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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good read about one of our airpower leaders, November 22, 1999
This review is from: Iron Eagle : The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (Hardcover)
This biography of Gen LeMay is an easy-to-read, informative book about Gen LeMay's life and career. Coffey's use of narratives to give the reader an insight to Gen LeMay's character make the book an enjoyable read. He does not bog us down with a lot of mundane details, and as a result, certainly some details about Gen LeMay's life and career are left out or not delved into. More attention is paid to his early career and his World War II accomplishments and not as much to his years as SAC commander and CSAF. The conflicts and controversies he was involved in as CSAF are not analyzed in depth. However, this is probably not the purpose of this book; the purpose is more of an introduction to Gen LeMay. "Iron Eagle" is a must read for Air Force personnel in order to get know one of the generals who had such a powerful effect on the Air Force and US national defense. Those interested in military history and good stories about military leaders will also find this an interesting read.
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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stephen R. Finney, USAF, Retired, September 4, 2002
Iron Eagle is an intensely interesting biography of one of the pivotal military thinkers of the 20th Century. It is doubtful that, without Curtis Lemay's incredible forsight and military genius, WWII would have ended as soon as it did. The air campaign against Germany was going poorly until Lemay deivised the effective method of bombing that became the standard throughout WWII, Korea, & Vietnam. This book is a must for anyone who wants a true perspective on those who shaped the United States Air Force. Sadly this biography and "Mission With LeMay" are two of the very few accounts of LeMay's career and his tremendous contribution not only to the Air Force, but to the United States. Because he was such a politically incorrect thinker, most of what he has done for his country has been swept aside by revisionist historians. Truly an excellent book, well worth the reading.
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22 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bio that misses the mark, October 17, 2001
This review is from: Iron Eagle : The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (Hardcover)
This biography of Curtis Le may is fairly comprehensive and favorable to its subject, the pilot who rose from being a lowly officer at the dawn of America's entry into WWII, to command the nation's military forces at the brink of global thermonuclear war. Le May's ideas on air strategy bucked existing tactics (like how aircraft are grouped, or use of evasive tactics during their attack runs), but results (at least in comparatively minimal casualty rate sustained by his B-17 unit in Europe) raised his fortunes. Soon sent to the Pacific to command a unit of the trouble-prone B-29, Le May's star rises even higher, setting the stage for his post-war commands of USAF-Europe, SAC and USAF Chief of Staff. His greatest post-war accomplishments were turning SAC from a shell of a command into a global-ready air arm. (Coffey dwells much on SAC's sheer absence of security, and the mock attacks by ersatz saboteurs - engineered largely by Lemay himself - who left notes like "there is a bomb in the suitcase I left in the hangar; it is set to explode at 6:05 am.") When taking over SAC, Lemay tested the unit by staging mock attacks with the rules stacked in favor of the attackers - and the results were still dismal. From turning SAC around, Lemay was primed for his tempestuous tenure as CinC-USAF. As the iconic cold-war air force boss, Lemay's frequently clashed with his boss, Maxwell Taylor (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs) and the civilian administration (personified by Robert McNamara). Hot topics were the military policies of "gradualism" in Vietnam as well as procurement of the joint-service fighter, the F-111, and manned bombers to replace the B-52. Unfortunately, whether or not you're familiar with the subject of this book or air warfare in general, you're likely to put it down feeling like a lot is missing. In generally historical terms, "Iron Eagle" seems insufficiently critical of Lemay. Even if you're predisposed to favor Lemay, the book will still sound like apologia. Coffey writes constantly about how the general was misquoted on such subjects as the use of nuclear weapons in Korea or Vietnam or the no-1st strike policy, without satisfactorily explaining what the general did mean or the context in which his statements were made. Also, though taking Lemay's foes to task for being inaccurate in quoting him, Coffey remains a bit inexact himself. McNamara and his circle at DoD are repeatedly called "Whiz Kids" (probably because of their reliance on burgeoning information technology, statistical analysis and other space-age ideas in decision-making) so often that it seems that Coffey believes that that was their official name. At times, it's not clear what the source of the misquoting is - whether deliberately created or innocently spread by Lemay's enemies. Historically speaking, Coffey spends more time re-telling history than placing the historical weight where it belongs. In WWII, bombers fly missions, absorb losses and burn down Japanese cities, but never conveys the gravity of these missions on those who flew them or were targeted by them. Coffey deals slightly with the use of the a-bomb against Japan because Lemay didn't think the bomb necessary (the war was nearly over, and Lemay had accomplished his primary goal of whipping the buggy-prone B-29 into shape), but this is still a huge error. The consequences for the next world war (which loomed closely even as the existing one still raged) together with liquid-fueled missile technology proven by the Germans meant that aviation technology was about to take a massive turn. It's impossible to believe that the bomb itself, used in combat, would have little interest for him. (On a more practical level, having learned of the bomb, security reasons forced Lemay from flying any more combat missions.) Lemay's fliers themselves withstand not only brutal combat conditions but brutal training as well, but Coffey, though repeatedly stressing the training, doesn't dwell much on what that training was, what standards Lemay set, and how he observed them. After the war, Coffey similarly charts the General's political battles, but the gaps are obvious. The general is popular on capital hill, we're told, but little else on those warm relations. (Coziness with congress seems only a counterpoint to the thinly-veiled hostility Lemay received from the White House). The pivotal issues in this period involve both the Cuban Missile Crisis, procurment of a sucessor to to the B-52 and a multi-service fighter, and the manned bomber v. missiles controversy. In Cuba, Coffey goes little further than telling the story without getting to the egos underneath. Neither the fighter (soon to become the F-111) nor the bomber (the eventually cancelled B-70) rise above being the issues of budget battles in Coffey's pages - their merits as aircraft seem to have escaped him entirely, and one wonders whether we should be grateful that the government eventually against Lemay's advice (the F-111 evolved into a superb multi-role strike fighter, while Lemay's B-70 would have been made obsolete by high altitude missiles and interceptors. The debate over missiles and manned bombers is also a murky one - Lemay seeks both manned bombers and missiles for the nuclear triad, and this middle-ground is never explored. Also neglected are the B-47 and B-58, the controversy over the Northrop Flying Wing, the non-use of B-36's over Korea, advances in air defenses, or any mention of Russian innovations. Lemay's tenure covered those years reckoned as a golden age for military aviation, but Coffey seems to miss that entirely. None of the aircraft really come alive in Coffey's pages. For all of its size, "Iron Eagle" says less about Curtis Lemay than you'd find in a few pages of William Anderson's memoir "To Fly and Fight". In that book, the author recalls having to brief the General on the troubled parasite-fighter program. "That's the craziest idea I've ever heard, crazier than any of that stuff that comes out of Edwards Air Force Base......but keep working on it." If only the General edited this
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