The Bomber Mafia: A Story Set in War
by Malcolm Gladwell
Although I love history, I do not generally seek books about military subjects. However, having enjoyed several of Malcolm Gladwell’s works, I seized the opportunity of reading his latest publication. The Bomber Mafia is, to be honest, quite an uncharacteristic book for Gladwell. He is best known for his works of sociology/social psychology such as The Tipping Point and Outliers, but The Bomber Mafia is a book about military history.
Gladwell gives us an account of the group of aviators and military strategists who, in the years between the wars, changed the way the US Air Force – and bomber divisions in particular – were perceived. The air force was originally considered an adjunct of the army, a mere support for traditional army invasions. But the pioneers of military aviation realised that war could be fought differently through attacks from the air. There was a philosophical – and, one could say, moral – underpinning to this. Strategists such as Haywood Hansell believed that through techniques of precision bombing, the infrastructure of a hostile country could be brought to its knees without unnecessary loss of human life. A key tool in this innovative vision was the “Norden bombsight”, a top-secret piece of equipment which would purportedly allow US bombers to “drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet”. We hardly need reminding that this dream was not realised during the Second World War – General Curtis LeMay’s scorched earth firebombing tactics against Japan were the antithesis of Hansell’s approach. Gladwell tells the intriguing story of how this happened and considers whether and how the views of Hansell and like-minded military leaders still have an important legacy. It makes for some edge-of-the-seat reading and the “interview” approach (the book started off as a podcast) suits it particularly well.
In his book, Gladwell
does not stick to bare facts, but often adopts a psychological approach,
delving into a psychological analysis of his larger-than-life cast of
characters. It is impressive and rather frightening to
think that certain decisions having a world-changing impact sometimes depend on
the psychological make-up of the individuals involved. This might be The
Bomber Mafia’s strongest point.
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