More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 16 - January 17, 2022
The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps.
“Mr. Norden was content to pass his time in the shop, which sometimes was an eighteen-hour day.”
I feel quite certain that if the controlling element of the War Department general staff had known what we were doing at Maxwell Field, we would have all been put in jail. Because it was just so contrary to their established doctrine that I just can’t imagine their knowing and allowing us to do it.
And so we arrive at principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.
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.
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.
A number of the historians I met with were themselves former Air Force pilots.
But back in the 1930s, the Bomber Mafia was talking about something theoretical, something they hoped would exist.
The Masks of War, by a political scientist named Carl Builder.
The Pittsburgh flood brought the whole aeronautics industry of 1936 to a halt: for the want of a spring, the airplane business was lost.
And if we can find another dozen or so crucial targets just like that—“choke points” was the phrase he used—bombing could cripple the whole country.
In a two-day presentation in April of 1939 at the Tactical School, they tried to figure it out.
Seventeen bombs! Conventional wisdom was that you would have to bomb the whole city—reduce it to rubble with wave upon wave of costly and dangerous bombing attacks. Fairchild’s point was, Why would you do that if you could use your intelligence, and the magic of the Norden bombsight, to disable a city with a single strike?
And this astonishing set of projections was produced just in nine days, start to finish—the kind of superhuman feat that is only possible if you have spent the previous ten years in the seclusion of central Alabama, waiting for your chance.
But if my house is gone, doesn’t that make me more dependent on my government, not more inclined to turn on my government?
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 Norden depended on visual sighting of the target. You looked through the telescope, saw what you wanted to hit, then entered all the information: wind direction, airspeed, temperature, the curvature of the earth, and so on.
What did Festinger make of all this? 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.
He could have hung mementos of any of those things in his foyer. But he didn’t. In the entryway to his house, he hung a reminder from his first real encounter with the orthodoxy of the Bomber Mafia, a reminder of failure and loss.
But the air attack plan was—in every sense of the word—absurd. Deeply absurd. First, consider the B-29. In 1944, it was a brand-new airplane, rushed into service. It broke down. Engines caught fire. No one had been properly trained to fly it. It had all kinds of idiosyncrasies.ii
Nakajima Aircraft Company, known as Subaru today—was
And fighters…Within a radius of fifteen miles of the Imperial Palace live seven million Japanese, a people we used to think of as small, dainty, polite, concerning themselves only with floral arrangements and rock gardens and the cultivation of silkworms.
If you weren’t using human ingenuity and science to improve the way human beings conducted their ruinous affairs, then what was the point? This is what technological innovation was for.
LeMay starts by trying out his own version of his predecessor’s strategy. He decides to take out the Nakajima aircraft plant in Tokyo. He needs to satisfy himself that Hansell’s failure wasn’t just Hansell.
He had sat in his car with St. Clair McKelway and said, “If this raid works the way I think it will, we can shorten this war.” You wage war as ferociously and brutally as possible, and in return, you get a shorter war.
Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.
