Book Review: The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021). Malcolm Gladwell.

This most recent book by one of my favorite non-fiction writers departs from his usual book topics of social psychology, and instead turns to a fascinating analysis and history of one of the most devastating aspects of modern war, beginning with World War II: the mass aerial bombing of civilian populations.   

Gladwell, who delights in upending conventional wisdom in his writing, as well as in his popular podcast, Revisionist History, takes us back to the pre-war era in the 1930s, when a small group of influential young RAF leaders began advocating for the idea of “more humane” pinpoint bombing, as a way to destroy enemy infrastructure and war production without hurting the civilian population.   It sounded great, and found adherents among the more progressive young U.S. military leaders of the time too.    

The problem as Gladwell explains it, though, is that the technology of the time – including the much-vaunted American Norden Bombsight – was utterly unable to support the level of accuracy required to make the strategy actually work.  The early results of these tactics as used by the Royal Air Force and the United States against Germany were that the bombing was so inaccurate that little harm was done to German war production, but enough random destruction was visited on the civilian population near target sites that it only served to stiffen German resistance.

From this point, he does a wonderful job of comparing this approach, and the idealistic men in both Britain and the U.S. who tried to implement it, with that of the person most associated with barbaric, indiscriminate bombing mayhem against populations – General Curtis LeMay – and then asking hard questions about which approach actually ended up being the more militarily effective, and the more "humane" in terms of total loss of life, minimizing human suffering and winning the war, given the limitations of the technology then available.

It’s a brilliant piece of historical research and analysis, with the usual Gladwellian twists and counter-intuitive musings.  And as always, he's more interested in raising and examining the questions under the light of different perspectives than providing the reader with firm answers.  Very highly recommended.