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

by Malcolm Gladwell

Well, he would tell you that only God invents; humans discover. So for him, it was not “genius.” He would have refused to accept that term. He would not appreciate it, would not accept anyone calling him a genius. He would say he’s just one who discovers the greatness of God, the creations of God; that God reveals truths through people who are willing to work hard and to use their minds to discover God’s truths.

Revolutions are invariably group activities. That’s why Carl Norden was such an anomaly. Rarely does someone start a revolution alone, at his mother’s kitchen table.

Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.

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

The second tenet: Up until then, it had been assumed that the only way to bomb your enemy was in the safety of darkness. But if the bomber was unstoppable, why would stealth matter? The Bomber Mafia wanted to attack by daylight.

The third tenet: If you could bomb by daylight, then you could see whatever it was you were trying to hit. You weren’t blind anymore. And if you could see, it meant that you could use a bombsight—line up the target, enter t...

The fourth and final tenet: Conventional wisdom said that when a bomber approached its target, it had to come down as close as it could to the ground in order to aim properly. But if you had the bombsight, you could drop your bomb from way up high—outside the range of antiaircraf...

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

That’s the Army: deeply patriotic, rooted in service to country.

That’s very Navy: arrogant, independent, secure in the global scale of its ambitions.

this is a group of people who desperately want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the older branches of military service, the Army and the Navy. And, further, the Air Force is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern.

Area bombing is not done in daylight, because if you aren’t bombing at anything specific, why do you need to see anything? And it was explicitly aimed at civilians. It said: You should hit residential neighborhoods, and keep coming night after night, in wave after wave, until your enemy’s cities are reduced to rubble. Then the will of the enemy is going to sink so low that it will just give up. When the British wanted a better euphemism for what they were doing, they called it “morale bombing”—bombing with the intent to destroy the homes and cities of your enemy and reduce your enemy’s population to a state of despair.

The British thought the American Bomber Mafia was crazy. Why were they taking all the risks of flying during the day against targets too hard to hit? The British were trying to win a war, and it seemed to them that the Americans were holding an undergraduate philosophy seminar. So at Casablanca, Churchill said to FDR, Enough. You’re doing it our way now. And in a panic, General Arnold summoned his commander in Europe, Ira Eaker, to tell him the bad news: area bombing had won the day.

Everyone knew that Churchill wouldn’t read a document longer than a page. So the briefing had to be really brief.

So when I reported in, the old PM came down the stairway—the high glass windows and the sun was shining through the orange groves—and he came down resplendent in his air commodore’s uniform. He had a penchant, which I knew of—when he was seeing a naval person, he wore his naval uniform; air, air [uniform], and so forth. Well, he said, “General, your General Arnold tells me you’re very unhappy about my request to your president that you discontinue your daylight bombing effort and join Marshal [Arthur] Harris and the RAF in the night effort.” I said, “Yes, sir, I am. And I’ve set down here on a single page the reasons why I’m unhappy. And I have served long enough in England now to know that you will listen to both sides of any controversy before you make a decision.” So he sat down on the couch and took up this piece of paper, called me to sit beside him, and he started reading. And he read like some aged person, with his lips, half audibly. So what did Eaker write? The most basic argument he could come up with. “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.”

When he got to that point of the memo, Churchill repeated the line to himself. As if he were trying to understand the logic. Then he turned to Eaker. He said, “You have not convinced me now that you are right, but you have convinced me you should have a further opportunity to prove your case. So when I see your president at lunch today, I shall say to him that I withdraw my objection and my request...

They were all active soldiers, to my mind. Children. Mothers. The elderly. Nurses in hospitals. Pastors in churches. When you make the leap to say that we will no longer try to aim at something specific, then you cross a line. Then you have to convince yourself that there is no difference between a soldier on the one hand and children and mothers and nurses in a hospital on the other.

The whole argument of the Bomber Mafia, their whole reason for being, was that they didn’t want to cross that line. They weren’t just advancing a technological argument. They were also advancing a moral argument about how to wage war. 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.

All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.

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. As he put it years later, “War is a mean, nasty business, and you’re going to kill a lot of people. No way of getting around it. I think that any moral commander tries to minimize this to the extent possible, and to me the best way of minimizing it is getting the war over as quick as possible.”