The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (Gladwell, Malcolm)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War. Little, Brown and Company, 2021.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Author’s Note
But I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.
Introduction: “This isn’t working. You’re out.”
It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back.
Part One: The Dream
Chapter One: “Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop.”
Because early in the twentieth century, the world went through World War I, in which thirty-seven million people were wounded or killed. Thirty-seven million. There were over a million casualties in the Battle of the Somme, a single battle that had no discernible point or impact on the course of the war.
the only realistic solution was for armies to change the way they fought wars. To learn to fight—if this doesn’t sound like too much of an oxymoron—better wars. And the people who made the argument for better wars were pilots.
Chapter Two: “We make progress unhindered by custom.”
Revolutions are invariably group activities.
Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.
The legendary Army general John “Black Jack” Pershing,
Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.”
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.
And so we arrive at principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.
you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are.
Chapter Three: “He was lacking in the bond of human sympathy.”
The Bomber Mafia said that you break the will of your enemy by crippling it economically—by carefully and skillfully taking out the aqueducts and the propeller-spring factories—so that the enemy is incapable of going on. They believed that modern bombing technology allowed you to narrow the scope of war. The British disagreed. They thought the advantage of having fleets of bombers was that you could broaden the scope of war. They called it “area bombing,” which was a euphemism for a bombing strategy in which you didn’t really aim at anything in particular. You just hit everything you could before flying home.
When the British wanted a better euphemism for what they were doing, they called it “morale bombing”—bombing with the intent to destroy the homes and cities of your enemy and reduce your enemy’s population to a state of despair.
The British were trying to win a war, and it seemed to them that the Americans were holding an undergraduate philosophy seminar.
But… since you feel so strongly about it, I’ll see if I can make a date for you to talk to the prime minister tomorrow morning.”
Hitler believed that if the Nazis bombed the working-class neighborhoods of East London, they would break the will of the British population. And because the British believed the same theory, they were terrified that the Blitz would cost them the war. The British government projected that between three and four million Londoners would flee the city. The authorities even took over a ring of psychiatric hospitals outside London to handle what they expected to be a flood of panic and psychological casualties. But what actually happened? Not that much! The panic never came.
The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.”
The psychiatric hospitals were switched over to military use because no one showed up.
the British authorities began to observe—to their astonishment—not just courage in the face of the bombing but also something closer to indifference.
It turns out that people were a lot tougher and more resilient than anyone expected.
The area-bombing advocates had this cleverly deceptive word they used to describe the effect of their bombing: dehousing. As if you could destroy a house without disturbing its occupants. But if my house is gone, doesn’t that make me more dependent on my government, not more inclined to turn on my government?
think we’ve seen this over and over again in the history of bombing. We’ve seen [that] the state, the target state—if we’re talking about coercive bombing, long-range coercive bombing—finds ways of absorbing the punishment if it’s really determined to do so.”
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 some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.
Lindemann served in Churchill’s cabinet as a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill’s mind. He went with Churchill to conferences. He dined with him.
definition of morality, and he answered: “I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.”
We weren’t aiming particularly at the civilian population. We were aiming at the production of everything that made it possible for the German armies to continue the war.
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.
he was a true believer that by making bombing accuracy better, he could save lives.
destroy machines of war, not the people of war.
Chapter Four: “The truest of the true believers.”
But military press releases tend to be loaded with so many euphemisms, elaborations, and aggressive improvements on the truth that if placed in any body of water, they would sink immediately to the bottom.
“There was a rain, and thousands of trays of ball bearings were rusted and they couldn’t be used. Engine production stopped at a time when it was desperately needed. It became quite apparent that the rotating machinery was extremely sensitive to the ball-bearing industry.”
He had a mind that moved only forward, never sideways.
Chapter Five: “General Hansell was aghast.”
The Seekers stayed rooted in their seats for hours, slowly coming to terms with the fact that no visitor from outer space would be coming to their rescue. But did “disconfirmation” of their belief cause them all to abandon it? No. At 4: 45 that morning, Martin announced that she had gotten another message. Because of the unwavering faith of the Seekers, she said, God had called off the destruction of the world. What did Festinger make of all this? 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.
There was something in LeMay’s makeup—in his obsession with the how and the what—that resisted any intellectual enthusiasms.
Part Two: The Temptation
Chapter Six: “It would be suicide, boys, suicide.”
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.
A Japanese scientist named Wasaburo Ooishi had actually discovered the jet stream in the 1920s in a series of groundbreaking experiments. But Ooishi happened to be devoted to the artificially constructed language called Esperanto, which was briefly in vogue in that era, and he only published his findings in Esperanto, which meant of course that almost no one read them.
Chapter Seven: “If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”
The birth of napalm. Baptized in eight inches of water in the middle of Harvard’s soccer pitch.
napalm, created at Harvard University, perfected in the fields along the meandering Charles River.
Chapter Eight: “It’s all ashes. All that and that and 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.” As many as one hundred thousand people died that night.
Chapter Nine: “Improvised destruction.”
LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.
his desk was a plaque with a mock-Latin inscription—Illegitimi non carborundum. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
I wonder if the explanation for Stimson’s blindness isn’t the same as the explanation for Stilwell’s. What LeMay was doing that summer was simply outside his imagination.
LeMay’s firebombing campaign unfolded with none of that deliberation.
By July, LeMay was bombing minor Japanese cities that had no strategically important industry at all—just people, living in tinderboxes. The historian William Ralph calls LeMay’s summer bombing campaign “improvised destruction”:
Because what happens is that 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.
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: “All of a sudden, the Air House would be gone. Poof.”
There is a set of moral problems that can be resolved only with the application of conscience and will. Those are the hardest kinds of problems. But there are other problems that can be resolved with the application of human ingenuity. The genius of the Bomber Mafia was to understand that distinction—and to say, We don’t have to slaughter the innocent, burn them beyond recognition, in pursuit of our military goals. We can do better. And they were right.