Key Insights From:
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
By Malcolm Gladwell
Key Insights From:
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
By Malcolm Gladwell
What You'll Learn:
Serially best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell spins another engaging yarn, tying together obsessive groups and individuals whose crucial (and overlooked) inventions and ideas forever altered the way humanity fights wars.
Key Insights:
- A change of generals in the Pacific theater had incalculable repercussions for World War II and modern warfare strategy.
- The bombsight is the most important 20th century invention you have never heard of.
- A group of pilots at an obscure military academy in Alabama developed a revolutionary approach to warfare aimed at eliminating casualties.
- The British balked at precision bombing, but the Bomber Mafia had an opportunity to prove them wrong in the European theater.
- Precision bombing in Japan proved not just difficult, but impossible.
- The push for indiscriminate napalm bombing in Japan was the temptation that would have marked the end of Bomber Mafia dreams.
- General LeMay’s firebombing of Tokyo “got it done,” but the cost in damage and loss of life was catastrophic.
- We have to grapple with the tension between the moral earnestness of precision bombing and the efficient pragmatism of morale bombing.
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