The Bomber Mafia
- Author: Malcolm Gladwell
- Publisher: Penguin UK
- Published: 2021-04-27
- ISBN-13: 9780141998381
失控的轟炸：人道與人性的交戰，造就二戰最漫長的一夜（含21幅珍貴歷史圖片）
- Author: 麥爾坎．葛拉威爾
- Publisher: 時報文化出版
- Published: 2022-04-22
- ISBN-13: 9786263351301
I first spotted this book in a bookstore a long time ago, meant to read it but never did, and eventually borrowed it from the library.
The author is Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote Outliers.
Shortly after airplanes appeared and were thrown into war, a group of people were already fantasizing about what future warfare might look like. The planes back then looked like the kind Snoopy flies — terrible performance. Due to all manner of accidents, they were probably killing more of their own pilots than enemy soldiers.
This group, known as the Bomber Mafia, dreamed up a vision of future war. Planes could be built enormous, flying impossibly high, penetrating deep into enemy territory to drop bombs without interference.
Under that premise, planes would need to fly during the day — you needed good visibility from altitude to bomb accurately.
Striking key facilities with precision could end a war without harming civilians.
A cantankerous Dutch engineer named Norden built the Norden bombsight — a mechanical analog computer that could calculate the exact moment to release bombs from a fast-moving aircraft. The invention gave the Bomber Mafia enormous confidence in their theory.
Then World War II arrived, and the Bomber Mafia finally had a chance to test it.
The Americans and British held a meeting to decide bombing strategy. The British argued for carpet-bombing civilians until their morale collapsed.
The author finds the British position a bit strange. Churchill had earlier worried that German bombing raids would shatter British morale — but in practice, they didn’t. Accuracy was terrible, and many British people actually stayed remarkably calm through the nighttime raids. So if German bombing failed to break British morale, why did the British think bombing would work on the Germans? Their answer: “Germans are different.”
The Bomber Mafia Americans proposed something else: bomb five German ball-bearing factories. Every moving machine requires ball bearings — knock those out, vehicles grind to a halt, and Germany surrenders quickly.
The Bomber Mafia got their chance. The mission was commanded by Haywood S. Hansell.
The book makes an interesting point about what makes air forces unique as a branch of the military:
- Extreme pressure: The Navy might fight one or two major engagements. The Army might make contact with the enemy once every six months. But bomber crews had to put everything on the line every 24 hours.
- Forward-thinking culture: The Army is steeped in tradition — classical chapel architecture, training rooted in Greek and Roman military history. The Air Force built chapels that looked aggressively modern (at the cost of leaks and structural problems), always thinking about how to bring future technology into the present.
The plan was to split into two groups: one formation would feign an attack on German airfields to draw out the fighter planes, while the other headed for the ball-bearing factories.
The diversionary group was led by Curtis LeMay — a practical man who, knowing their planes would take off from fog-soaked London, had already drilled his pilots to fly on instruments alone, without visual reference.
The other group had no such training, and Hansell hadn’t thought to arrange it. They waited for the fog to lift before departing, and by the time they reached the factories, the German fighters had reassembled. The bombers took devastating losses. The factories got some rubble, but most of the machinery was still running.
The plan to cripple Germany’s ball-bearing supply had failed.
A second chance came. Germany surrendered. Japan remained.
The Americans now had the B-29, capable of long-range bombing runs. Two locations could reach Japan: Calcutta in northern India, and the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific — Saipan, Tinian, and Guam — seized from the Japanese in brutal ground fighting.
LeMay was sent to the former, Hansell to the latter.
LeMay struggled in India. His plan had bombers fly to Chengdu to refuel before continuing to Japan — but that meant crossing the Himalayas, with their terrifying air currents. Wrecked planes lined the mountain range, earning it the nickname “the Aluminum Trail.”
Hansell struggled in the Marianas. The tiny islands were barely adequate for the massive B-29s. Tropical typhoons were a constant threat — on one occasion, sheer luck was all that saved his fleet of nine hundred bombers from complete destruction.
Hansell followed Bomber Mafia doctrine faithfully: high altitude, daytime flights, precision strikes.
When the bombers reached Japan, something strange happened. The planes suddenly shot forward at bizarre speeds, making it impossible to bomb accurately.
The Japanese had known about the jet stream for some time — but Americans didn’t. The Japanese researcher who discovered it preferred to publish in Esperanto.
Meanwhile, back in the United States, the chemical industry had developed the infamous incendiary bomb. These weapons contained sticky, flammable material that clung to whatever it touched and burned continuously, impossible to extinguish.
The incendiary was designed specifically with Japan’s predominantly wooden architecture in mind. The author believes both Hansell and LeMay were told these weapons were available.
Hansell was eventually relieved of command. LeMay took over the Marianas.
LeMay first ran Hansell’s plan a few more times. He wanted to confirm that Hansell’s failures were a strategic problem, not a personal one.
Once he was sure the strategy was unworkable, LeMay decided to gamble on something different.
If high altitude meant jet stream interference — fly low.
But low altitude meant anti-aircraft fire — so don’t fly during the day. Fly at night.
Night flying meant no precision bombing — so use incendiaries, and target residential areas.
When crews saw the black paint being applied to the underbelly of their aircraft that day, everyone assumed this was a one-way trip. Men wrote farewell letters.
LeMay himself wasn’t entirely confident. But it worked. The Japanese had never anticipated low-altitude nighttime raids, and their air defenses were completely unprepared.
What was originally planned as strikes on one or two major cities turned into something else entirely. LeMay went on a rampage, firebombing dozens of cities in succession.
The author finds two things deeply puzzling:
First, why do the Japanese seem to barely commemorate those killed in the firebombings? He made a trip to Japan and found only one memorial, tucked away in a distant suburb — looking more like a small apartment building than a monument.
Second, how did LeMay’s campaign — so indiscriminate and devastating — proceed without pushback or intervention from the Army? The author’s theory: LeMay’s technical operations were so complex that no one higher up could actually follow what he was doing.
In the end, the author’s sympathy lies with Hansell. He believes Hansell held firm to the ideal of minimizing civilian casualties and refused to use incendiaries.
The author then traces the long arc of precision bombing’s development through subsequent conflicts. By the time the book was written, American aircraft could strike a specific unit within a specific building. The Bomber Mafia, the author concludes, ultimately won.
This past June, the U.S. precision-bombed Iranian nuclear facilities — which looks a lot like the latest chapter in this story.
To me, this book reads as a dual biography of Hansell and LeMay — the idealist versus the pragmatist.
The book doesn’t dwell on it, but Norden and LeMay share something in common: neither shied away from paths others had already tried and failed.
Norden was the kind of engineer who worked from a blank sheet of paper. He didn’t go around asking what had already failed. He designed from scratch.
LeMay, by contrast, started by repeating Hansell’s failed plan — deliberately.
War has a way of making it hard to know where anyone’s limits are. But reading this, you have to ask yourself: would you want to be the freewheeling Bomber Mafia visionaries, the principled Hansell, or the pragmatic LeMay?