After graduating from the University of California, Robert McNamara went to the Harvard Graduate School of Business for two years and then went back to San Francisco, as he explains in Fog of War:
I began to court this young lady that I’d met when we were 17 in our first week at Berkley: Margaret Craig. And I was making some progress after eight or nine months. I proposed and she accepted.
She went with her aunt and her mother on a trip across the country. She telegraphed me?”Must order engraved invitations to include your middle name, what is it?”
And I wired back, “My middle name is ‘Strange.’”
And she said “I know it’s ‘strange,’ but what is it?”
“Well, I mean it is ‘Strange,’ it’s ‘Robert Strange McNamara.’”
And it was a marriage made in heaven. At the end of a year we had our first child. The delivery costs were $100, and we paid that $10 a month. Those were some of the happiest days of our life.
And then the war came.
I’d been promoted to assistant professor. I was the youngest assistant professor at Harvard — and a salary by the way of $4000 a year. Harvard business school’s market was drying up. The males were being drafted or volunteering. So the Dean, being farsighted, brought back a government contract to establish an officer candidate school for what was called “Statistical Control” in the Air Force.
We said to the Air Force, “Look, we’re not going to take anybody you send up here. We’re going to select the people. You have a punch card for every human being brought into the Air Corps. We’re going to run those cards through the IBM sorting machines, and we’re going to sort on age, education, accomplishments, grades, etc.” We were looking for the best and the brightest. The best brains, the greatest capacity to lead, the best judgment.
The U.S. was just beginning to bomb. We were bombing by daylight. The loss rate was very, very high, so they commissioned a study. And what did we find? We found the abort rate was 20%. 20% of the planes that took off to bomb targets in Germany turned around before they got to their target. Well that was a hell of a mess. We lost 20% of our capability right there.
The form — I think it was form 1—A or something like that — was a mission report. And if you aborted a mission you had to write down why. So we get all these things and we analyze them, and we finally concluded it was baloney. They were aborting out of fear.
Because the loss rate was 4% per sortie, the combat tour was 25 sorties. It didn’t mean that 100% of them were going to be killed, but a hell of a lot of them were going to be killed. They knew that and they found reasons to not go over the target. So we reported this.
One of the commanders was Curtis LeMay, Colonel in command of a B—24 group. He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal. He got the report. He issued an order. He said, “I will be in the lead plane on every mission. Any plane that takes off will go over the target, or the crew will be court—marshaled.” The abort rate dropped over night.
Now that’s the kind of commander he was.
McNamara, whose understanding of the enemy never got beyond an accounting of production. The strictures of technowar did not allow war managers to include social relationships, cultural and historical factors, or the motivations and strategies of the guerrilla and revolutionary forces they faced on the ground in their calculus of the war. To paraphrase The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam by James William Gibson.
Curtis Lemay, BCE ca. 1932, The Ohio State University. His portrait hangs on the wall of famous civil engineering alumni in Hitchcock Hall, 4th floor.
One of the best war films is “Twelve O’Clock High,” starring Gregory Peck. Its focus and theme is battle fatigue.