The Bomber Mafia
"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.
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What Hacker News says
- There's a good book by Malcolm Gladwell called "the bomber mafia" that's all about the airforce doctrine of indiscriminate bombing to break the population and the rebel faction within the airforce who advocated high precision bombing instead. Crippling industry instead of punishing civilians.
They eventually lost out to the former, culminating in horrific napalm raids on Japan that continued even after the atomic bombs were dropped and had more casualties
- As an aside - I just finished "The Bomber Mafia" and found it to be a very fun and interesting read. A departure from his "Pop-Smart" type books in the past.
He's a very entertaining writer, and effective at telling stories - definitely lessons to be learned from his style.
- Malcolm Gladwell published a pretty interesting history on LeMay in his new book The Bomber Mafia https://www.pushkin.fm/audiobook/bomber-mafia/
- Like most Malcom Gladwell works this is confused and sloppy.
The "bomber mafia" (they didn't call themselves this) were prewar strategists who thought you could destroy an enemy's ability to fight by hitting his strategic and tactical assets with bombers.
Basically they thought that bombers would be to the next war what artillery was in WWI.
What ended up happening is level bombing wasn't very precise, it was often hard to identify the correct targets, and modern mechanized war machines were more resilient than expected so bombers ended up not being as decisive as expected.
"Area bombing" or "carpet bombing" and the strategy to "dehouse and demoralize the population" were tactics developed during the war when the earlier tactics weren't working.
- I looked back, my issue was with another Yuval book: Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
Maybe I'll try Sapians it give Yuval another try.
My recent list:
The Half Known Life
Born a Crime
American Prometheus
Operation Mincemeat
Leonardo Da Vinci
Powers and Thrones
The Icepick Surgeon
Destiny of the Republic
The River of Doubt
Red Famine
Under the Banner of Heaven
In Order to Live
The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream
Homo Deus
The Confidence Men
The Bomber Mafia
Calypso
Termination Shock
Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor
The Dawn of Everything
The Secret Life of Groceries
The Hidden Life of Trees
- > Gen. Wesley Clark was a huge advocate of the doctrine that you could win wars with air power alone and never have to sacrifice ground troops - that thinking changed after '99
Delusions about winning wars with only air power are very close to a century old now. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_Mafia ) But they seem hugely appealing to parts of human psychology - so "proved horribly wrong, yet again" doesn't do much to cure them.
That said - Gen. Clark was a career Army officer, not Air Force. And "we don't need an army to win" ideas have, ah, limited appeal to career Army folks. My read is that he was a good officer, stuck under a political leader (Pres. Bill Clinton) extremely reluctant to commit ground forces. Clark knew not to contradict his boss, and did what he could within the imposed constraints.
