The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell. His famous 2004 TED Talk about pasta sauce placed Malcolm onto the world’s new internet stage.
I also enjoy his podcast series Revisionist History. As a matter of fact The Bomber Mafia is an outcome of podcast Season 5, Episode 4. So Malcolm has delivered a rather unique book.
This is not a feel good story. Malcolm reveals the horror of war and the understanding that precision bombing dealt a harsh blow to Germany, while firebombing Japanese cities caused the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians.
The story begins with a short history of aerial bombing in World War I. Then Malcolm introduces Major General Haywood S. Hansell.
So Hansell and the mafia of Air Force leaders developed America’s high-altitude precision bombing strategy in World War II. His strategy was to limit civilian casualties as the pacific campaign was beginning to ramp up.
However, Hansell was replaced by Major General Curtis LeMay. Instead, LeMay altered the US Air Force tactic to a low altitude, fire bombing campaigns across Japan.
Did LeMay sell his soul?
Malcolm certainly structures this powerful storyline around Luke 4:2, the temptation of Christ by the devil:
And the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and said to him, “To you I will give all this authority and their glory, for it has been delivered to me, and I give it to whom I will. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.
Luke 4:2
LeMay led a devastating bombing campaign, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. In fact, after a single firebombing of Tokyo, between 100,00 to 130,000 civilians burned to death. Yet all the firebombing did not impact Japan’s industrial capacity to wage war.