Curtis LeMay Quotes
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.
LeMay, Curtis E., and MacKinlay Kantor. Mission with LeMay: My Story. Doubleday, 1965.
The changes he wrought were many and profound and were rejected years later when his party was voted out of office so markedly that the only retained 2 seats in the parliament and lost their status as an official Canadian party.
This quotation is an amazing prediction that was 100 years in the future. China had a mercantile culture and tradition that was suppressed and controlled by the Emperors, the Europeans, the Nationalist Chinese, the Japanese, and finally the Communists who finally found a way to provide commercial freedom if not political, religious, and cultural liberty. But the talent for commerce was clear even 100 years ago to those who were broadminded enough to see it behind the antl-Asian prejudice of the 19th and early 20th century.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston. He was right on the 1st, and time will tell about the 2nd. But at the time he made this prediction, America was not a superpower, and was considered behind, England and France and just passing Argentina. At the time, America was reeling from the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression. The development of the United State through the FDR era including WWII was amazing. And by 1948 America was not only number 1, but the only Superpower at the time.
LeMay became a pursuit pilot and, while stationed in Hawaii, became one of the first members of the Air Corps to receive specialized training in aerial navigation. In August 1937, as navigator under pilot and commander Caleb V. Haynes on a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, he helped locate the battleship Utah despite being given the wrong coordinates by Navy personnel, in exercises held in misty conditions off California, after which the group of B-17s bombed it with water bombs. For Haynes again, in May 1938 he navigated three B-17s 620 nm (610 miles or 980 km) over the Atlantic Ocean to intercept the Italian liner SS Rex to illustrate the ability of land-based airpower to defend the American coasts. In 1940 he was navigator for Haynes on the prototype Boeing XB-15 heavy bomber, flying a survey from Panama over the Galapagos islands. War brought rapid promotion and increased responsibility.
