'The Bomber Mafia': Malcolm Gladwell dissects World War II's longest night

On the night of March 9, 1945, more than 300 U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from rudimentary airfields in the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, retaken from the Japanese the previous summer. Their mission was to attack a 12-square-mile sector of central Tokyo containing the highly flammable, densely packed wooden dwellings of thousands of working-class families as well as industrial and commercial buildings.

During the three-hour raid their bombs ignited a firestorm that was so intense it killed 100,000 people and sent up a glow that was visible 150 miles away. When the returning B-29s touched down, teams fumigated them to dissipate the smell of burning flesh. In "The Bomber Mafia," Malcolm Gladwell takes readers on the journey that led to that attack. Along the way, he signposts both the technological developments enabling the raid and the underlying strategic and moral judgments.

Gladwell's interest in air power began a child when his English father recounted the roar of Luftwaffe planes overhead during their attacks on London. Gladwell's particular fascination is with the "Bomber Mafia," an influential group of officers at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Alabama.

They advocated precision bombing as a more morally defensible way to destroy an enemy's fighting capability. In the summer of 1941 the Bomber Mafia identified strategic "choke points" — power plants, oil refineries, aircraft factories — to be attacked should the United States enter the war. After Pearl Harbor their plan provided the template for the first daylight, high-altitude precision bombing missions of the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force, stationed in England.

Britain's Bomber Command was, however, unimpressed by the Norden bombsight and, after its own failed attempts to hit industrial and port targets, skeptical about precision bombing. Instead its controversial head, Arthur "Bomber" Harris, advocated nighttime "area" or "morale bombing." Though the Blitz had not broken Londoners' spirit, Harris maintained that Germans were "a different breed." The arrival in England of Ira Eaker of the Bomber Mafia to command the Eighth Army Air Force highlighted the divide between strategic and area bombing proponents. Curiously, perhaps, he and Harris became good friends even though Eaker considered Harris' approach morally dubious.

Gladwell does not explore how racial attitudes influenced the bombing of Japan. Nor does Gladwell, who briefly discusses the February 1945 bombing of Dresden, address the extent to which the American and British bombing strategy in Europe was influenced by the need to convince Stalin that his Western allies were doing all they could to support Soviet troops who were suffering heavy losses as they advanced west.

Gladwell does however confront us with difficult questions: "Ask yourself — What would I have done?" he suggests at one point. In so doing he has produced a thought-provoking, accessible account of how people respond to difficult choices in difficult times. Albert Einstein once warned that "our technology has exceeded our humanity."

Gladwell suggests that, given their concern not to cross a moral line, the Bomber Mafia would have approved of modern technical innovations like the B-2 stealth bomber, capable of precision strikes on military targets while minimizing civilian casualties. Yet ingenuity and conscience always sit uneasily in warfare, and Einstein's warning should not be forgotten.