The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

“There is something that has always puzzled me about technological revolutions. Some new idea or innovation comes along, and it is obvious to all that it will upend our world. The internet. Social media. In previous generations, it was the telephone and the automobile. There’s an expectation that because of this new invention, things will get better, more efficient, safer, richer, faster. Which they do, in some respects. But then things also, invariably, go sideways. […] How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?”

Early on, Gladwell touches on one of the main themes of the book, Technology and Morality. He states that in many instances technology brings a promise of something better, only to go awry and be used for negative ends. He is interested in exploring how that happens and why. In this sense, the problem presented in the book is modern—and ongoing. The Bomber Mafia is a case study of an issue that has many applications.

“Airplanes made their first big appearance in World War I. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of those early planes […] They resembled something that came in the mail to be assembled in a garage. The most famous of World War I fighter planes was the Sopwith Camel. (That’s the one that Snoopy flew in the old Peanuts comic strip.) It was a mess. ‘In the hands of a novice,’ the aviation writer Robert Jackson says, ‘it displayed vicious characteristics that could make it a killer.’ Meaning a killer of the pilot flying it, not the enemy under attack. But a new generation of pilots looked at these contraptions and said, Something like this can make all that deadly, wasteful, pointless conflict on the ground obsolete. What if we just fought wars from the air?”

This is an example of Gladwell’s writing style, which can be casual and conversational (addressing the reader) where appropriate. It’s also a summary of where the Bomber Mafia doctrine came from. Reminding readers just how new airplanes were during the time of World Word II, Gladwell emphasizes their novelty as a technology and sets up the premise that, as the Bomber Mafia envisioned things, this technology could be used for something good.

“The wind could be blowing at a hundred miles per hour. You’d have to factor that in. If it’s cold, the air is dense, and the bomb will fall slowly. If it’s warm, the air is thin, and the bomb will fall fast. Then you’d also have to consider: Is the plane level? Is it moving from side to side? Or up and down? A tiny degree of error at the release point could translate to a big error on the ground. […] The dream that the airplane could revolutionize warfare was based on a massive untested and unproven assumption: that somehow, someone at some point would figure out how to aim a bomb from high in the sky with something close to accuracy. It was a question on the era’s technological wish list. Until…Carl Norden.”

Gladwell describes some of the many variables Carl Norden factored in when designing a bombsight. Gladwell presents the information as more than a list, mixing up statements and questions. He holds out the prospect many had that an accurate bomb could revolutionize warfare, but he highlights how many hurdles there were to achieve that goal. This makes Norden’s success all the more remarkable. 

“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. We wouldn’t need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We could reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost.”

Gladwell spells out the dream that some could foresee. The goal is admirable and slightly fantastic to modern readers, but it’s important to keep in mind that airpower was new at that time. This is what Gladwell is referring to in Quote #2, about technological revolutions morphing from their intended paths. As incredible as it seems today, it was seen as possible to make war “quick and almost bloodless”—if only bombing could be made precise; how that went awry is what the book is about. This quotation also includes Gladwell’s recurring symbol of the pickle barrel.

“This is so Air Force. You build a twenty-first-century chapel in the middle of the twentieth century, and it’s so far ahead of its time that you have to do an engineering workaround based on a reanalysis of meteorological patterns. My point is—where did this radical new mind-set come from? It came from the Air Corps Tactical School, in that intellectual flurry between 1931 and 1941. In those seminar rooms and late-night arguments, the culture of the modern Air Force was born. They would take warfare into the air. They would leave every other branch of the service behind. And if you stand in the sanctuary of the Air Force Academy chapel and stare up at the soaring aluminum ribs of the ceiling, you’ll get it.”

Each military academy has a chapel on campus, and the styles of each chapel demonstrate the different philosophies of each military branch. The Air Force Academy chapel is different from the others—modern and futuristic in style. At the start of the passage, Gladwell refers to a glitch in the design that caused a water leak. This, too, he likens to the Air Force’s new and experimental outlook. One can trace this back to the Air Corps Tactical School in the early days.

“The presentation was given by a key Bomber Mafia associate, Muir Fairchild. Fairchild argued that the aqueducts are the most obvious targets. […] As Fairchild concluded: ‘We see then that seventeen bombs, if dropped on the right spots, will not only take out practically all of the electric power of the entire metropolitan area but will prevent the distribution of outside power!’ […] Conventional wisdom was that you would have to bomb the whole city—reduce it to rubble with wave upon wave of costly and dangerous bombing attacks. Fairchild’s point was, Why would you do that if you could use your intelligence, and the magic of the Norden bombsight, to disable a city with a single strike?”

This quotation refers to a presentation given at the Air Corps Tactical School in April 1939. The Bomber Mafia’s philosophy of precision bombing is explained here, with all that it meant for a revamped style of warfare. The New York City power grid in the presentation is an example of what they called “choke points,” or vital elements like infrastructure or industrial centers, that would end the enemy’s war-making capability if destroyed. It seemed magical to rely on a handful of bombs to do this rather than the old method of complete area bombardment.

“The Bomber Mafia—despite its ominous name—was never very large. It was a dozen men at most, all living—more or less—within walking distance of one another on those quiet, shaded streets at Maxwell Field. Nor was the Tactical School itself some massive facility. It was never West Point, churning out generation after generation of Army officers. During its twenty years of operation, it produced just over a thousand graduates. Had the Second World War never happened, it is entirely possible that the theories and dreams of this little group would have faded into history.”

This quote describes the origins of the group at the heart of this book. The Bomber Mafia was working in near obscurity in a brand-new field when World War II came along, which put them at the forefront. Suddenly, their theories and discussions about airpower were being put to the test in practice. They were a small, tight-knit group of airmen, which helped them keep the faith during the war; even as their philosophy was being discredited, they did not abandon it.

“The ideas that had so enthralled Eaker and his classmates at Maxwell Field did not have quite the same effect on the other side of the Atlantic. The British were skeptical about precision bombing. […] They never got tantalized by the possibility of dropping a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet. The Bomber Mafia […] 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.”

This passage describes the different approaches taken by the British and American militaries during World War II and sets up the conflict they encountered when working together to bomb Germany. General Ira Eaker was a member of the Bomber Mafia who commanded the Eighth Air Force stationed in England in 1943. When Churchill convinced Roosevelt to employ area bombing, it was Eaker who persuaded Churchill to give precision bombing another chance. Throughout the book, there is this push and pull between the two approaches, between individuals and, in this case, countries. Gladwell again uses the “pickle barrel” symbol in the discussion.

“They were all active soldiers, to my mind. Children. Mothers. The elderly. Nurses in hospitals. Pastors in churches. 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 first sentence of this quotation (italicized) comes from an interview with Arthur Harris, a marshal in the British Royal Air Force (RAF). He was defending their policy of area bombing and its consequences of killing civilians. His rationalization was that all German citizens were tantamount to soldiers, devoted to the Nazi cause as they were. The members of the Bomber Mafia were diametrically opposed to this on moral grounds. However, Gladwell is foreshadowing here, as the Americans will use the same line of rationalization later when discussing the bombing of Japan.

“In 1931, as a young Army lieutenant, Hansell was assigned to Maxwell Field. He was appointed an instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School in 1935 and distinguished himself quickly as one of the sharpest minds in the entire school. When Ira Eaker was looking for someone to defend the doctrine of high-altitude daylight precision bombing against the skepticism of the British, there was no question whom he would pick. That was a job for Haywood Hansell, the truest of the true believers.”

Here, Gladwell establishes Hansell’s bona fides as a charter member of the Bomber Mafia. Eaker, who successfully petitions Churchill to continue precision bombing, chooses Hansell to carry out the mission. Sprinkled throughout the text is the phrase “true believer[s],” which Gladwell uses almost in a religious sense. It supports the theme of The Power of Belief and also connotes a Christlike faith that ties in with the motif of the Temptation of Christ. This adds overall cohesiveness to the text.

“One more LeMay story, because the fascination people have with LeMay—okay, the fascination I have with LeMay—is not that he was an extraordinary combat commander. There were plenty of those in the Second World War. The fascination comes from the unfathomable depths of his character—the sense that he didn’t have limits the way normal people did, which was, in one way, exhilarating, because it meant that LeMay could achieve things others could not even imagine. But at the same time, it gave people pause. Think about the word McNamara used to describe LeMay: brutal. And it’s not like McNamara himself was warm and fuzzy. He would later direct the saturation bombing of North Vietnam. Yet LeMay gave him pause.”

This is an example of Gladwell’s writing style and use of sources. He’s not afraid to insert himself into the narration (“okay, the fascination I have with LeMay”). He also uses quotations from others, usually contemporary figures, to describe and explain the behavior of his characters. Here, he quotes from Robert McNamara, secretary of defense during the 1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War. Because McNamara is seen as a bit of a military hawk, when he calls LeMay “brutal” the reader gets a sense of just what that means.

“LeMay being LeMay, long before the day of the attack, he worried about the weather. He was taking off from the base in England, the land of mist and fog. So in the weeks leading up to the raid, he had his crews practice blind takeoffs, day after day. Sure enough, on the morning of the mission, August 17, the fog was terrible. […] LeMay led his men off into the gloom. Once they entered occupied France, the German fighters started to emerge from behind the clouds, and LeMay’s Fourth Bombardment Wing learned what it meant to fly headfirst into the heart of the German air defense.”

Gladwell uses anecdotes like this to illuminate his characters’ personalities. Here, he sums up LeMay’s stubbornness, thoroughness, and pragmatism all at once. It was in stark opposition to Hansell, who focused on big ideas and grand strategy. No one else thought of this detail about the weather, and thus the second wave of bombers—that is, the mission’s main bombers, who were headed to the ball-bearing factories—were stuck on the ground until the weather cleared. With the delay, the Germans had a chance to regroup and attack them. This is the kind of mistake that haunted LeMay and caused him to keep photos of Schweinfurt and Regensburg in the foyer of his house as a reminder years later.

“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. And the bomber was supposed to fly so high and so fast that no one could touch it. Are you kidding me? US airmen of the Eighth Air Force were required to fly twenty-five missions to complete their tours of service. And if you were part of that second Schweinfurt mission, in which a quarter of the crews didn’t come back—well, you do the math. Fly twenty-five missions like that, and what are your odds of making it through the war alive?”

This passage highlights, in Gladwell’s informal writing style how dire the 1943 bombing campaign of Germany was for the Bomber Mafia. Planes were vulnerable to attack because they flew in the daytime, and the results of precision bombing were dismal. It would have been easy for the Bomber Mafia to abandon their beliefs and tempting to choose an alternative bombing method even if it resulted in more destruction and civilian deaths. Yet they held to their principles, demonstrating the power of belief and their commitment to wage war more humanely.

“The dream hatched back at Maxwell Field in the 1930s and brought to life by the genius of Carl Norden had run up against an unstoppable force in the skies over Japan. […] High-altitude precision bombing in the midst of a jet stream is impossible. The dreams of revolutionaries go awry when they are forced to confront an unanticipated obstacle—not a rational obstacle such as inexperience or haste or miscalculation, but something immovable. And in that moment of vulnerability and frustration, with his dream in pieces all around him, Haywood Hansell, like Jesus in the wilderness, was presented with a temptation.”

In this passage, Gladwell describes the obstacle of the jet stream that stopped Hansell in his tracks. The military was unaware of the jet stream because, until then, planes never flew high enough to encounter it. However, there was no way around it: Precision bombing in the way he worked it out was impossible when faced with the jet stream. Gladwell suspects that, if Hansell was ever going to change course, this is when he would have done it. Yet he doesn’t; he never abandons his faith in precision bombing. Note that the end of the quotation uses the motif of the Temptation of Christ by the devil. 

“As the analysts wrote, ‘After some considerable calculation, we have determined that the combustible coverage in the twenty-five-square-mile area that is the central section of Osaka is 80 percent, as opposed to 15 percent for London.’

Eighty percent—that’s almost the whole city.

The people writing the article weren’t military officers or White House policy makers. The idea that you might destroy 80 percent of one of your enemy’s cities—burn it to the ground—was heretical. […] 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.”

The article Gladwell refers to here comes from Harper’s magazine, after the Pearl Harbor attack, written by American military analysts. It shows American military leaders moving in the direction of the bombing tactics of Marshal Harris of the RAF, quoted above. The serious discussion of burning down 80% of a city shows a disregard for civilian life. Such tactics begin to be rationalized by the argument that homes were being used for industrial production.

“Imagine that you were a member of the Bomber Mafia and you happened to sit in on that demonstration test at the Dugway Proving Ground. You saw the meticulous reconstruction of Japanese villages. Heard the B-29s—your B-29s—screaming down the skies to drop their fiery payloads. You saw the houses engulfed in flames. What would you have made of it all?

[…] The Bomber Mafia was consumed with the potential of the Norden bombsight, a machine that used technology to redefine war, to make it more humane, to restrain the murderous impulses of generals on the battlefield. If you weren’t using human ingenuity and science to improve the way human beings conducted their ruinous affairs, then what was the point? This is what technological innovation was for…But then, after the initial outrage had passed, you might well have had a second thought. An unbidden thought. A temptation.”

Gladwell describes the scene of a bomb test during the Second World War, asking the reader to imagine viewing it as a member of the Bomber Mafia. It’s a turning point in the war, as the test is to determine the effectiveness of various incendiary substances, including napalm. The demonstration, Gladwell argues, would have been jarring and demoralizing, as it used technology in the opposite way that the Bomber Mafia hoped it would be used. However, it also would have been tempting because switching to incendiaries could solve many of their problems. Gladwell juxtaposes the theme of the Power of Belief with the motif of the Temptation of Christ to illustrate their dilemma.

“After the war, 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.’ As many as one hundred thousand people died that night. The aircrews who flew that mission came back shaken.”

This passage contains a harrowing quotation: the conclusion of the US military about the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945. The dominant image of destructive bombing in most people’s minds is usually from the atomic bomb attacks on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year. However, LeMay’s bombing of Tokyo killed more people during the initial attack than either atomic bomb (that is, not counting later deaths from radiation sickness). It directly reflects the theme of Technology and Morality, as the Tokyo bombing would not have been as lethal without the use of the incendiary gel napalm, developed shortly beforehand by scientists at Harvard University.

1.    “The next night, back on Guam, LeMay was awakened around midnight. The aerial photos taken during the attack were ready. As news spread, people came running from their beds. They drove up in Jeeps until the room was crowded. LeMay, still in his pajamas, put the photos down on a large table under a bright light. There was a moment of shocked silence. St. Clair McKelway was standing in the room with all the others and remembers LeMay gesturing at the vast area of devastation. ‘All this is out.’ LeMay said. ‘This is out—this—this—this.’

General Lauris Norstad stood next to him and said, ‘It’s all ashes—all that and that and that.’”

Gladwell creates scenes using dialogue and specific details. Although not much is said in the dialogue, the effect lies in how it is said. The scale of destruction is revealed simply by the repetition of “this” and “that” being reduced to ashes.

“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. In his memoirs, the nuclear attacks get no more than a couple of pages. That was someone else’s gig.”

This passage details the almost out-of-control destruction of Japan that LeMay inflicted after his first successful firebombing of Tokyo. The death toll is staggering and ultimately unknown, and the sheer destruction of cities nearly complete. Gladwell emphasizes in the chapter that this was solely the work of LeMay, a young general at the time, with no debate at higher levels over the ethical dilemmas it posed. LeMay’s trail of terror that spring and summer clearly illustrates the interplay of technology and morality, the book’s main theme.

“That’s the kind of man Stilwell was. Yet he had to see, with his own eyes, what airpower did to Yokohama to understand LeMay, because what LeMay had been talking about in their conversation in China was outside the old general’s imagination. He had been taught back at West Point that soldiers fought soldiers and armies fought armies. A warrior of Stilwell’s generation was slow to understand that you could do this, as an American Army officer, if you wanted: you could take out entire cities. And then more. One after another.”

Gladwell conveys a sense of the novelty of airpower and firebombing to some in the military, especially those of an older generation. He refers here to General Joseph Stilwell, who just before this passage he calls “as savvy and experienced and grizzled a military mind as there was in the Second World War” (190). Yet Stilwell couldn’t fully grasp what LeMay told him about bombing when they met up during the war. It was only afterward, when Stilwell saw the bombed-out city of Yokohama, that he fully understood. This is in keeping with Gladwell’s earlier discussion of how modern and futuristic the Army Air Corps was at the time—it was outside the imagination of many.

“But if Curtis LeMay won the war and the prizes, why is it that Haywood Hansell’s memory is the one that moves us? Romantic, idealistic Haywood Hansell, who loved Don Quixote, who identified with the delusional gallant knight who tilted helplessly at windmills. 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. That is what the Bomber Mafia tried to do—even as their careful plans were lost in the clouds over Europe and blown sideways over the skies of Japan. They persisted, even in the face of technology’s inevitable misdirection, even when abandoning their dream offered a quicker path to victory, even when Satan offered them all the world if only they would renounce their faith. Without persistence, principles are meaningless. Because one day your dream may come true. And if you cannot keep that dream alive in the interim, then who are you?”

This passage gets to the heart of the theme of Technology and Morality. Gladwell argues that although LeMay’s tactics won out during World War II, Hansell is an enduring figure who inspires because he did not compromise his values even when his approach to bombing was not effective enough. The message we can take from him is that if the new technologies we face today are to reach their most positive potential, people must hold firm to their proper use, even when tempted to go astray. The Hansell-LeMay story from World War II is thus a parable for modern times.

“Curtis LeMay put the bomb-damage photos of Schweinfurt and Regensburg in the foyer of his house because he wanted to remind himself every day of how many of his men were lost in the course of what he considered a fruitless mission. I would feel better about Curtis LeMay if he had also hung the strike photos from the firebombing of Tokyo—to remind himself, every day, of what was lost in the course of what he considered his most successful mission.”

Gladwell tells the story of a friend of LeMay’s visiting the general’s house in his retirement and seeing the photos of Schweinfurt and Regensburg in the foyer. First, it’s another example of how Gladwell uses the memoirs and articles of others to flesh out the portrayals of his main characters. Second, it’s also a telling bit of information about what made LeMay tick. The long-ago failure of the two bombing runs in Germany in 1943 made a strong impression on him from the loss of his men due to an overreliance on the philosophy of precision bombing. LeMay, the pragmatist, preferred to jettison philosophy in favor of the most effective methods. He did just that later when he firebombed Tokyo—a mission in which none of his men were lost—but Gladwell reminds readers that it’s also important to remember all the civilian lives that were lost there.

“None of the generals that evening claimed that this precision-bombing revolution had perfected war, or solved war. It has its own set of drawbacks. If your target is a single man inside a room, then you have to have intelligence good enough to tell you that this is the man you want. And when you have a way of hitting a man inside a room, then it becomes awfully easy to decide to strike, doesn’t it? They all worried about that fact: the cleaner and more precise a bomber gets, the more tempting it is to use that bomber—even when you shouldn’t.”

Although precision bombing has been perfected today even beyond the wildest dreams of the Bomber Mafia, Gladwell reminds readers of the central theme of the book, the connection between morality and technology. The technology has been improved immeasurably, but with it comes a new set of moral issues if it’s going to be used to improve warfare, not just make it more lethal. It might, for example, be too easy a solution, which military leaders will reach for even when greater restraint is called for.