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

by Malcolm Gladwell

The dream that the airplane could revolutionize warfare was based on a massive untested and unproven assumption: that somehow, someone at some point would figure out how to aim a bomb from high in the sky with something close to accuracy. It was a question on the era’s technological wish list. Until…Carl Norden.

But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight,

dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore. We wouldn’t need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We could reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost.

Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.”

principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.

why would stealth matter? The Bomber Mafia wanted to attack by daylight.

High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama.

They go from the B-9 to the B-10 to the B-12 to the B-15 prototype to the B-17 to the B-29 in about ten years, which is extraordinary when you think about it.

“I’d said that if the British bombed by night and the Americans by day, bombing them thus around the clock will give the devils no rest.”

In 1935, Churchill spent the modern equivalent of more than $60,000 on alcohol—in one year. Within a month of becoming prime minister, he was broke.

Harris quoted Hosea, one of the bleakest of the Old Testament prophets: “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and nobody was going to bomb them…They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

The most important fact about Carl Norden, the godfather of precision bombing, is not that he was a brilliant engineer or a hopeless eccentric. It’s that he was a devoted Christian.

Two hundred and thirty bombers, each carrying eight to nine bombs—so let’s say two thousand bombs dropped in total. And they get eighty hits. That doesn’t sound like precision bombing, does it?

Twelve O’Clock High. It was based on a book written by Beirne Lay, the pilot under LeMay.

Leon Festinger went on to become one of the most famous social psychologists in the country. And I’ve always wondered whether his experience with the Air Forces was the motivation after the war for his most famous study, an analysis of a cult out of Chicago called the Seekers. Festinger approached the Seekers with a question that must have crossed his mind years before, during that dire period when everything the Bomber Mafia believed in was proved false: What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality? As Festinger recalled, “The idea that you have to supply cognition that will fit with—that will justify—what you feel or what you do made this immediately the first thing we thought of: well, if this operates, it must be a very pervasive thing.” The leader of the Seekers was a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed to be in contact with a group of aliens she called the Guardians. The Guardians told her, she said, that the world was going to be destroyed by flood on December 21, 1954. But a few days before the apocalypse happened, she and her followers would be rescued by a flying saucer. It would land in her backyard. In preparation for this moment, the Seekers quit their jobs, left their families, and gave away their possessions. They gathered in Dorothy Martin’s house, in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park. At first, Martin said, the flying saucer was supposed to arrive at four o’clock on December 17. The aliens didn’t come. Then at midnight, ...

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.

Over the course of the war, how many American planes do you think crashed while trying to navigate over the Hump? Seven hundred. The flying route was called “the aluminum trail” because of all the debris scattered over the mountains.

National Defense Research Committee.

Gasoline mixed with aluminum naphthenate plus aluminum palmitate. Napalm.

The Bomber Mafia was consumed with the potential of the Norden bombsight, a machine that used technology to redefine war, to make it more humane, to restrain the murderous impulses of generals on the battlefield.

But suddenly you were standing somewhere deep in the Utah desert, under a hard sun, observing a military exercise authorized and funded by the same US military that paid for your Norden bombsight. Except that these people are using science and ingenuity to create incendiaries, objects to be dropped from the sky with the intention of starting violent, indiscriminate fires.

You had been going to elaborate pains to avoid hitting anything but the most crucial industrial targets. Now the Army was using your precision-bombing apparatus to obliterate people’s houses. Here was the government—your own military bosses back in Washington—pursuing a strategy 100 percent in violation of your principles.

LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.

On his desk was a plaque with a mock-Latin inscription—Illegitimi non carborundum. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Japanese government awarded LeMay the highest award their country could give a foreigner, the First-Class Order of Merit of the Grand Cordon of the Rising Sun, in appreciation for his help in rebuilding the Japanese Air Force.

analyze the power of incendiary bombs, a perfect replica of a Japanese village was built at the Dugway Proving Ground, in Utah, in 1943. Photo credit: Courtesy of JapanAirRaids.org