The bomber mafia, p.16
The Bomber Mafia, page 16
For the NDRC’s analysis of incendiary weapons, see National Defense Research Committee, Summary Technical Report of Division 11, vol. 3, Fire Warfare: Incendiaries and Flame Throwers (Washington, DC, 1946), available at https://www.japanairraids.org/?page_id=1095.
“The main component…toward the target”: M-69 Incendiary Bomb, Department of Defense combat bulletin no. 48, PIN 20311, 1945, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPteVZyF4U0.
“Boys. It’s tough…doing well” and “I don’t agree…operation will fail”: Transcript of Interview with Major General J. B. Montgomery, Los Angeles, CA, August 8, 1974, Clark Special Collections Branch, McDermott Library, US Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO.
“an urgent requirement for planning purposes”: Charles Griffith, The Quest: Haywood Hansell and American Strategic Bombing in World War II (Montgomery, AL: Air University Press, 1999), 182.
“Every important building...the next day”: William W. Ralph, “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” War in History 13, no. 4 (2006): 517, doi:10.1177/0968344506069971.
Chapter Eight: “It’s all ashes. All that and that and that.”
Many of the primary sources cited in this chapter and elsewhere are available at Japan Air Raids (https://www.japanairraids.org/), a bilingual historical archive run by David Fedman, assistant professor of East Asian history at the University of California at Irvine, and Cary Karacas.
“How many times…we’ll go” and “Suddenly, in the air…piercing the air”: Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 13–14, 351.
“And there was just a gasp…low-altitude [flight profile]” and “Frankly, when those…fire that big”: David Braden, interview by Alfred F. Hurley, Dallas, TX, February 4, 2005, University of North Texas Library, Denton, TX, available at https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc306702/?q=david%20braden.
“I have been asked…personal decision”: Haywood Hansell, talk at the United States Air Force Academy, April 19, 1967, Clark Special Collections Branch, McDermott Library, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO.
Curtis LeMay’s quotations in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, are from Reminiscences of Curtis E. LeMay: Oral History, 1971 (Air Force Academy Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY).
“Colonel LeMay…very inaccurate”: First U.S. Raid on Germany, Reuters, British Pathé newsreel, 1943, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgO6DX_9z0I.
“It worked out…but it worked” and “War is a mean…quick as possible”: Curtis LeMay oral history interview, March 1965, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Montgomery, AL.
“Ralph, you’re probably…much better”: Emily Newburger, “Call to Arms,” Harvard Law Today, October 1, 2001, available at https://today.law.harvard.edu/feature/call-arms/.
St. Clair McKelway’s quotations are from St. Clair McKelway, “A Reporter with the B-29s: III—The Cigar, the Three Wings, and the Low-Level Attacks,” The New Yorker, June 23, 1945, 26–39.
“We had a good mission…grocery bill for a month”: Letter from Curtis LeMay to Helen LeMay, March 12, 1945, in Benjamin Paul Hegi, From Wright Field, Ohio, to Hokkaido, Japan: General Curtis E. LeMay’s Letters to His Wife Helen, 1941–1945 (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Libraries, 2015), 330.
“There were a couple…that kind of thing”: Jane LeMay Lodge, interview by Barbara W. Sommer, San Juan Capistrano, CA, September 10, 1998, Nebraska State Historical Society, available at http://d1vmz9r13e2j4x.cloudfront.net/nebstudies/0904_0302jane.pdf.
“the temptation…greatness of the end”: George Slatyer Barrett, The Temptation of Christ (Edinburgh: Macniven & Wallace, 1883), 48.
Information about the impact of the March 10, 1945, Tokyo bombing is from R. Cargill Hall, ed., Case Studies in Strategic Bombardment (Washington, DC: Air Force History and Museums Program, 1998), 319, available at https://media.defense.gov/2010/Oct/12/2001330115/-1/-1/0/AFD-101012-036.pdf.
“That the more densely…‘paper and ply-board structures’”: David Fedman, “Mapping Armageddon: The Cartography of Ruin in Occupied Japan,” The Portolan 92 (Spring 2015): 16.
“Probably more…history of man”: United States Strategic Bombing Survey, A Report on Physical Damage in Japan, June 1947, 95, available at https://dl.ndl.go.jp/info:ndljp/pid/8822320.
Chapter Nine: “Improvised destruction.”
Information about LeMay’s bombing of Japan in the spring of 1945 is from C. Peter Chen, “Bombing of Tokyo and Other Cities: 19 Feb 1945–10 Aug 1945,” World War II Database, available at https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217.
“Our B-29s…Japan had capitulated”: Curtis E. LeMay with MacKinlay Kantor, Mission with LeMay: My Story (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 388.
Curtis LeMay’s quotations in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, are from Reminiscences of Curtis E. LeMay: Oral History, 1971 (Air Force Academy Project, Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University Libraries, New York, NY).
“What a kick…feeling fine”: J. W. Stilwell diary, September 1, 1945, quoted in Jon Thares Davidann, The Limits of Westernization: American and East Asian Intellectuals Create Modernity, 1860–1960 (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2019), 208.
“Was it possible…enemy civilians?”: Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgment: American Bombing in World War II (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1985), 180.
“Deliberate terror bombing…hasten Hitler’s doom” and “Our policy…civilian populations”: Mark Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities, and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 5, no. 5 (May 2, 2007), available at https://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html.
“We have discovered…old capital or the new”: Erik Slavin, “When the President Said Yes to the Bomb: Truman’s Diaries Reveal No Hesitation, Some Regret,” Stars and Stripes, August 5, 2015.
“It is striking…from above?”: William W. Ralph, “Improvised Destruction: Arnold, LeMay, and the Firebombing of Japan,” War in History 13, no. 4 (2006): 517, doi:10.1177/0968344506069971.
“Bygones are bygones…our Air Self-Defense Units”: Robert Trumbull, “Honor to LeMay by Japan Stirs Parliament Debate,” New York Times, December 8, 1964, available at https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1964/12/08/99401959.html?pageNumber=15.
Information about the dispute between George C. Marshall and Ernest J. King is from Richard B. Frank, “No Recipe for Victory,” National WWII Museum, August 3, 2020, available at https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-in-japan-army-navy-1945.
“In his autobiography…something he could have said”: Warren Kozak, LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2009), 341.
Conclusion: “All of a sudden, the Air House would be gone. Poof.”
Information about the United Nations protocol banning incendiary weapons is from “Protocol III to the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects,” United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs Treaties Database, available at http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/ccwc_p3/text.
About the Author
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including Talking to Strangers, David and Goliath, Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point. The Bomber Mafia began as episodes of his podcast, Revisionist History, and the production team behind that show also produced the audiobook edition. Gladwell is cofounder and president of Pushkin Industries, an audiobook and podcast production company. He was born in England, grew up in rural Ontario, and now lives in New York.
Gladwell.com
Facebook.com/MalcolmGladwellBooks
Twitter.com/Gladwell
Also by Malcolm Gladwell
Talking to Strangers
David and Goliath
What the Dog Saw
Outliers
Blink
The Tipping Point
Photos
Carl L. Norden was a brilliant Dutch inventor who single-handedly invented the Norden bombsight used by the United States in World War II.
Photo credit: US Navy
Dubbed “the football” by airmen, it weighed fifty-five pounds and allowed bombardiers to factor in many variables, including altitude, wind speed, and airspeed. The legend goes, it enabled a bombardier to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up.
Photo credit: Albert Knapp/Alamy Stock Photo
The Bomber Mafia: Harold George (above left), Donald Wilson (above right), Ira Eaker, and others were convinced that precision bombing, aimed at crucial choke points of the enemy’s supply chain, could win wars entirely from the air. Their futuristic thinking was typical of what would become the Air Force Academy, whose modernistic chapel contrasts radically with the traditional architecture of the chapels at West Point and Annapolis.
Photo credit left: US Air Force
Photo credit right: US Army Air Force Official Photograph
Ira Eaker
Photo credit: © Imperial War Museum (FRE 12088)
The Air Force Academy chapel
Photo credit: Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Frederick Lindemann (at far left), who was Churchill’s close adviser, believed that bombing should be used to break the will of the enemy by striking at cities indiscriminately. He is pictured here watching a display of anti-aircraft gunnery with Churchill (second from right) and other British military officials.
Photo credit: Photo by Capt. Horton/Imperial War Museums via Getty Images
Royal Air Force marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris ran the British bomber command using an “area-bombing” strategy, targeting military and civilian outposts alike.
Photo credit: Photo by Leonard McCombe/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The B-17 Flying Fortress, developed as a high-flying long-range bomber and used widely in the European theater, bombs an aircraft works in Germany.
Photo credit: ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images
A B-29 Superfortress waits to take off from a runway in the Pacific theater. The B-29 could fly faster, higher, and farther than any other bomber in the world and finally put the US Army Air Forces within striking distance of Japan.
Photo credit: NARA
A crewman checks bombs in the cargo bay of a B-29 before the bombing of Tokyo.
Photo credit: akg-images
Harvard chemistry professor Louis Fieser and his associate E. B. Hershberg (not pictured) conducted experiments with combustible gels that led to the invention of napalm.
Photo credit: HUP Fieser, Louis (25). Harvard University Archives
The first napalm bomb test was conducted on July 4, 1942, behind Harvard Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Photo credit: Photograph courtesy of Harvard University Archives/Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method
To 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
In January of 1945, Major General Curtis E. LeMay (left) replaced Brigadier General Haywood Hansell Jr. (center) as head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command in the Mariana Islands. At right is Hansell’s chief of staff, Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey.
Photo credit: NARA
The Army Air Forces’s early facilities on Guam were primitive: tents and metal Quonset huts.
Photo credit: NARA
Aerial view of Tokyo bombing. On the night of March 9–10, 1945, one observer noted that the glow from the fires was visible 150 miles away.
Photo credit: NARA
During Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid of World War II, 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped on Tokyo, and as many as one hundred thousand people died.
Photo credit: akg-images/Glasshouse/Circa Images
During Operation Meetinghouse, the single most destructive bombing raid of World War II, 1,665 tons of napalm were dropped on Tokyo, and as many as one hundred thousand people died.
Photo credit: akg-images/WHA/World History Archive
General Curtis E. LeMay in 1954
Photo credit: Photo by A. Y. Owen/The LIFE Images Collection
via Getty Images/Getty Images
The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage is located in an unassuming building in Tokyo, Japan.
Photo credit: Nick-D, CC BY-SA 4.0
Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia
