This Book: Mission With Lemay: My Story by Curtis E. Lemay and MacKinlay Kantor is the personal and outspoken story of a history making General Curtis E. Lemay. His military contributions were enormous. His firebombing campaign against Janpan between March 1945 and the Japanese surrender in August 1945 may have killed more than 500,000 Japanese civilians. He said, "if the US lost the war he fully expected to be tried for war crimes". After the war, he unintentionally iniated the Berlin Airlift, then reorganized the Stretegic Air Command (SAC) into an effective instrument of nuclear war.