Review and highlights: The Bomber Mafia, by Malcom Gladwell
The Bomber Mafia, by Malcom Gladwell
Malcom Gladwell is commonly criticized for reaching some inaccurate conclusions. In “The Tipping Point,” he popularized the Broken Window Theory, which states New York City’s tight policing of minor infractions drove historic crime decreases in the 90s and early 2000s. In fact, that decrease began before the city’s efforts. Gladwell’s detractors blame him popularizing the tactics throughout the US, leading to increased harassment of underprivileged Americans.
But Gladwell is master storyteller who examines historical topics in an engaging way. It’s on the reader to draw their own conclusions and, if so inclined, do further research with other sources.
Through that lens, “The Bomber Mafia” is another interesting and important work by Gladwell.
The Bomber Mafia was born as a audiobook, and then later converted to print. It’s a bit on the short side, coming in under 180 pages. As a result, it feels somewhat incomplete, more like a lengthy blog post than a full-length book. Given the gravity of the material, Gladwell could have presented a more complete story by including more perspectives of the German and Japanese citizens who suffered at the hands of the Allies’ all-out bombing efforts.
Key ideas from The Bomber Mafia
General Haywood Hansell was the leader of The Bomber Mafia, a small group within the military that believed an emerging technology—airborne warfare—could make wars shorter and far less deadly. By dropping bombs with precision onto strategic targets, Hansell believed wars could be won faster and with far less bloodshed.
Unfortunately, Hansell’s theory failed in the field. The technology was not there to bomb with precision. The weather wrecked havoc on their efforts. And, because precisions runs had to occur during the daytime, missions were more susceptible to both enemy pilots and groundfire.
General Curtis LeMay had a competing vision. He too believed airpower could shorten wars, but only by bombing widely and indiscriminately to create as much civilian and military destruction as possible. After successfully revamping and leading the bombing efforts over Germany—including going on bombing runs himself—LeMay replaced Hansell in the Pacific. As a result, the U.S. firebombed nearly 70 Japanese cities using napalm, and, of course, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gladwell examines the motivations of both men and reaches a couple of interesting conclusions. LeMay, reviled in some circles for his aggressive tactics, probably did shorten the war, and undoubtably saved the lives of many Allied soldiers who would have died in a ground invasion of Japan. LeMay’s vision that short and brutal war creates faster peace might have been the right one overall.
But in the long run, Hansell and The Bomber Mafia’s vision won out. Technology simply had to catch up. Today, the United States can drop a missile into a particular room of a house from a drone. Pinpoint bombing is a reality.
Kindle highlights from The Bomber Mafia
So there were Hansell and Norstad in Guam. Two war-weary airmen, facing what they hoped might be the war’s
final chapter.
Curtis LeMay was Haywood Hansell’s antithesis.
How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path? The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry.
Chapter One
Norden was Dutch.
His nickname was Old Man Dynamite. He drank coffee by the gallon. Lived on steak.
Norden “read Dickens avidly for revelations on the lives of the disadvantaged and Thoreau for the discussion of the simple
Bombers, in the early days of aviation, couldn’t hit anything. Not even close.
The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden. And why spend so much on a bombsight? Because the Norden represented a dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore.
Chapter Two
Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.
Richard Kohn, chief historian of the US Air Force for a decade, explains that in the early days, people just didn’t understand airpower: I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, “Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don’t we just buy one of them and let the services share it?”
That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.
principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.
The second tenet:
if the bomber was unstoppable, why would stealth matter? The Bomber Mafia wanted to attack by daylight.
The third tenet: If you could bomb by daylight, then you could see whatever it was you were trying to hit. You weren’t blind anymore. And if you could see, it meant that you could use a bombsight—line up the target, enter the necessary variables, let the device do its work—and boom.
The fourth and final tenet: Conventional wisdom said that when a bomber approached its target, it had to come down as close as it could to the ground in order to aim properly. But if you had the bombsight, you could drop your bomb from way up high—outside
High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama.
When he first got to England, Eaker lived at the home of his counterpart in the Royal Air Force, Arthur Harris,
Ira Eaker and Arthur Harris have doctrines of bombing that are 180 degrees out from one another, completely different. Yet they become fast friends.
And it also turns out that maybe if you bomb another country day in and day out, it doesn’t make the people you’re bombing give up and lose faith.
The British had their own version of a Bomber Mafia—with an equally dogmatic set of views about how airpower ought to be used. Actually, the word mafia is not quite right—more like a single bombing mafioso. A godfather. And his name was Frederick Lindemann.
The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds.
When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.
In 1935, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of more than $60,000 on alcohol—in one year.
One of the subjects on which Lindemann was most persuasive, when it came to Churchill, was bombing. Lindemann was a great believer in the idea that the surest way to break the will of the enemy was by bombing its cities indiscriminately.
When you make the leap to say that we will no longer try to aim at something specific, then you cross a line. Then you have to convince yourself that there is no difference between a soldier on the one hand and children and mothers and nurses in a hospital on the other.
The whole argument of the Bomber Mafia, their whole reason for being, was that they didn’t want to cross that line. They weren’t just advancing a technological argument. They were also advancing a moral argument about how to wage war. 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.
So for Commanding General Ira Eaker, that midnight trip to Casablanca to save precision bombing was the most morally consequential act of his life. And when he came back to his air base in England, he said, We need a new plan for the war in Europe, one that will show the British that there is a better way to wage an air war. And whom did he pick to think up that plan? Haywood Hansell, now General Hansell, one of the brightest of the young lights in the US Army Air Forces. The same Hansell who would one day abruptly lose his job to Curtis LeMay on the island of Guam.
Chapter Four
He put flying first, polo second, and family a distant third. Once, early in his marriage, the story goes, he heard a baby cry and turned to his wife. “What in heaven’s name is that?” “That’s your son,” she said.
The Bomber Mafia was made up of theorists, intellectuals who conceived of their grand plans in the years before the war from the safety of Montgomery, Alabama. But Curtis LeMay was the one who figured out how to realize those theories.
he was one of those guys that, if you gave him a problem to fix, you didn’t ask a whole lot of questions how he was going to do it.
Chapter Five
The orders given to Curtis LeMay on the eve of the Schweinfurt raid called for him to lead an elaborate decoy mission. He would take off first with the Fourth Bombardment Wing—a fleet of B-17 bombers. And they’d head for the Messerschmitt aircraft factories in Regensburg.
A few years after the war, a movie came out called Twelve O’Clock High. It was based on a book written by Beirne Lay, the pilot under LeMay. Twelve O’Clock High starred Gregory Peck as the leader of an attack on a ball-bearing factory. It’s worth watching because it perfectly captures the persistence of the Bomber Mafia’s vision.
The year 1943 was a dark time for the Bomber Mafia. Every one of its ideas crumbled in the face of reality. The team was supposed to be able to put a bomb inside a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. That now seemed like a joke.
The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.
In a 1971 interview, LeMay was even more blunt.
Some swivel-chair target analysts back in the Pentagon. He’s talking about Haywood Hansell and the Bomber Mafia, with their fanciful conjecture about how to disable the enemy.
In 1948 and 1949, he would run the Berlin Airlift, one of the pivotal events at the start of the Cold War.
In the entryway to his house, he hung a reminder from his first real encounter with the orthodoxy of the Bomber Mafia, a reminder of failure and loss.
But the Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage is not about what happened after the nuclear attacks on Japan. It’s about what happened before them—between November of 1944 and the late winter of 1945. From the command of Haywood Hansell to that of Curtis LeMay.
Chapter Six
But the Pacific theater? It was on the other end of the war-absurdity continuum. The United States and Japan probably had less contact with each other and knew less about each other than any two wartime combatants in history. More importantly, they were as far apart geographically as any two combatants in history.
If you were the United States and you wanted to drop bombs on Japan, how would you do it? Solving that problem took the better part of the war. 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:
To reach Japan, a B-29 first needed to be loaded up with twenty thousand pounds of extra fuel. And because that made the plane dangerously overweight, each B-29 also needed a ferocious wind to lift it off the runway.
In the many considerations and reconsiderations of LeMay’s legacy, there have been all manner of theories about his motivation for what he would do the following spring, when he took control of the air war in the Pacific. I wonder if the first and simplest explanation isn’t just this: when a problem solver is finally free to act, he will let nothing stand in his way.
the winter of 1944 and early spring of 1945, this narrow, hurricane-force band of air was directly over Japan. That made it impossible for Hansell’s pilots to do any of the precision bombing they had planned
Chapter Seven
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, however, this heretical idea began to seem less heretical. Didn’t a lot of Japanese industrial production actually take place in people’s houses? Wasn’t it true that a lot of the war effort happened in living rooms as well as factories? A gradual process of rationalization began to take hold.
“These generals don’t believe what scientists do. They only believe what they think they can visualize. We’ve got to build a Japanese village and a German village. It’s amazing the enormity of the effort that went into building those things.”
Hottel grouped whatever fire he saw into three categories of destructiveness: (a) uncontrollable within six minutes, (b) destructive if unattended, and (c) nondestructive. Napalm was the hands-down winner, with a 68 percent success rate in the first category on Japanese houses.
With napalm, the United States had built itself a superweapon.
The Army shipped thousands of napalm canisters to the Marianas. They urged Hansell to try—just try—a full-scale incendiary attack on Japan.
Then Norstad turned to Hansell, completely out of the blue, and said: You’re out. Curtis LeMay’s taking over. “I thought the earth had fallen in—I was completely crushed.”
he was a true believer, but he was not the kind of man who was willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people. He just didn’t have it. Didn’t have it in his soul.”
Hansell’s final mission takes place on January 19. It’s a tremendous success. Sixty-two B-29s take out the Kawasaki factory. As historian William Ralph notes: “Every important building in the entire complex was hit. Production fell by 90 percent. Not a single B-29 was lost. Hansell flew back to the United States the next day.” The irony is unbearable.
Chapter Eight
So what does “trying to get us to be independent of weather” mean? It means not only is he going to come in under the jet stream, he’s also going to come in under the clouds. He’s going to have the pilots come in between five thousand and nine thousand feet, lower than anyone has ever dreamed of taking a B-29 on a bombing run.
To be clear, five thousand feet is not just low. Five thousand feet is also unheard of.
LeMay: We had ideas flying back and forth, a lot. It was my basic decision. I made it…Nobody said anything about night incendiary bombing. But [we] had to have results, and I had to produce them. If I didn’t produce them, or made a wrong guess, get another commander in there. That’s what happened to Hansell. He got no results. You had to have them.
LeMay was uncompromising with his men in terms of how relentlessly he prepared and drilled them, but he was that way for a reason. Because he cared about them.
how would LeMay have justified the firebombing he intended to inflict on Japan? Well, he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible. That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering.
Curtis LeMay’s fleet of B-29s had, as its destination, a twelve-square-mile rectangular region of central Tokyo straddling the Sumida River.
one of the most densely populated urban districts in the world.iii
The bombs fell from the B-29s in clusters. They were small steel pipes twenty inches long, weighing six pounds each, packed with napalm.
Everything burned for sixteen square miles.
the United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded the following: “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man.”
Chapter Nine
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.
LeMay burned down 68.9 percent of Okayama, 85 percent of Tokushima, 99 percent of Toyama—sixty-seven Japanese cities
LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.
General Hap Arnold, head of the Army Air Forces, once told Stimson, with a straight face, that LeMay was trying to keep Japanese civilian casualties to a minimum. And Stimson believed him. It wasn’t until LeMay firebombed Tokyo a second time, at the end of May, that Stimson declared himself shocked at what was happening in Japan. Shocked? This was two and a half months after LeMay had incinerated sixteen square miles of Tokyo the first time around. Historians have always struggled to make sense of Stimson’s obliviousness.i
The historian Conrad Crane told me: I actually gave a presentation in Tokyo about the incendiary bombing of Tokyo to a Japanese audience, and at the end of the presentation, one of the senior Japanese historians there stood up and said, “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs.” That kind of took me aback. And then he explained: “We would have surrendered eventually anyway, but the impact of the massive firebombing campaign and the atomic bombs was that we surrendered in August.”
The other thing that would have happened is that there would have been millions of Japanese who would have starved to death in the winter.
by surrendering in August, that gives MacArthur time to come in with his occupation forces and actually feed Japan…I mean, that’s one of MacArthur’s great successes: bringing in a massive amount of food to avoid starvation in the winter of 1945.
Curtis LeMay’s approach brought everyone—Americans and Japanese—back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible.
We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.
Conclusion
It was a hot summer night. We sat outside in deck chairs—five of us. Planes roared overhead as they took off from nearby Reagan National Airport. A big air-conditioning unit hemmed and hawed. Mosquitoes buzzed about happily.
Today, the expectation is that a young pilot can hit just above the pinnacle at the base of the chimney. And…if he didn’t hit that, then that’s a miss. That level of precision. And…the reason I use that as an example is that the target is an individual who’s in that room. And I don’t want to destroy the floors below it. We do that all the time. That’s the level of precision we’ve achieved.
One general said, “So in essence, [in] Fort Myer, where we’re sitting today: you could take the eighty targets you want, and so from above forty thousand feet without seeing it, without [the bomber’s] being on your radar, those just go away.” I asked whether we would be able to hear the bomber’s approach. The reply: “You don’t. It’s too high. You don’t hear it.” We would all be sitting in our deck chairs in the backyard, and we would look up, and all of a sudden, the Air House—or maybe even some specific part of the Air House—would be gone. Poof. High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.