The Final Storm - Jeff Shaara [243]
In 1984 he retires and settles into the farm country of the Shenandoah Valley. He dies of heart disease in 2007, at age eighty-two. Loraine lives today in their family home near the New Market Battlefield, outside Harrisonburg, Virginia.
SERGEANT HAROLD MORTENSEN
The Sixth Division’s downsizing does not affect the squad leader, who pushes hard to continue his career in the Corps. Mortensen is promoted to first sergeant in August 1946 and remains in service through the Korean War. When the brigade is revitalized as the reactivated Third Marine Division, Mortensen applies for and receives a commission as second lieutenant, and is awarded the bronze star for action in Korea. By the war’s end he has been promoted to the rank of major. He retires in June 1955 and settles in Vienna, Virginia. That year Mortensen marries Constance Fowler, a secretary at the Veterans Administration in Washington, D.C., and she encourages him to seek a position there. Always an advocate for the care of ailing veterans, he agrees, and continues his work on behalf of veterans until his retirement in 1977. He moves to Venice, Florida, and dies in 2008, at age ninety-one.
GENERAL CURTIS LEMAY
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is generally credited as accounting for the most cataclysmic loss of Japanese life, but LeMay’s aggressive bombing campaigns produce losses to the Japanese citizenry that far exceed those two blasts. LeMay’s bomb ’em and burn ’em philosophy reduces more of Japan to ash than both atomic bombs combined, and LeMay is somewhat justified in claiming that it is his airplanes that win the war, responsible for the destruction of sixty-five Japanese cities, causing more than a million Japanese casualties, and devastating more than ten million Japanese residences.
After the war LeMay is selected to head the United States Air Force command in Europe, and in 1948 is instrumental in the Berlin Airlift, which parachutes much-needed food and supplies into the German capital, breaking a blockade imposed on the city by the Soviets. Later that year LeMay becomes the first commander of the new Strategic Air Command, and works tirelessly to expand the role of the Air Force as a key component of America’s military arsenal. He is promoted to full (four-star) general in 1951, the youngest to achieve that rank since Ulysses S. Grant. He heads SAC until 1957 and is widely regarded as the engineer of America’s line-in-the-sand approach to the threat of Soviet missile attacks, thus ensuring that the Cold War remains cold.
He serves as air force chief of staff until 1961 and retires from active duty in 1965. Always a vocal critic of the “softening” of America’s defensive shields, including what he sees as America’s tentative strategies in the Vietnam War, a frustrated LeMay sees an opportunity to put his viewpoint on a loud pedestal. He accepts the opportunity to run as the vice presidential candidate as part of Alabama governor George Wallace’s third-party campaign in the 1968 presidential election. Though Wallace has little expectation of winning, his high visibility brings out the most militant viewpoints of many in this country, who are mostly silenced by the vast outpouring of protest against the war. It is LeMay who uses that opportunity to express his support for the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, an incendiary philosophy that only helps polarize an already divided nation.
After the election, LeMay fades from public view, settles in California, and dies in 1990, at age eighty-three. He is buried at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery, in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN
The thirty-third president of the United States is a man both loved and despised during his terms of office, usually striving for what he believes to be in the nation’s best interests as opposed to the will of the politicians who surround him. He seeks reelection in 1948 and scores a stunning upset over the heavily favored New York governor, Thomas Dewey. During his tenure, he supports his new secretary of