So it is probably too early, far too early, to believe that wide-area, city-destroying attacks that kill large numbers of civilians have become a horror only of the past. The print has its merits of being able to take your time to know the history of the "bomber mafia." This article may not be republished, rebroadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. We have updated our Privacy Policy The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War is a nonfiction book by Malcolm Gladwell, published in 2021. Senora Panqueque's Classroom. InRevisionist History, Gladwell re-examines moments from the past and asks whether we got it right the first time. Two questions have students connect the material to today. Do you prefer this format. Perhaps bombing debate this is old hat to many of my readers. you can submit them using the q&a button. (Gladwell partly excuses this notorious phrase, saying it was likely the work of a ghostwriter.) The airmen believed that the tool would allow forces to focus on taking out specific targets that could cripple the enemys production lines rather than engaging in the kind of indiscriminate bombing that the Germans did on London and the Allied forces would against Dresden. Key ideas from The Bomber Mafia. This was not a standalone event. After the war, the 20 years of foundational work by the bomber mafia resulted in the separation of the United States Air Force from the Army to become an independent military arm. [4][5] In contrast, American theorists devised a strategy of pin-point bombing that targeted the enemy economy and the production of weapons. Would this audiobook be appropriate for a teen with an interest in military history? Hes more of an intellectual explorer than a disciplined academic. New Review from Brian Castner: Malcolm Gladwell's "The Bomber Mafia In that sense, Gladwell wrote that Hansell "won the war."[21][22]. I immediately thought, Oh yeah? Also, the air arm tends to be regarded by the other services as suspiciously civilian-ish as in the soldiers one-liner, I have a lot of respect for the U.S. military, and also for the Air Force. But in Gladwells deft hands, the Air Force generals of World War II come back to life as the stirring 20th-century equivalent of Adm. Horatio Nelson and his band of audacious captains from the age of fighting sail. I didn't know he had a podcast on this topic, but after listening to the book my immediate thought was "Why did I pay for this book? As a compromise first step, the General Headquarters (GHQ) Air Force was established within the Army Air Corps in 1935, commanded by General Frank M. Andrews, a strategic bombing advocate. And then they did the same thing to another city. This is a preview of the digital audiobook of The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell, available on Libro.fm at https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781735803227?cmp=li. Gladwell raises two fascinating points. He was and is wrong, killing the elderly, women, and children is not an object of war, its evil and destructive. From what Ive read, dropping the atomic bombs was more a signal to Russia of our strength than a strategy to defeat Japan, which was pretty much defeated already. The book follows the Bomber Mafia, especially Major General Haywood S. Hansell, and the development of a high-altitude precision aerial bombardment strategy in World War II as a means to limit casualties. The Listeners Guide is only available from Pushkin Industries when you buy The Bomber Mafia. And because we dont know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. The pilot kept flying.. Gladwell is a wonderful storyteller. Bomber Mafia - Wikipedia After you enter your email address, youll get a unique link. Reader Q&A, [1], The term "Bomber Mafia" came from the sometimes bitter debates between United States Army staff and Air Corps men who observed, and argued with, the insistence by instructors and students of the ACTS that heavy bombers were the new primary weapon of war, and that a separate air arm was required to command them. While we are at it, I really feel that nobody sane would actually mind if a barrel of olive loaf, or environment-friendly bean casserole catches a bomb or 2. The author of the book is Malcolm Gladwell, an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. Malcolm Gladwell's Fantasy of War From the Air - The New Republic With battles airborne having the power to win you the battle, can we do accuracy battle to help reduce the casualties of war? Those large conclusions seemed unsubstantiated to me. Please simply click here to enter your email address (no additional purchase required) and you will receive the Listeners Guide. Unfortunately for its believers, the Norden bombsight was a brilliant idea that didnt quite work in practice, mostly because the technology did not yet exist to do the additional computations that real-world issues required to move beyond the theoretical ones that worked so well in the lab. Agreed? Ask the Author. This is an account of a team of elderly minds in the USA airforce who ended up being focused on accuracy battle to decrease innocent noncombatant casualties and also quicken completion of problem by strategically bombing factories and also battle production vital for your enemys ability to continue to combat on. In Gladwells account, Hansells relatively more humane approach didnt work. WATCH SEGMENT. Bomber Mafia, A Story Set in War by Malcolm Gladwell - LinkedIn A second shell hit the radio compartment, cutting the legs of the radio operator off at the knees. The destruction was so far beyond anything theyd seen before that the reality of the reports coming in from American bases in the Mariana Islands just didnt register. This was a ripoff and should have just been a podcast. This was a team of obsessive however significant men who wanted to prevent the British approach in any way prices as their aircrews were trained with computer system like bombsights, and also needed to plunder in clear skies from high mindset. The Bombing plane mafia under Hansell are bent on reduce the destruction as well as focused on throwing a spanner in the works of battle. [21] In The New York Times Book Review, Thomas E. Ricks called the book "a conversational work" which he enjoyed, but noted that "when Gladwell leaps to provide superlative assessments, or draws broad lessons of history from isolated incidents, he makes me wary". One of Gladwells skills is enabling us to see the world through the eyes of his subjects. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War is a 2021 book by Malcolm Gladwell that examines the US Bomber Mafia of World War II, which advocated precision aerial bombing as a means to win a war. First, the U.S. command didnt really seem to understand what LeMays campaign was doing to Japan. The Listeners Guide features additional commentary from, Suggestions, Fan Mail, Bones to Pick, and All Other Queries, For Speaking Engagements With Malcolm Gladwell, Hasta la Vista, America: Trumps Farewell Address, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Its proponents continued to promote the doctrine into the Atomic Age, forming the Strategic Air Command to carry out a vision modified to fit the needs of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear warfare. Emergency workers and local residents battled to clear debris and extinguish fires in the Ukrainian city of Uman after Two U.S. army helicopters collided and crashed Thursday in Alaska while returning from a training flight, killing three soldiers 89-year-old Max Hancock was an U.S. airman stationed outside of Oxford, England, in 1953. Thank you for purchasing The Bomber Mafia, an audiobook by Malcolm Gladwell. This advancement of how warplanes were deployed is rather remarkable. Almost 100 B-24 planes were lost with only minimal damage done to the ball bearing plant. You can pay with any major credit cards, as well as Apple Pay on iOS and Google Pay on Android. LeMay was instead, in the words of the military historian Conrad Crane, the Air Forces ultimate problem solver. As Gladwell tells it, the practical problem was how to win the war as quickly as possible. 50% Off The Bomber Mafia | Senior Discounts Club Tap the link to open your audiobook purchase in your podcast app. Malcolm Gladwell - The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War Audiobook. If you have actually ever attempted to toss a can from a moving automobile into a whip can you would understand the math/physics behind it. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War Buy on Bookshop Little Brown and Company, 256 pp., $27.00 The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the. Just how wrong was I, however in a blink of an eye I had a book I could not take down. The mission failed for several reasons, including clouds that obscured the targets, which had to be seen to use the Norden bombsight. Content Warning: The source text contains historical quotations that use offensive terms for Japanese people. Purchase The Bomber Mafia and receive the exclusive Bomber Mafia Listeners Guide a visual document of the making of The Bomber Mafia. the moral challenges of modern american history. Yes, it would have caused millions to starve and die but the invasion alternative would have caused millions of allied lives. Starting in 2022, Starbucks is expanding its Veterans Day freebie to include an additional product: iced coffee. Regardless, it was estimated that there would have been 2 MILLION American casualties had there been an invasion. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Much of Japanese housing was wood, paper, with straw mats. Chapter 3 is about the British and American bombing campaign against Germany in 1943. Malcolm Gladwell, "The Bomber Mafia" : CSPAN2 - Archive Tap the link to open your audiobook purchase in your podcast app. Those fools can really do some damages if you capture one in the kisser. I thought he was pretty thorough but obviously if he's written a book he must have thought it worthy of a more even in depth look. Scientists at Harvard repurposed a failed Dupont Chemical product and refined it into napalm, the most brutal bombing tool devised before the atomic bomb and one particularly suited to cause maximum damage to the wood-and-paper houses of Japan. What of the infinitely long nights of millions of concentration camp prisoners? [2] Fleets of heavy bombers were not able to achieve victory without the cooperation of the Army and Navy, and required the protection of long-range fighters for deep penetration missions. [23], A reviewer in Kirkus Reviews stated Gladwell "[delivered] a fairly flattering portrait of LeMay". It reviews the capabilities that todays military has in terms of bombing and notes that the Bomber Mafias philosophy of precision bombing won out in the end. Rather than focus on industrial or military targets, the napalm bombs spewed all over cities, destroying housing and killing civilians in a most devastating way. Following numerous casualties from ground warfare in World war, a group people army males focused on producing a bombing system that would certainly be so exact that it could get really specific targets that would cripple enemies while decreasing human loss. In the first chapter, Gladwell introduces Carl Norden, inventor of the Norden bombsight, the first sight that allowed bombs to accurately hit their target. [23], Several reviewers criticized the book for its accuracy, and for being light on details. Two new bomber groups were formed in the Pacific: LeMay headed one in India and Hansell led another in the Marianas. Guide begins with a very genuine trouble. [10] The doctrine also ran counter to the theories of Billy Mitchell himself, who espoused that pursuit support was essential for daylight bombing operations.[11]. Revisionist History host Malcolm Gladwell joins Dan to discuss the development of U.S. precision bombing ideas, Curtis LeMay and the firebombing of Japanese cities. [1] Hansell concurred that both the theorists and the authors of the AWPD-1 war plan (of which he was both) made a serious mistake in neglecting long-range fighter escort in their ideas. As an expert in the use of air units to aid artillery and infantry, Gordon P. Saville held to the concept of tactical air power through his time as ACTS instructor from 1934 to 1936. He released a couple chapters from this book as episodes of Revisionist History. Bombing of Tokyo on March 10, 1945 with Operation Meetinghouse, "You Know Your History? [17] In The Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Paul Kennedy praised the audiobook version of The Bomber Mafia as "remarkable" and a "work of art"; similarly, in The Times, reviewer Gerard DeGroot said "The Bomber Mafia remind[ed] [him] of a really good podcast a fascinating story is appealingly delivered", and historian Diana Preston of The Washington Post called the audiobook "innovative" for its inclusion of archival clips, music, and sound effects. WATCH SEGMENT. [5][6], The book follows the story of the Bomber Mafia, a group of American military officers, especially Major General Haywood S. Hansell, as they developed a military doctrine of daylight strategic bombing as a means to defeat an enemy with precision high-altitude aerial bombardment. The American military leaders, however, convinced their allies to let them pursue precision bombing, based on the Bomber Mafias philosophy of taking out vital choke points. The setting is Second World War. Many historians posit that the primary reason for Japanese surrender was not the use of the atom bomb. The theoretical discussions they had back at Maxwell Field didnt properly account for weather, enemy fire, and mass-produced bomb sights. Your seamless listening experience is powered by Supporting Cast. This book once more casts an extra critical eye on this situation and outcome. [23], Writing for The Baffler, Noah Kulwin criticized the book as "an attempt to retcon the history of American aerial warfare by arguing that developing the capacity to explode anything, anywhere in the world has made America and, indeed, the rest of the globe, unequivocally safer" and stated "by taking up military history, Gladwell's half-witted didacticism threatens to convince millions of people that the only solution to American butchery is to continue shelling out for sharper and larger knives. The war ended some 76 years ago. But rather Russias entry into the war and their invasion into Japanese-held Manchuria. Listen to audiobooks in the same place you spend hours listening to your favorite podcasts. Malcolm Gladwell and "The Bomber Mafia". Malcom Gladwells book Talking to Strangers is a very good book that ties together Review and highlights: The Bomber Mafia, by Malcom Gladwell NOW PLAYING. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. We now live in a world where its not too much of an exaggeration to say that a bomber flying at 50,000 feet can tickle a targets nose hairs with the advanced systems we now have in place. If LeMay firebombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the loss of life would have been similar as to what the atomic bombs caused without the radiation. Their empire building was targeted towards oil production, in order to be a world power you must have oil. Curtis LeMays approach brought everyone Americans and Japanese back to peace and prosperity as quickly as possible, he writes. This change of commandand what it meant in terms of military strategyis the crux of this book. This was all in one plane. Kurt Vonneguts seminal publication Slaughterhouse five took the allied battle (pointless) of Dresden with the POV of Prisioners of war. But it was news to me. After graduating from ACTS in 1931, Mitchell protge Harold L. George stayed at the school to refine and teach the new bombing theory, soon recruiting as teachers his former students Haywood S. Hansell, Donald Wilson and Laurence S. Kuter as fellow bomber advocates. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Blandthrowing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. The object of war is to destroy the enemy which LeMay understood very well, their morale had nothing to do with it, and ultimately saved millions of lives on both sides due to a invasion not having to happen. He bled to death. The unexpected hero of Gladwells story is Curtis LeMay yes, that one, the general who firebombed Tokyo and dozens of other Japanese cities and then, decades later, supposedly advocated bombing the Vietnamese back into the Stone Age. The book is adapted from a series of podcasts Gladwell created for his show Revisionist History. Captain Claire Lee Chennault, senior instructor in fighter tactics at ACTS, was a vocal Air Corps officer who challenged the bomber mafia for more than a decade; he was forced into early retirement in 1937, leaving the precision bombing advocates unopposed. The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation and the Longest Night of the Second World War, by Malcolm Gladwell, Little, Brown and Co., New York, 2021, $27. Bomber Mafia Listeners Guide Final | PDF | Boeing B 29 - Scribd As long as youre comfortable with the numbers of people who were killed during the air attacks described throughout the book. In World War II, the Bomber Mafia's theory of the primacy of unescorted daylight strategic bombing was proved wrong. By dropping bombs with precision onto strategic targets, Hansell believed wars could be won faster and with far less . While one is a celebrated hero, the other was an idealist whose concepts allowed him to be sidelined in the annals of background. Malcolm Gladwells new audiobook, The Bomber Mafia,is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war. They believed that bombing strategic targets made sense, and bombing population centers didn't. There are actual recordings of interviews conducted by Gladwell and also taken from documentaries filmed or recorded in the decades since the war. To most people, a city park is a grace note, a green space that makes urban life more livable. Please take a moment to review it. Gladwell describes the challenges that both faced. EP13 Gladwell and the Bomber Mafia - YouTube Kennedy stated there were "gaps in [Gladwell's] account", and cites the RAF Bomber Command's attempt at careful bombing as an example. People growing up on animations and motion pictures see planes going down bombs/shooting targets as if done through cross hairs. Ive read most of Gladwells books, but he always finds something new to tackle from a different angle. Japan was largely self-sufficient as far as food is concerned, they would have become uncomfortable but they would not have starved to death. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policys Top Global Thinkers. I'm interested in the Bomber Mafia for my 13 y.o. And was engrossed once again. >> and with one of our favorite guest. General Haywood Hansell was the leader of The Bomber Mafia, a small group within the military that believed an emerging technologyairborne warfarecould make wars shorter and far less deadly. [12] The teaching of fighter ("pursuit") tactics declined, though Earle E. Partridge and Hoyt S. Vandenberg continued to discuss the role of the fighter. By continuing to use this site, you agree to the terms of our updated Privacy Policy. [19] Publishers Weekly stated "this history feels more tossed off than fully fledged", though Gladwell "provide[d] plenty of colorful details and pose[d] intriguing questions about the morality of warfare". The American militarys precise new way of information-based warfare so far has been tested only in relatively small and short bombing campaigns in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, the gunboat wars of our time. LeMay believed that the campaign was so effective that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 werent even necessary, because his campaign already had made clear the price if Japan declined to surrender. Developed over the years 19261929 at Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Langley Field in Virginia, a forward-looking doctrine of daylight precision bombing was promulgated by Brigadier General William "Billy" Mitchell who advocated a greatly expanded role for the bomber force. After difficulties in applying the Bomber Mafia's theoretical strategy, Major General Hansell was replaced by Major General Curtis LeMay, who utilized tactical changes such as attacking Japanese population centers with napalm to ensure a Japanese surrender. Because of a review from one of the Goodread friends, I decided to take on the audiobook, instead of the print/e-book version. The book is adapted from a series of podcasts Gladwell created for his show . Nixon tried the LeMay strategy in North Vietnam, and we all know how that ended. Very interesting. Listener's Guide: The Bomber Mafia | Pushkin Industries [2] Precision in bombing was not achieved until long-range fighter escorts became available and air superiority was achieved, as opponents had warned. Is this book appropriate for an 11-year old that reads a lot WW II history and fiction books? I was also aware of Bomber Harris who led the fire battle on Germany, and I have actually reviewed exactly how this impacted cities like Dresden. Had the war gone on longer, into the winter of 1945-46, he suggests, millions of Japanese could have died of starvation. [7] This could lead to a minimum of war-time casualties with new technology such as the Norden bombsight. Gladwell argues that LeMays savage firebombing campaign succeeded, and that, combined with the two atomic bombs that followed, shortened the war. [27] Ricks calls LeMay an "unexpected hero" of the story,[22] while McConnachie cites Hansell as Gladwell's hero. The system was then implemented in The second world war to varying outcomes.
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