Curtis LeMay

Sometime in the future - 25, 50, 75 years hence - what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too.

— Curtis LeMay

There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.

— Curtis LeMay

My solution to the problem would be to tell [the North Vietnamese Communists] frankly that they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them 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

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier.

— Curtis LeMay

I'd like to see a more aggressive attitude on the part of the United States. That doesn't mean launching an immediate preventive war...

— Curtis LeMay

...Native annalists may look sadly back from the future on that period when we had the atomic bomb and the Russians didn't. Or when the Russians had aquired (through connivance and treachery of Westerns with warped minds) the atomic bomb - and yet still didn't have any stockpile of the weapons. That was the era when we might have destroyed Russia completely and not even skinned our elbows doing it.

— Curtis LeMay

China has The Bomb. [...] Sometime in the future--25, 50, 75 years hence--what will the situation be like then? By that time the Chinese will have the capability of delivery too. That's the reason some schools of thinking don't rule out a destruction of the Chinese military potential before the situation grows worse than it is today. It's bad enough now.

— Curtis LeMay

We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too.… Over a period of three years or so, we killed off — what — twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?

— Curtis LeMay

If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I'm going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.

— Curtis LeMay

We’re at war with Japan. We were attacked by Japan. Do you want to kill Japanese, or would you rather have Americans killed?

— Curtis LeMay

She [America] escaped the ruin visited upon other nations because she was given time to prepare and because of distance. [In the next war] distance will be academic [and no preparation time, too].

— Curtis LeMay

I'll tell you what war is about, you've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting.

— Curtis LeMay

We should bomb Vietnam back into the stone age.

— Curtis LeMay

My solution to the problem would be to tell the North Vietnamese Communists frankly that they've got to drawn in their horns and stop their aggression or we're going to bomb them into the stone age.

— Curtis LeMay