The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

“He said, I’m replacing you with Curtis LeMay. General Curtis Emerson LeMay, thirty-eight years of age, hero of the bombing campaigns over Germany. One of the most storied airmen of his generation. Hansell knew him well. They had served together in Europe. And Hansell understood immediately that this was not a standard leadership reshuffle. This was a rebuke, an about-face. An admission by Washington that everything Hansell had been doing was now considered wrong. Because Curtis LeMay was Haywood Hansell’s antithesis.”

Gladwell both sets up the conflict and introduces the topic of the book in the Introduction. The two main characters are presented here, described as opposites with one replacing the other, which is seen as a rebuke. It’s a technique that piques the reader’s interest immediately because it raises questions. Gladwell heightens this further a couple of paragraphs down by saying that the replacement of Hansell by LeMay had consequences that are still felt today.

“There is something that has always puzzled me about technological revolutions. Some new idea or innovation comes along, and it is obvious to all that it will upend our world. The internet. Social media. In previous generations, it was the telephone and the automobile. There’s an expectation that because of this new invention, things will get better, more efficient, safer, richer, faster. Which they do, in some respects. But then things also, invariably, go sideways. […] How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?”

Early on, Gladwell touches on one of the main themes of the book, Technology and Morality. He states that in many instances technology brings a promise of something better, only to go awry and be used for negative ends. He is interested in exploring how that happens and why. In this sense, the problem presented in the book is modern—and ongoing. The Bomber Mafia is a case study of an issue that has many applications.

“Airplanes made their first big appearance in World War I. I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of those early planes […] They resembled something that came in the mail to be assembled in a garage. The most famous of World War I fighter planes was the Sopwith Camel. (That’s the one that Snoopy flew in the old Peanuts comic strip.) It was a mess. ‘In the hands of a novice,’ the aviation writer Robert Jackson says, ‘it displayed vicious characteristics that could make it a killer.’ Meaning a killer of the pilot flying it, not the enemy under attack. But a new generation of pilots looked at these contraptions and said, Something like this can make all that deadly, wasteful, pointless conflict on the ground obsolete. What if we just fought wars from the air?”

This is an example of Gladwell’s writing style, which can be casual and conversational (addressing the reader) where appropriate. It’s also a summary of where the Bomber Mafia doctrine came from. Reminding readers just how new airplanes were during the time of World Word II, Gladwell emphasizes their novelty as a technology and sets up the premise that, as the Bomber Mafia envisioned things, this technology could be used for something good.