This is not my usual fare, although I do enjoy good war stories. A friend who’s doing research on the experiences of her father in World War II recommended it to me and I’m very happy she did. Gladwell tells the true story of a paradigmatic change in the U.S. Army Air Force before and during World War II. The Bomber Mafia was published first as an audiobook, complete with atmospheric music and sound effects, as well as clips of interviews with the main characters and military historians. Now it’s also available as a book, but I highly recommend the audio. It’s only about five hours and totally immersive. Gladwell is the narrator and does a sterling job.
The Air Force didn’t become a separate military service until 1947. During World War II it was part of the Army and called the Air Corps. In the 1930s, the military couldn’t figure out how airplanes were going to contribute to the next war; they saw them as support for ground troops. Maybe they’d need a few planes. However, a group of driven, idealistic, iconoclastic Air Corps pilots and officers had a vision that planes could take the place of ground troops by using high-altitude, daylight precision bombing. For their radical vision, they were known as the Bomber Mafia. They were brilliant, often eccentric officers; their personalities and disputes, plus Gladwell’s high-energy reading make it all very colorful and fun to listen to.
It was quite a stretch for the tradition-bound military services to accept this idea of high altitude, daylight bombing, but the Bomber Mafia persisted in trying to convince the generals. There was a new bombsight, invented by a Dutchman named Carl Norden, that had a high level of accuracy. It was a complicated analog computer that supposedly could put a bomb into a pickle barrel. If the Air Corps deployed this device, fewer pilots would be killed, fewer planes lost, and there would be fewer casualties on the ground. The Bomber Mafia thought the Norden bombsight was just the thing to win the coming war. The U.S. was the only country that had it. What could go wrong?
One of my uncles was a Seabee in the Navy, stationed on Tinian, part of the Mariana Islands in the Pacific that were used as bases to launch bombs against Japan. The Seabees built the airfields under enemy fire. There’s a family story about how his sister, my mother, sent him a jar of peanut butter. He turned up his nose and tossed it in the sand, but then crawled out to find it later when heavy shelling devastated their food supplies. After listening to The Bomber Mafia I now have a sense of what it must have been like for him. Haywood Hansell was the commander on Tinian, hoping to use the Norden bombsight for high altitude daylight bombing and validate the approach of the Bomber Mafia. He was sure Japan would surrender soon. It didn’t go so well for several interesting reasons, and he was replaced by Curtis LeMay, a traditionalist. LeMay had another approach that he was also sure was the right one.
I won’t tell any more of the details, except to say that Gladwell brings out the moral questions inherent in the story and the personalities of the principal protagonists (and antagonists). I’m pretty sure that if you start listening to this, you’ll be riveted to the end.
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