The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, A Temptation, and The Longest Night of the Second World War, Gladwell - B +

    The Bomber Mafia were the young men of the US Army Air Force Technical School in the 1930's who tried to plan for a future in which sophisticated modern airplanes could be used in war. In 1941, they presented Air War Plans Division One to headquarters, mapping out in nine pages the US strategy for an air war against Germany. They believed in the concept of precise daytime bombing utilizing the Norden bombsight. When war came and they tried to implement their plans, they failed. The bombsight, a sort of analog computer, worked in the research lab, but the mass produced iteration did not work as planned in combat situations.

   The air war in the Pacific was different from the one in Europe. The B-29 was built  because it could fly farther, and distance was the challenge in the Pacific. Only after the capture, in 1944, of the Marianas could the US launch bombing raids on Japan. The Marianas were actually a rat and mosquito infested hellhole from which the new Superfortress could reach Japan, but only when the weather was perfect. And when they arrived over Tokyo seeking out the Nakajima aircraft plant, they couldn't effectively bomb it because of the jet stream's interference with their bombing runs. Washington decided it was time to forget precision bombing and burn Japan's cities to the ground.  They had the perfect tool to accomplish their goal - napalm and, the perfect man to lead he charge - Curtis LeMay. LeMay decided to have his planes make low altitude saturation bombing runs at night. He reversed all of our strategic plans, and began the terrorization of the Empire on March 9, 1945. Hundreds of B-29's dropped 1655 tons of napalm on a 12 square mile section of Tokyo. In the next six months, firebombing destroyed most of Japan's cities and killed anywhere from 500,000-1,000,000 people. Historians from both Japan and America believe the firebombing hastened the end of the war, and avoided an invasion of the home islands by the US and the USSR.

   Today's US Air Force has mastered precision bombing and perfected the dream of the Bomber Mafia of limiting civilian casualties. This is a fascinating and very brief read. As the author declares in his closing comments, the Mafia prevailed in the end, but it took completely overturning their plans to win the war.