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"Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. This 'Bomber Mafia' asked: What if precision bombing could, just by taking out critical choke points -- industrial or transportation hubs -- cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? In his podcast, Revisionist History, Gladwell re-examines moments from the past and asks whether we got it right the first time. In The Bomber Mafia, he steps back from the bombing of Tokyo, the deadliest night of the war, and asks, "Was it worth it?" The attack was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared more by averting a planned US invasion. Things might have gone differently had LeMay's predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. As a key member of the Bomber Mafia, Haywood's theories of precision bombing had been foiled by bad weather, enemy jet fighters, and human error. When he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war." --… (more)
User reviews
I requested and received a free temporary ebook copy from Little, Brown and Company via NetGalley. Thank you.
It is a good story, even if it is only very shallowly told, I guess without much research. We never learn anything
Gladwell has a thesis, but the story doesn't support it. Oddly, he doesn't even seem to try to support it. He just states the thesis repeatedly. I like when historians try to find meaning in their history, even if it is debatable. But in this case, I don't know what to think, Gladwell's approach is so bizarre.
> In America, at the Air Corps Tactical School, the Bomber Mafia dreamed of a world where bombs were used with dazzling precision. Lindemann went out of his way to promote the opposite approach—and the only explanation Snow could come up with is personal. Lindemann was just a sadist. He found it satisfying to reduce the cities of the enemy to rubble: “About him there hung a kind of atmosphere of indefinable malaise. You felt that he didn’t understand his own life well, and he wasn’t very good at coping with the major things. He was venomous; he was harsh-tongued; he had a malicious, sadistic sense of humor, but nevertheless you felt somehow he was lost.”
> The most important fact about Carl Norden, the godfather of precision bombing, is not that he was a brilliant engineer or a hopeless eccentric. It’s that he was a devoted Christian. As historian Stephen McFarland puts it, You might wonder, if he thought he was being in service to humanity, why he would develop sights to help people drop bombs. And the reason was because he was a true believer that by making bombing accuracy better, he could save lives.
> So LeMay said, Let’s try it. Let’s fly in straight. A seven-minute-long, straight and steady approach. And if that sounded suicidal—which it did to all his pilots—he added, I’m going to be the first to try it. In a 1942 bombing run over Saint-Nazaire, France, LeMay led the way. He took no evasive action. And what happened? His group put twice as many bombs on the target as any group had before. And they didn’t lose a single bomber.
> In his memoir, Hitler’s minister of armaments and war production, Albert Speer, provides a detailed account of the Schweinfurt missions and what he calls “the enemy’s error.” He notes: “The attacks on the ball-bearing industry ceased abruptly. Thus, the Allies threw away success when it was already in their hands. Had they continued the attacks…with the same energy, we would quickly have been at our last gasp."
> The first step was building the B-29 Superfortress, the greatest bomber ever built, with an effective range of more than three thousand miles. The next step was capturing a string of three tiny islands in the middle of the western Pacific: Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. They were the Mariana Islands, controlled by the Japanese. The Marianas were 1,500 miles across the water from Tokyo
> Over the course of the war, how many American planes do you think crashed while trying to navigate over the Hump? Seven hundred. The flying route was called “the aluminum trail” because of all the debris scattered over the mountains.
> The only way they could get gasoline to Chengdu was by flying the Hump. Sometimes, if they had a headwind, it took twelve gallons of a B-29’s gasoline to bring one gallon over the Hump.
> Hottel first tried British thermite bombs, which were favored by the RAF commander Arthur Harris in his night raids on Germany. They compared those results with those of Hershberg and Fieser’s napalm, packed inside bombs that went by the name M69.
> At one point, in late December, the second in command of the entire Army Air Forces, Lauris Norstad, gave Hansell a direct order: launch a napalm attack on the Japanese city of Nagoya as soon as possible. It was, in Norstad’s words, “an urgent requirement for planning purposes.” Hansell did a trial run and burned down a paltry three acres of the city. Then he grimaced, shrugged, delayed, promising to do something bigger at some point, maybe, when his other work was finished.
> Then Norstad turned to Hansell, completely out of the blue, and said: You’re out. Curtis LeMay’s taking over.
> Jet stream plus heavy cloud cover means low. Low means night. And the decision to switch to night raids means you can’t do precision bombing anymore
> One of LeMay’s pilots once said that when he confessed his fears to LeMay, LeMay replied: “Ralph, you’re probably going to get killed, so it’s best to accept it. You’ll get along much better.”
> After the firebombing of Tokyo in March of 1945, Curtis LeMay and the Twenty-First Bomber Command ran over the rest of Japan like wild animals. Osaka. Kure. Kobe. Nishinomiya. LeMay burned down 68.9 percent of Okayama, 85 percent of Tokushima, 99 percent of Toyama—sixty-seven Japanese cities in all over the course of half a year. In the chaos of war, it is impossible to say how many Japanese were killed—maybe half a million. Maybe a million. On August 6, the Enola Gay, a specially outfitted B-29, flew from the Marianas to Hiroshima and dropped the world’s first atomic bomb. Yet LeMay kept going.
> LeMay’s firebombing campaign unfolded with none of that deliberation. There was no formal plan behind his summer rampage, no precise direction from his own superiors. To the extent that the war planners back in Washington conceived of a firebombing campaign, they thought of hitting six Japanese cities, not sixty-seven. By July, LeMay was bombing minor Japanese cities that had no strategically important industry at all—just people, living in tinderboxes
> this Japanese historian believed: no firebombs and no atomic bombs, and the Japanese don’t surrender. And if they don’t surrender, the Soviets invade, and then the Americans invade, and Japan gets carved up, just as Germany and the Korean peninsula eventually were.
> The Bomber Mafia: Harold George (above left), Donald Wilson (above right), Ira Eaker, and others were convinced that precision bombing, aimed at crucial choke points of the enemy’s supply chain, could win wars entirely from the air.
Norden, LeMay, the Air force, DuPont, a full range of characters that invented ways to make war more effective, with the hope that this war would be the last. Highlights how technological advances are often used in ways they were not meant. Limited in scope, short in play time, I found this thought provoking.
During World War II, it was imperative for the Americans to have a place from which to stage their aircraft in order to attack Japan. The Mariana Islands enabled our bombers to
In this brief book, two generals are largely featured as integral parts of the war effort. One is Major General Haywood S. Hansell Jr. and the other is General Curtis LeMay. One was fired for not accomplishing the goal of winning the war and the other was hired and did successfully bring about its end. One considered all consequences and casualties on the road to victory, resulting in catastrophic failure, and the other was headstrong and focused first and foremost on the ultimate goal of winning without regard to the loss of innocent lives.
Citing many examples, complete with quotes, sound effects and audio commentary from the actual persons involved , Gladwell explains how the idea of precision bombing came about and explores the types of men and methods involved in developing it. A group of forward-thinking men who were not afraid to think outside of the box, became the “Bomber Mafia. In spite of opposition in favor of carpet bombing, rather than precision bombing, eventually this group helped to bring about an end to the terrible war, though history has shown that they did not get appropriate credit for it and remained largely unacknowledged.
Without their creative ideas, coupled with their courage to persevere and develop them, the war would probably have continued far longer and accrued many more American casualties and fatalities. Their technology somewhat improved the accuracy of the bombers, but their ultimate achievement was the development of Napalm. Previously, bombings were haphazard, with bombs randomly dropping in approximate areas, sometimes missing the mark altogether. With their bomb sights, a more precise target could be chosen and struck more effectively. That technology, however, was not advanced enough, at that time, to end the war. The terrible incendiary devices were more effective and far more destructive of property and human life. As the author notes, in hindsight it is easy to judge the violence and destruction more harshly, but as one is experiencing the theater of war, one thinks only of inflicting harm on the enemy to bring about its end without our continued loss of life. The Bomber Mafia were at odds with the prevailing judgment of military men, but ultimately, they paved the way for the more precise war efforts of today.
Maxwell Gladwell narrates his book very well, with just the right emotional stress coupled with an intellectual approach. He treats each word as if seeing it for the first time and as is if he is being enlightened with the facts along with the listener.
However, flying a
When the Americans developed the B-29 which could cross the great distances to Japan, their commander on the scene, Curtis LeMay knew what damage napalm could do to Japanese houses and he decided to burn Japanese cities to the ground. His first city was Tokyo and he created a fire storm the killed thousands of people trapped in its narrow streets with no way to escape which became known as the "longest night of the second world war". He felt dropping the Atomic Bomb was unnecessary as the Japanese would have soon surrendered after he had destroyed all their cities.
This is another Gladwell effort that is full of trivia on the main theme and short biographies of the characters he finds were involved. Very informative and interesting.
Second, Gladwell effectively raises the moral question of bombing civilians. The Germans did this in the battle of Britain but only strengthened the resolve of the English people. Within the US military, there were individuals who only wanted to target military, manufacturing and war supporting industries. They felt that that was the most effective and in a sense the most humane way to end a war.
To be fair, in 1945 it looked like the United States and its allies were going to have to invade Japan. That would've meant hundreds of thousands of American deaths not to mention millions of Japanese who would've died.
But let's face it, we unleashed a lot of barbarism to end the conflict.
Gladwell's book should be read by every head of state, legislators, diplomats and military leaders in every country. There really aren't a lot of ground rules when it comes to war – – barbarism inevitably occurs. Read Gladwell's description of the effects of the napalm bombing in Tokyo:
Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reach them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their back's only to discover – – when they stopped to rest – – that their babies were on fire. People jumped into the canals off the Sumida River, only to drown when the tide came in or when hundreds of others jumped on top of them. People tried to hang on to steel bridges until the metal grew too hot to the touch, and they fell to their deaths.
The effects of the bombing are summarized below:
After the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following: “Probably more people lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six hour period than at any time in the history of man." As many as 100,000 people died that night.
Some people did not “get” Gladwell’s intent. I think I got it.
This is a discussion of the schools of though in bombing theory during the 1930s into WWII. It reads a bit like a novel and compares the personalities and motivations of the principal
It was interesting and quick read. Judging by his comment, the author had access to the thoughts by then current Air Force leadership and conducted research at Maxwell AFB. I kind of felt he touched the top of the story without going deeply into the story.
7/10 Would recommend as an additional source.
Of the World Wars, I'm much more interested in WWI but I honestly don't know too much
If you are going to read this I would recommend the audiobook for sure, though I did read along with the book and that is fine but you definitely lose something in the transition from audio to text. This is a short, interesting book and I enjoyed it.
The topic
Still, this slight little book treats some things too casually. The Bomber Mafia apparently thought it was wrong to target a nation's houses but not that nation's water supply. Why the one and not the other? The book doesn't seem to say. And I've read enough about the British air war against Germany (and talked to enough civilian survivors of that war) to not be a big fan of Bomber Harris, but Gladwell's close reading of a statement by Harris in an effort to prove that Harris was a psychopath seems rather sloppy to me.
However, this plan seemed to fail when World War II erupted, both in the European theater and in the Pacific theater. Eventually, on both fronts, area bombing became the modus operandi and produced massive casualties. Ironically, most leaders at the time and most historians today credit these area bombing campaigns with ultimately shortening the war. By their demoralizing civilian impact, a wholesale (and costly) land invasion of Japan was averted.
In recent American military campaigns (both Gulf Wars, Afghanistan, and Kosovo), precision bombing has avoided massive civilian casualties and produced quick victories. However, confidence in the ease of these techniques only encourage more violence, not less, and over-reliance on them can potentially make costly mistakes more common.
In journalistic fashion, Gladwell originally produced this work for presentation as an audiobook. This format makes listening to the book far more interesting than expected. On top of that, the tale’s novelty entices. World War II has been exhaustively examined by historians, but through thorough investigation of US military records and access to Air Force leadership, Gladwell was able to unearth an untold story. Then he engages the public’s imagination to produce a winning feat. I can find no holes in his execution in telling this well-researched narrative. Kudos for this great presentation!
Bomber Mafia is the misnomer applied to the group of officers who argued that the mass killing of
General Curtis LeMay expressed the opposing view that the humane approach to war was to strike as forcefully and ruthlessly as possible. Kill as many of the enemy as quickly as you can to force them to surrender. Although that sounds inhumane, LeMay argued his approach resulted in fewer deaths and injuries and less human suffering than a more prolonged war.
The development of the Norden bombsight was critical to the success of the Army Air Corps in achieving the Bomber Mafia’s goal. Unfortunately, the bombsight was not as effective as expected. Despite using thousands of bombers to drop tons of bombs, the war production of ball bearings was only minimally affected. In hindsight, it is apparent that the problem was not with the theory but with the current state of technology. The accuracy needed was not achievable at that time.
LeMay’s approach led to the massive firebombing of 67 Japanese cities, some of which had no strategically important industry.
I was not aware of the philosophical debate described in The Bomber Mafia, and it places the related military actions in WW II in a different light. Argument and angst have focused on using the atomic bomb, and LeMay’s contention that the massive killing of the enemy was the most humane approach is at the heart of this discussion. But the firebombing of cities by Germany and the Allies has been muted in comparison. However, it is worth noting that the United States and 114 other nations have signed a United Nations protocol outlawing the use of incendiary weapons.
The Bomber Mafia is well worth reading. Gladwell makes a few missteps—the effort to draw biblical comparisons, for example—but the brief account is a lively and informative read.
When I went to
As a story of morality, the book works well. As a history, it falls short. It lacks context and I suspect it inflates the importance of LeMay and Hansell as individuals. There is an over-reliance on oral histories...which are valuable, but subject to the inevitable failures of memory and personal perspectives. And, there are no voices of the British forces or of the many people who were bombed.
Despite that, it is worth reading because it raises important moral issues and provides food for thought.
The sub-title promises a kind of conceptual approach to technological innovation and war – Yet, what we get is a thin surrogate of a theory of change. Strategic change occurs as a result of stubborn, visionary, male super beings, whose ego’s occasionally clash, which can lead to some (temporary) confusion before the great wheel of history receives another swing from a brilliant alpha male in the right direction. Basically, the few facts that Gladwell uses to narrate the story of an American school of precision bombers, could equally be used to construe a recurrent story of failure, right till the present day of drone-driven assassinations. During all this time, the promise of precision bombing remained just that – a promise that was used to perpetrate the most morally despicable acts of mindless carpet bombing that was known to achieve the opposite of what it was meant to achieve (break the spirit of resistance? Duhh, the opposite!).
I would rather have known how it is possible that in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such ineffectual bombing strategies stay in place (which mechanisms are responsible for this kind of morally doubtful wastage of lives on both ends). What Malcolm does well, is to write in short bursts and sentences, making use of personalized suspense to keep one reading. Chapot for that!