Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young — in their twenties and thirties, full of the ambition of youth. They got drunk on the weekends, flew warplanes for fun, and raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” It was not intended as a compliment — these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck.
The Bomber Mafia is a different kind of book from the magpie mind of Malcolm Gladwell: Although there are several fascinating digressions*, this is primarily the straightforward story of the birth of the US Air Force in the aftermath of WWI, how they strove to perfect precision bombing before the American entry into WWII, and how the realities of battle can trump philosophical best intentions. I’m no aficionado of WWII trivia and there were many stories here I hadn’t heard before; much was fascinating. Still, this felt a little light for Gladwell; his conclusions a little pat. He explains in the intro that he has had a lifelong obsession with war histories (and with bombers in particular), so it might just be that Gladwell is too close-up with this material to see a bigger picture? And I see from other reviews that this was originally an audiobook (with audio clips of interviews, music, and sound effects), so that might be the better format in which to experience this? But at any rate, I was not disappointed overall: Gladwell cracks open some interesting nuts of history here and I was happy to squirrel it all away in my own generalist’s mind. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime. It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in a basement lab at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back. And at the heart of it all are Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay, who squared off in the jungles of Guam. One was sent home. One stayed on, with a result that would lead to the darkest night of the Second World War. Consider their story and ask yourself — What would I have done? Which side would I have been on?
Gladwell starts with the birth of the US Air Force at the Air Corps Tactical School in Montgomery, Alabama (the aviation version of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island.) In the wake of WWI’s devastation for infantrymen, these early dreamers, the “Bomber Mafia”, conceived of a world in which airplanes could replace soldiers on the ground, flying into the heart of enemy territory and disabling “chokepoints” of war manufactury. There’s interesting bits about Carl Norden and his invention of the first bombsights that would allow for precision bombing (the legend goes that with a Norden bombsight, you could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up), and what Gladwell stresses most of all, is that the founding philosophy of the US Air Force was that precision bombing would reduce the deaths of soldiers and civilians by solely targeting munitions factories and refineries and the like.
Action moves to WWII, and in the European theatre, Churchill expects the USAF to join the RAF in their “morale bombing” operations (targeting Dresden and Münster to force German surrender despite the Blitz on London having not broken English resolve), and when the story moves to the Marianas islands in the Pacific, the real heart of the Air Force’s philosophical dilemma is reached: Japan must be defeated at any cost, and when General Haywood Hansell’s precision bombing runs prove to be costly and ineffective, he will be replaced by General Curtis LeMay; a commander unafraid to fill his men’s bombers with weaponised napalm and burn Japan to the ground.
The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm — a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles. Buildings burst into flame before the fire ever reached them. Mothers ran from the fire with their babies strapped to their backs 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 then they fell to their deaths.
General LeMay would say after the war that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been superfluous; the real work had already been done to force Japan’s surrender. And in a fascinating twist, the Japanese government would eventually bestow on LeMay their highest honor for a foreigner — the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun — in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force. A Japanese historian is quoted as saying that he wanted to thank the Americans for the firebombing and the atomic bombs; if the Japanese government hadn’t been forced to surrender, there would have been a devastating land invasion, the Soviets would have carved the country up, and there would have been mass starvation in the winter of 1945 if General MacArthur hadn’t mobilised massive amounts of food aid. Despite it being concluded of the first night of firebombing that “Probably more persons lost their lives by fire at Tokyo in a six-hour period than at any time in the history of man”, the point can be made that this subversion of the precision-bombing-to-avoid-deaths philosophy went on to save countless more lives. So, as Gladwell asks in the beginning, put in the position of General Hansell (morally opposed to firebombing) or LeMay (reluctantly accepting of), what would you do?
There is a lot to fascinate in this narrative — Gladwell pulls threads from many directions to weave a unified whole — but it’s not a very long read and the moral quandary at its heart felt a little manufactured. A little slight, a little pat, but definitely interesting while it lasted. Rounding up to four stars.
*Digressions of note: The stunning architecture of the Air Force Academy Chapel that reinforces that branch of the military’s commitment to the unconventional; the western approach to bombing Japan started from India and travelled over the Himalayas (a route known as the “Hump” or “the aluminum trail” for the scattered debris from hundreds of airplane crashes); although the jet stream over Tokyo was unknown to American pilots in 1945, it had been discovered in the ‘20s by Japanese scientist Wasaburo Ooishi, but he only published his findings in Esperanto (ha!).
