![]() ![]() And LeMay proceeded to mount such attacks again and again over Tokyo and almost every other Japanese city.īy the time LeMay sent the Enola Gay over Hiroshima on August 6, he had run out of suitable targets. More than 90,000 and possibly over 100,000 Japanese people were killed, mostly civilians, and one million were left homeless. Bombs dropped from 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers burned out much of eastern Tokyo. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, he launched Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid in history. But it took the general little more than a month to jettison dependence on the Norden bombsight and turn instead to the indiscriminate bombing of Tokyo. ![]() Gladwell describes LeMay’s early, largely unsuccessful efforts to improve on Hansell’s results. Tokyo after the March 9-10 1945 firebombing mission described in The Bomber Mafia as “the longest night of the Second World War.” Image: US Army via The Japan Times The single most destructive bombing raid in history The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War by Malcolm Gladwell (2021) 179 pages ★★★★☆ A military historian later dubbed LeMay “the Air Force’s ultimate problem solver.” If anyone could devise a more successful approach, they thought, it was LeMay. They sacked the man in charge in the Pacific, Gen. In January 1945, the Army Air Force brass concluded that the Norden-based strategy had failed in Japan. Unfortunately, the temperamental device proved far less successful under combat conditions. In tests, Carl Norden‘s invention seemed miraculous, encouraging the leadership of the Army and Navy to believe their planes could “ drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 30,000 feet.” Their hopes rested on a brilliant innovation called the Norden bombsight. They staffed the Air Corps Tactical School near Montgomery Alabama at what was then called Maxwell Field. Precision bombing was the dream of the dozen or so young maverick airmen dubbed the Bomber Mafia who trained US Air Force pilots in the 1930s. LeMay emerged the winner at the time, and he comes across as the author’s hero. Gladwell terms it “a case study in dreams gone awry.” In his telling, the debate was personified by the divergent careers of two US Army Air Force generals, Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay. The book, subtitled “ A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War,” dramatizes the debate at the heart of the growing use of airpower in the war-the dispute between the two schools of thought about strategic bombing in WWII: high-altitude precision targeting and unrestrained area bombing of cities. ![]() In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell departs from the precincts of social psychology he knows so well ( The Tipping Point, Talking to Strangers, Outliers) and ventures into the history of World War II. ![]()
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