The Bomber Mafia

by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell writes about subjects the way John McPhee used to write about subjects before McP became so ponderous and candidly,  boring. 

Maybe MG’s cool, lean prose has something to do with the man himself. He’s a cool slick cat born in England, raised in Canada, who now lives in 212, with his whacked-out curly hair and slightly crazed expression (I once saw him working out at Equinox.) He is truly one-of-a-kind, always with something interesting to say. And his latest book, which began as a podcast, is no exception.

“The Bomber Mafia” has nothing to do with John Gotti and his ilk, but rather with an unconventional group of military officers who were the leading lights of the modern Air Force back in the 1920s and 1930s. What made them so unconventional was the way they wanted to wage war in the mid 20th century—for one thing, from the air, and for another, in a way that saved lives, rather than one that indiscriminately killed masses of civilians.

Their “precision-bombing” approach during WWII was a way of targeting and crippling factories that were critical to making weapons (say, plants that manufactured ball bearings), rather than “morale bombing,” which decimated civilian populations in cities like Dresden and Cologne or even London in order to wear down morale.

This did not go over well with the more conventional school of military leaders like Winston Churchill, who wanted to do to the Nazis what the Nazis did to England. Coupled with bad weather and bad timing, this newfangled “precision-bombing” approach was a resounding failure. Eventually it led back to the more hard-lined approach, both in Europe and later Japan, advocated by the redoubtable Curtis LeMay. Yeah, that guy—the one who wanted to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

Rather than focus on the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in Part Two of the book, MG chronicles the mass incinerations of Japanese cities (and their civilian populations) by LeMay during the spring of 1945. It is this approach that LeMay credits to the Americans’ eventual victory—as it, together with the August 6 and 9 atomic bombs, headed off a protracted war with Japan and/or possible invasion by both US and Russia.

Fascinating stuff especially for a peacenik like yours truly. And if you wonder if we ever came around to the “precision-bombing” approach of the Bomber Mafia, you’ll have to read the book. Which, thanks to Gladwell’s lean-and-mean prose, I devoured in the space of a day. Gulp.