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

by Malcolm Gladwell

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. As historian Stephen McFarland puts it, You might wonder, if he thought he was being in service to humanity, why he would develop sights to help people drop bombs. And the reason was because he was a true believer that by making bombing accuracy better, he could save lives. He truly believed what the Army and Navy were telling him. And that is that we’re going to destroy machines of war, not the people of war. We’re not going to do like [we did in] World War I, where we slaughtered millions of soldiers.

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.

But the tools available to meteorologists of that era were crude. I know this is a digression, but the easiest thing to forget about the Second World War is that it took place in another technological era. It’s half twentieth century and half nineteenth century.

So how would LeMay have justified the firebombing he intended to inflict on Japan? Well, he would have said that it was the responsibility of a military leader to make wars as short as possible. That it was the duration of war, not the techniques of war, that caused suffering.

Satan tempts Jesus by offering him dominion over all he sees—the chance to defeat the Roman enemy—if only Jesus will accept, as one theologian puts it, “the temptation to do evil that good may come; to justify the illegitimacy of the means by the greatness of the end.” Haywood Hansell sided with Jesus on that question: you should never do evil so that good may come. But LeMay would have thought long and hard about going with Satan. He would have accepted the illegitimate means if they led to what he considered a swift and more advantageous end.

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.

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

Curtis LeMay put the bomb-damage photos of Schweinfurt and Regensburg in the foyer of his house because he wanted to remind himself every day of how many of his men were lost in the course of what he considered a fruitless mission. I would feel better about Curtis LeMay if he had also hung the strike photos from the firebombing of Tokyo—to remind himself, every day, of what was lost in the course of what he considered his most successful mission.

High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.

On January 21, 2009, the day after his inauguration, President Obama signed a United Nations protocol banning the use of incendiary weapons. As of this writing, 115 nations have signed the disarmament treaty, first introduced in 1981.