The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

by Malcolm Gladwell

He truly believed in a very biological sense that sun created stupidity. And so you would never see him outside without a big hat on. His family always was forced to wear hats outside. He was, as a young boy, stationed in the Dutch East Indies, and yet he and his family always wore hats because the sun caused stupidity.

We can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet.

Nice visual. I think all big meme's like that need/have had such a visualization.

Eaker went back to his quarters and stayed up half the night drafting a response for Churchill. Everyone knew that Churchill wouldn’t read a document longer than a page. So the briefing had to be really brief. And convincing.

Maybe Jeff Bezos learned from Churchhill :)

Churchill stored all the thinking that had to do with the quantitative world inside Lindemann’s brain. And when Churchill became prime minister, in 1940, just after the war broke out, he took Lindemann with him. Lindemann served in Churchill’s cabinet as a kind of gatekeeper to Churchill’s mind. He went with Churchill to conferences. He dined with him. Lindemann never drank unless he was eating with Churchill, who was a big drinker. Then he drank. He went to Churchill’s country house on the weekends. People spotted them at 3:00 a.m., sitting by the fire, reading the newspaper together.

It became quite apparent that the rotating machinery was extremely sensitive to the ball-bearing industry.” Hansell wondered whether ball bearings might be the Achilles’ heel of Germany. Why ball bearings, specifically? Because they are at the heart of any mechanical device.

The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.

If you were the United States and you wanted to drop bombs on Japan, how would you do it? Solving that problem took the better part of the war. The first step was building the B-29 Superfortress, the greatest bomber ever built, with an effective range of more than three thousand miles. The next step was capturing a string of three tiny islands in the middle of the western Pacific: Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. They were the Mariana Islands, controlled by the Japanese. The Marianas were 1,500 miles across the water from Tokyo—the closest possible spot where you could build a runway. If you could put a fleet of B-29s on the Marianas, you could bomb Japan.

If you cared about the lives of your men—and the pain inflicted on your enemy—then you ought to wage as relentless and decisive and devastating a war as you could. Because if being relentless, decisive, and devastating turned a two-year war into a one-year war, wasn’t that the most desirable outcome?

Burning globs of napalm exploding in every direction. Then another wave of bombers. And another. The full attack lasted almost three hours; 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped. LeMay’s planners had worked out in advance that this many firebombs, dropped in such tight proximity, would create a firestorm—a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system. They were correct. Everything burned for sixteen square miles.

You wage war as ferociously and brutally as possible, and in return, you get a shorter war.