noted, LeMay is very conventional in its interpretations. It might be suitable for Junior ROTC students but not for the readers of this journal. Rather, they should turn to LeMay's own Mission with LeMay: My Story; Tami Davis Biddle's Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (2002) (on strategic bombing up to Hiroshima); Harry R. Borowski's A Hollow Threat: Strategic Air Power and Containment before Korea (1982) (for the initial weakness of SAC); and Walton S. Moody's Building a Strategic Air Force (1996) (on LeMay's work in rebuilding SAC). The author also relies heavily on Thomas M. Coffey's Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay--not a definitive biography but certainly a better source than Tillman's.

I recommend that you do not use up space on your professional reading list for Tillman's concise summary.

Dr. David R. Mets

Maxwell AFB, Alabama