EP13 Gladwell and the Bomber Mafia

What this episode is about

The content explores the intersection of history and storytelling as the host engages with Malcolm Gladwell, discussing his latest work, which delves into World War II and its cultural implications. The conversation emphasizes the significance of narrative in understanding historical events and highlights Gladwell's unique approach to sharing these stories through various mediums.

Key takeaways

• Malcolm Gladwell's 'The Bomber Mafia' redefines WWII narratives, blending morality insights with airpower strategies.
• Morality in warfare shifted drastically during WWII; bombing civilians became a calculated tactic in just years.
• The Bomber Mafia aimed to revolutionize combat, believing precision bombing could eliminate the need for traditional forces.
• 'The Bomber Mafia' illustrates how idealism in military thought can crumble under the weight of war's brutal reality.
• Gladwell's storytelling gifts transform history into compelling audio journeys—proof that facts can be engagingly narrated.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Dan Carlin (Host) · 43 min speaking
• Malcolm Gladwell (Guest) · 19 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: World War II, Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History
2. 10:00 – 20:00: World War II, B-29 Superfortress
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Curtis LeMay, World War II, Hiroshima, Nagasaki
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Curtis LeMay, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, World War II
5. 40:00 – 50:00: World War II, Curtis LeMay, Haywood Hansel
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: World War II, Malcolm Gladwell, Tokyo
7. 1:00:00 – 1:02:01: Malcolm Gladwell, World War II

Notable quotes from "EP13 Gladwell and the Bomber Mafia"

• Started referring to it as the world war ii channel the topic of the you know long put off hardcore history addendum show here involves the second world war but i couldn't resist and you'll understand why when you hear who i'm.

  about World War II · at 0:45

• Narrow little field well too good to pass up and malcolm's coming on the show today to talk about the new book the bomber mafia a dream a temptation and the longest night of the second world war.

  about Malcolm Gladwell · at 2:17

• So talk to us a little bit about the norton bomb side and maybe the weapon system of the b-29 superfortress and how these things were intended to work together to create a sort of an american a bombing approach if you will from.

  about B-29 Superfortress · at 12:35

• How to effectively bomb the enemy in world war ii the genius without question of that era was curtis delay so he's this kind of indomitable blunt-spoken unemotional.

  about Curtis LeMay · at 22:18

• The bomber mafia were given napalm and we're told use it and hayward hansel who was one of the key bomber mafia leaders who was in charge of the 21st bomber command.

  about Haywood Hansel · at 31:13

• Distinction between what it between that experience and the experience of being on the ground in hiroshima or nagasaki in august of that same year i don't think it feels any different to be bombed with a nuclear bomb that.

  about Hiroshima · at 32:29

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Malcolm Gladwell — Person · Main guest · 5 mentions · first at 1:46
  Interview subject discussing his book/audiobook project about WWII airpower ethics, precision bombing, and the shift to area firebombing.
• Curtis LeMay — Person · Referenced historical figure (central antagonist/foil in discussion) · 9 mentions · first at 20:43
  Key WWII USAAF commander contrasted with the 'Bomber Mafia' ideal of precision bombing; discussed as the driver of the shift to mass incendiary attacks on Japan.
• Haywood Hansel — Person · Referenced historical figure (Bomber Mafia leader; displaced commander) · 2 mentions · first at 31:41
  Presented as a key Bomber Mafia leader associated with precision-bombing ideals; described as resisting napalm use and being replaced by LeMay, ending his career trajectory.

Products & tech

• B-29 Superfortress — Product · Key technology · 1 mention · first at 12:38
  Primary bomber aircraft used in the firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II.
• Norden Bombsight — Product · Key technology · 5 mentions
  Precision bombing device that was central to the Bomber Mafia's strategy.
  Airships and what they were capable of and i mean you spend quite a bit of time on the norton bomb site and how much of a difference that makes in allowing people to have a theory of precision bombing that maybe makes some.

Places & events

• World War II — Event · Core topic · 27 mentions · first at 0:26
  Central theme of the episode, discussing the moral and strategic aspects of aerial bombing during the war.
• Hiroshima — Place · Setting · 4 mentions · first at 29:42
  City targeted by an atomic bomb during World War II, discussed in comparison to firebombing.
• Nagasaki — Place · Setting · 3 mentions · first at 29:42
  City targeted by an atomic bomb during World War II, discussed in comparison to firebombing.
  Distinction between what it between that experience and the experience of being on the ground in hiroshima or nagasaki in august of that same year i don't think it feels any different to be bombed with a nuclear bomb that.
• Tokyo — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at 31:55
  Key location discussed in the context of firebombing during World War II.
  Where he just sends hundreds of b-29s with tons and tons of napon and he burns out what is it 16 square miles of tokyo in one night kills we're not sure how many probably close to 100 000 people in one.

Media & podcasts

• Revisionist History — Media · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 1:51
  Podcast hosted by Malcolm Gladwell, mentioned in the context of his work.
  With shows we've done like logical insanity or the destroyer of worlds the guest i'm talking about is malcolm gladwell host of the revisionist history podcast which he's been doing to rave reviews and large audiences for.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:02 it's hardcore history well it is way past time isn't it for just about any content from us um you know hardcore history addendum shows long overdue i've been working on tying up the loose ends that develop over a six-part multi-year long is that even right a series on the second world war so uh sorry patience required on that front but uh when we wrap that up um we'll be done with the second world war for a while i need a palette cleanser a medieval or an ancient palette cleanser for a while but at the risk of going down that same road that the history channel went down once when they started referring to it as the world war ii channel uh the topic of the you know long put off hardcore history addendum show here involves the second world war but i couldn't resist and you'll understand why when you hear who i'm talking with um it's it's one of the people that you can say i mean i know he's on a book

1:02 tour right now but i just i feel like we're the right people to sort of interview him because well we're other history podcasters and um and this book is actually more an audiobook although i read the pdf version and i'm sure he's going to sell a ton of of copies of this in print but i think he wants it to be heard and there are sounds and like he says in the interview when you hear the principles in the story talked about you hear their voice all of a sudden um so that would be really cool i didn't realize i was going to get so grabbed by the story when i read it but it's one of those things that it's right up our alley same sorts of cultural societal questions that come into play with shows we've done like logical insanity or the destroyer of worlds the guest i'm talking about is malcolm gladwell host of the revisionist history podcast which he's been doing to rave reviews and large audiences for

1:58 years he's written multiple books been on the new york times bestseller multiple times as a public speaker he does a lot of stuff and you know in the last hardcore history addendum show we got out was in july so i mean there's a little bit of a contrast there um but regardless when you get a chance to talk to somebody um who is a big important person in your narrow little field um well too good to pass up and malcolm's coming on the show today to talk about the new book the bomber mafia a dream a temptation and the longest night of the second world war uh i read the whole thing i only was going to give it enough time to skim because you know working on the sixth part of a six-part series uh and it sucked me right in which i may have told him in the interview but it's the absolute truth and if the pdf can do that to me i can only imagine what um you know a man who makes a living telling stories in an

2:50 audio venue anyway i mean it's got to be much better so uh check out the interview and by all means uh check out the bomber mafia if you like the second world war or just even that weird question about how uh relatively cultural and genteel countries at least in terms of how they were willing to treat you know other advanced countries uh went from thinking something like bombing human beings in cities was abhorrent awful never to be attempted behavior into you know in like four or five years people who thought that this was the proper way to win a war it's fascinating and uh malcolm gladwell delves into it and uh we talked to him right now so let me first tell you that my intention originally because like most history podcasters i have a huge reading list that i'm perpetually behind on and i was planning on just skimming this and then letting you tell me about it but i got sucked in by the quality of the writing and the

3:52 fascinating aspect of the story which is something that we've been interested to hear in in forever i mean i've done hours and hours and hours after the uh on some of the basic trade-offs that you talk about where morality and warfare sort of uh come into contact with each other so i thought i'd ask you since the title of the book is the bomber mafia maybe we can start by by you explaining to to the listeners what the bomber mafia is and what it means the obama mafia were a group of uh pilots um airmen um who were at maxwell air force base in just outside of montgomery alabama in the 1930s and they were um they were uh fat on the faculty of what was called the aircourt tactical school so this is basically the training ground for officers for uh in the air corps in the before the second world war and the bomber mafia were a group who became convinced they could reform modern war um through the use of bombers through

5:00 the use specifically a precision bombing they felt that if you could drop a bomb exactly where you wanted to drop a bomb then all of a sudden every other element of uh traditional warfare became obsolete you wouldn't need armies you wouldn't need navies you wouldn't need anything except for bombers and they pursued this idea that first of all they sketched it out in the 1930s and pursued it well into the second world war and my book is a story of that ultimately failed uh pursuit of this particular dream about how to remake war now this was part of an intellectual tradition amongst airmen that that goes far before the second world war i mean you know duets command of the air uh happens almost almost at the same time the wright brothers are putting planes in the sky so this concept of using air power as not just a way to change warfare but maybe as a more humane development to warfare was

6:07 something that was pinging the one thing i didn't see in the book and i was curious about it was was was there any intellectual contact between the theorists in the bomber mafia and uh and other air theorists who weren't american really interesting question which i put to some of the historians of bayer university and the short answer is we don't really know um and the oh it doesn't seem like there was a lot it seemed like a very much because remember there's a slight difference in the um uh in the emphasis of what deway was talking about and what the bomber mafia were talking about the bomber mafia were really caught up in the notion of precision bombing so they they weren't simply believers in air power they thought that they were believers in a particular application of air power which is this idea that you could do pinpoint bombing so they were sort of they felt that they were departing quite

7:09 dramatically from uh kind of conventional air powered doctrine at the time so they didn't you know what deway believed was he was part of the group that believed and you know i'm sure you know more about this than me that you know the bomber would always get through that that uh bombers could fly so high and so fast and we're so um imperturbable in the face of anti-aircraft fire and and um um you know planes uh coming to attack them that they represented a kind of unstoppable force in warfare the bar mafia took that one step further and they said all of that is true and if we can put them on wherever we want then we really can rule the air because not only can we get through but we can we can we can um uh we can debilitate the enemy with just the barest minimum of planes and bombs that's the kind of crucial element of their thinking and i was looking at stuff from some of the um early 20th century arms limitation

8:17 treaties and rules of war stuff hague convention those sorts of things and even back then the americans were making sure that there were loopholes carved into uh the rules and restrictions on these brand new weapon systems known as bombers and airplanes to allow for precision bombing so it seems like from the very roots of the american intellectual tradition that precision bombing uh question has been something that's been on their minds yeah so this is they're very much the vera mafia is very much in the spirit of amer american military thinking going back to the revolutionary war right there's always been this belief in american military doctrine that technology um uh offers a set of opportunities and advantages um uh over traditional in you know over the kind of status quo um so they're in that they're very much um caught up in that notion that um the technology could be the savior of

9:18 the military uh mission um that doesn't you know that's um it's an odd thing because you know they they're the most american of of um military strategists but they still at the end find themselves on the outside looking in uh to the american war effort i mean they're they start out as the most american of americans and then you know what happens by the end of the war is they're not they're no longer in charge of our war effort they're they're um not outcasts exactly but they're pushed to the side you know i wrote down a little uh synopsis of i was trying to figure out a good one paragraph way to describe what the book sort of explains and one of the versions i have here said it's the story of how the u.s got to the point where it was burning down all of japan's major cities when the original idea amongst u.s aviation theorists was specifically to avoid that outcome does that sound like a description of

10:15 what you were explaining yeah exactly i mean they begin the war thinking that the british idea of area bombing was was monstrous you know that in the early days of the of the european air war you know the americans regarded what bomber harris was doing with the with the raf as a kind of act of moral barbarousness i mean they were appalled by what the british intended to do over europe and they they always had this idea that they were engaged in a much more um morally upright uh mission that the british wanted to bomb everything excited the americans like no no no we'll go in by day we'll pick our targets and you know we'll avoid civilian casualties as much as possible um we'll leave the cities intact we'll just take out the bridges or we'll just take out the power plants or we'll just take out the most militarily significant targets and so they have this like they never they explicitly think they are trying to

11:18 avoid this indiscriminate use of of of of uh a bombing of air power and yet by the end of the war they're the worst defenders i mean it's and by the way the nuclear bomb at the end of the war is the ultimate expression of the very idea they were trying to defeat i mean it's sort of the ironies here are just kind of overwhelming yeah i love that that's why that's why the subject originally when i saw the title of the book i thought this is going to be a book about heavy bombers and all that i'm not all that interested in heavy bombers and then when i got into it and realized no this is about the the moral overtones and how people can set out on one course and end up on another and that to me is in my wheelhouse so i found it fascinating what you wrote and so it started getting me thinking about things like the various um time period we're talking about here where so much of this stuff is

12:07 theoretical so you mentioned british area bombing i mean to give the british some credit nobody really knew how you used these vast fleets of airships and what they were capable of and i mean you spend quite a bit of time on the norton bomb site and how much of a difference that makes in allowing people to have a theory of precision bombing that maybe makes some sense right if you have this great uh uh targeting weapon then maybe you can actually hit what did you say a pickle barrel from 30 000 feet or whatever so talk to us a little bit about the norton bomb side and maybe the weapon system of the b-29 superfortress and how these things were were intended to work together to create a sort of an american uh a bombing approach if you will from the beginning when the barber mafia first conducting these kind of seminars and um brainstorming and at maxwell in the 1930s what they're thinking of is entirely

13:02 hypothetical so the b-29 is still a kind of you know it's not even it hasn't even been imagined yet but they have this notion in their head of a bomber that could fly really fast and really high um and that could be you know well outside of the range of of um enemy anti-aircraft fire um and much faster than any um uh you know um enemy fighter jet any enemy fighter plane that might intercept it the second thing that they hypothesize is they they strongly believe there will be a way to drop to solve the physics problem of how you drama drop a bomb accurately from 25 000 feet or 20 000 feet um they don't know how to do it yet but they have this kind of native confidence that by the time war actually breaks out we will solve that physics problem and sure enough um there is this top secret uh army project that's launched in the late 1930s with this legendary adventure called carl norton um to resolve that issue to figure out how

14:11 to do it and you know the northern bomb site which is now kind of famous device from the second world war was this um uh was kind of comes online um right at the time that the bomber mafia is kind of fighting to make their dream real so they're given they're given two tools at the outbreak of the or actually not the outbreak but in the middle of the second world war um that can that allow them to think that their dream can be made real one is one is they finally get to be 29. um which is you know such a uh an advancement over the previous generation um what really makes you think that you can hit anything from anywhere because the range is so extraordinary and the sophistication of it is a step beyond the b17 um the second thing is like they get the northern bomb site and they you know norden who is this brilliant inventor convinces the military brass that with the aid of this incredibly

15:14 intricate analog computer that he has invented you really can hit whatever target you want to hit from 20 25 000 feet i mean he convinces them that is no longer simply a kind of dream but rather a reality and armed with those two things the plane that finally meets their specifications and the bomb site that allows them to make they think precision bombing a reality they think there's nothing stopping the american air force they think oh we can win now right like we can go we can go over germany and then we can go over japan and we can just you know we could pick off whatever militarily significant targets we want and there's nothing they're going to be powerless to to do anything about it so there's this kind of moment of extraordinary unguarded optimism um in you know 4041 in that in that in that window early in the war when the air force thinks oh we've we've got the tools now to make this

16:20 happen i'm trying to think about you know and this is these are the unanswerables like if you could go to the american public or the president of the united states or even maybe the heads of the military uh in the mid 1930s so a few years before the second world war breaks out and you could have told them uh we're going to use our air force to completely level the cities of our enemies i wonder how the reaction would have been different than if you'd had that same conversation at the end of the second world war in 1945 so the difference in in what the the combination of the evilness of the war and you know as everyone likes to point out to me the fact that the uh uh the axis powers were bombing people too um so so is there a way to compare and contrast the attitudes the pre-war attitudes of of of a people that if you had shown them photos of what was going to happen to germany and japan

17:15 because of the bombing attacks um i guess what i'm trying to get to is is the change in the mentality do you think 1930s united states public opinion would have supported something like this i'm trying to get to the point where we go from a place where in even like if we look at the bomber mafia people they would have been appalled if you'd shown them what what their weapon systems were going to do and yet after the second world war we really didn't go back to okay this was a one-off an outlier we're going to go back to the idea that you don't bomb cities anymore instead we started targeting um cities with nuclear weapons including multiple nuclear weapons on a lot of cities and moscow was supposed to be hit with like 69 of them at one point um i'm looking i'm in search of a question here no i know exactly what's right i guess the i yeah i'm trying to figure out how the attitude changes and then

18:05 stays changed after we see the results i think there is this thing that happens over the course of the second world war which is this kind of coarsening of uh of of western attitudes and this kind of um uh deterioration in our uh our kind of moral position um i think there is no way at all that the american public would have been comfortable in the 1930s with what we did in 1945 they would have been appalled i mean remember that in in the 1930s where what do we were 20 years out from the end of the first world war which was the first world war was that the kind of the weight of that catastrophe was still heavy on the mind of everyone in the united states in england across europe i mean everyone knew someone who died in that war everyone was aware of the kind of insane futility of that war i mean the the you know these battles that went nowhere the stupidity of the commanders there's just some sour taste in people's

19:21 mouths i think about war and i don't think anyone wanted to repeat that and if you had said to someone in 35 you know we're going to do pretty much what we did in the first world war only instead of having people kill each other on the ground we're just going to burn them to death from the air people would have been appalled when they were not ready for that um they wanted to escape from that that's the whole point of the bomb the battle mafia were many of them were world war one death and that their experience in world war one scarred them i mean like many civilians they were running from that experience we're not as so duplicated i just think after four years as a second world war people just they were so exhausted and so kind of horrified and so um that they were ready to try anything at that point i do i i i agree there's something it is an about faith in the space of 10 years i mean which is kind of remarkable to

20:23 see but um well what the bara mafi was proposing in the 30s was consistent with i think what a lot of americans um would have wanted it was an american bombing policy yes so so that brings us to sort of a crux figure here though that might explain some of this let's talk a little bit about general curtis lemay one of the more interesting american military figures ever and you talk about him quite a bit in your book um let's talk about curtis lemay for a second for people who may have no idea who this guy was what can you tell me if you wanted to give me sort of the boilerplate introduction to air force general curtis lemay uh born into poverty in columbus ohio one of the greatest without question one of the greatest aviators of his generation um he there's almost nothing he couldn't do with an airplane and everyone who was around him realized this he could there's a story about once uh after the schweinster

21:31 the first schweinfur bombing raid um his group uh instead of flying back to england flew on and landed in north africa and they were badly damaged and they're all they're all basically on the desert in morocco or something and lemay like gets out of his plane and starts fixing the b-29 so he could fly them he was hands down in the 30s considered to be the greatest navigator in the air corps he could fix them and then he also many of the most important um tactical innovations of uh of of uh a bombing in the in the second world war were invented by curtis lemay i mean he everything if you were interested in how to effectively bomb the enemy in world war ii the the genius without question of that era was curtis delay so he's this kind of indomitable blunt-spoken um unemotional uh unsentimental um hard bitten you know always always a cigar or a pipe in his mouth um man of incredibly few words there's all

22:48 these hilarious stories about you know he'd sit through a three-hour briefing and later on when he's uh when he is um uh chief of staff of the air force he's briefed on the bay of pigs and you know it's like two hour long presentation and then he just sort of stands up and he just said it won't work and leave that's it i mean like three words um so he's like this he's a kind of really absolutely ruthless but even those who found him um overwhelming or hard to take realized that he was a genius um if he were to compile a list of the you would you would know this much better than me you know the top five combat commanders in any domain in the second world war he's on the list right there's no question about that um you know fill out whatever other ford names you want um so but he is not a member of the obama mafia he's the opposite he he thinks that they're dreamers and that they are out of touch with the

24:01 realities of war and they're you know they're having some kind of grad school debate about morality when what they should be doing is trying to defeat the enemy um so he he he's sort of sitting in the wings and the reason that the united states takes this kind of u-turn in time in terms of of uh of air power policy near the end of the war is that curtis lemay takes them on that u-turn he just has no patience for this kind of what he believes is to be this over-intellectualized rarified theory that with a few carefully chosen and carefully placed bombs you can defeat the enemy he's like nonsense the way you defeat the enemy is by destroying the enemy everybody's got a famous curtis lemay anecdote that they like uh whether they're true or not because the bombing back to the stone age one as you pointed out in in the work and as we did in the podcast was was never said by him but he kind of maybe

25:03 thought he liked it and was okay with it being uh uh uh attributed to him i had one and again no no one knows if any of this is true but supposedly if he didn't like what you were saying and you could be the president of the united states he had a tendency to go into the nearby bathroom leave the door open start doing his business while you were still explaining things to you uh he's a fascinating very colorful character and yet you know he's he's an interesting dichotomy because on one hand he's portrayed as this savage kind of person that would that would target uh enemy cities and enemy populations during the cold war without even blinking and yet when you read a lot of the stuff about him including his own words he comes off like his own like his own version of a duet or a bomber mafia where he's suggesting that that half measures in war end up prolonging the conflict and prolonging the conflict ends up

25:52 increasing the death toll so in effect being horrific uh uh early on and and and intensely might end up being in the long run the less deadly um less uh bloody alternative i mean does he strike you as an interesting character that way oh absolutely i mean i mean one of the things i was very careful to do in the book was i didn't want to take sides i didn't want to make the maya to be either the hero or the villain and i didn't want to make the bomber mafia out to be these kinds of you know um heroic romanticized overly romanticized figures either i thought that two sides were engaged in a the most impossible of arguments right and to your point the renee's position was that the way the most moral way to fight a war is to fight it as savagely as possible because that means it'll be over quicker and when when a war is over quickly it does a lot less damage than when awards prolonged he thought it was all about jiren that

26:59 morality was duration that's what he thought now is that true i don't know we can't do the counter factual i will say that there is something about what lemay did in the summer of 1945 when having burnt tokyo to the ground in the deadliest night of the war in repudiation of the ideas of the baha'i mafia he then proceeds to napalm basically every other city in every other big city in tokyo over the course of the next three four months and there's a point in that kind of you know it's the sherman's march of the air there's a point in that campaign where i think he's he's kind of off his rocker i mean i think i don't think he was he would tell you he's shortening the end of the war but i don't think that if the japanese weren't going to surrender after having their 10 biggest cities burned to the ground they're not going to surrender after having their 50 biggest cities burnt to the ground

28:01 yeah i think he was you know there's i think he sort of i think he created this kind of argument at the end of the day i don't really buy it when it comes to um the fire bombing of japan in the summer of 45. so you bring up the firebombing and this is important to talk about so when i have discussions with people about atomic bomb dropping morality which is one of the classic discussions obviously for the second world war where morality is concerned i find so often that we that we have to have a conversation about the fire bombing first because unless you happen to be uh a second world war aficionado which sounds like a strange thing to say um a fan of the second world war um oftentimes people are unaware of exactly how nasty the firebombing was that was going on and so when when an atomic bomb is dropped they see this as a giant ratcheting up of the experience of the people on the receiving end of these bombs but

29:04 i can't think of anything that's um orders of magnitude worse than what you talk about with the tokyo uh firebombing which may be the worst bombing of all time can you tell us a little bit about it and then then contrast it a little bit with this question of of early atomic weapons because none of us are saying that like thermonuclear weapons today are the equivalent of a firebombing raid but a 1945 atomic bomb versus what curtis lemay could do to you with 100 or 200 b-29s uh with with napalm uh not that dissimilar what can you tell somebody who's maybe not aware of the bombings how they compared is something that they fully understand which is you know a hiroshima or a nagasaki type attack yeah so nippon is invented at harvard in the 1940s early 1940s and explicitly to be used against asian cities because um asian cities were highly flammable right they were the houses were made of you know rice paper and wood and

30:06 they were incredibly close together there were no fire breaks the streets were really narrow asian cities japanese cities were the perfect cities to burn down i mean there were all these calculations done um before the war about you know how if you used fire how much damage could you do to london and the answer is not as much as you think it's a it's a brick city it's got a lot of parks it's got wide streets in many areas you know you can burn some of it down but if you if you get a full-scale attack with incendiary weapons on london you're not going to get that far that's why the you know the germans did not go fully incendiary with london they they used a mix of bombs yeah they tried though they tried they used the mix right whereas if you were attacking a japanese city you didn't have to use conventional explosives the the best way to learn to attack them was to burn them down because they were

31:01 they were just tinder boxes and they it was that was recognized in america and napalm was developed in order to burn down japanese cities and the person who the the bomber mafia were given napalm and we're told use it and hayward hansel who was uh one of the key bomber mafia um uh leaders who was in charge of the um 21st bomber command which was the bomb command that had its the responsibility of bombing japan from uh from the marianas from guam and the air force bases on guam and taipan and uh tinian um really wouldn't use it he didn't think he thought it was immoral um and then uh lemay comes in takes over the command from hensel and decides he's going to go whole hog on napalm and in march of 45 he launches this infamous attack on tokyo where he just sends hundreds of b-29s with tons and tons of napon and he burns out what is it 16 square miles of tokyo in one night um kills we're not sure how many

32:12 probably close to 100 000 people in one night burns them to death really um if you were on the ground in the part of tokyo of east tokyo that lemay bombed that night in march of 45 i don't think you would uh detect a distinction between what it uh between that experience and the experience of being on the ground in hiroshima or nagasaki um in august of that same year i don't think it feels any different to be bombed with a nuclear bomb that summer or to be bombed with napalm there's a case of made that napalm was worse um i was just gonna say that you don't you don't have any blast at least casualties it's all burned up it's all burned down it's and the stories are if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of this you want to compare survivor accounts from tokyo in march and hiroshima in august and i found that i found the march napalm survivor accounts to be more horrifying i really did

33:15 um so it's yeah there's this you're right there is this kind of we have a sense that the you know the moral the real moral um horror was uh the atomic bomb in august and now that's just not true um and also we dropped two atomic bombs uh lemay bomb 66 japanese cities between march and august to 45 66 including a couple afterwards let's not forget the couple after that i mean like there's just no there is no comparison if you want to get on a moral high horse about american air power in the second world war in the japanese theater pacific theater it's lemay who you should be focused on not the decision to drop nuclear weapons what i always tell people uh is that have we not dropped new nuclear weapons and i'm not i'm not defending that policy but have we not done it the fire bombing was just going to continue it wasn't going to spare anybody anything um so so if i i was trying to imagine uh the

34:23 difference between and and you may be able to address this better than i can that so in in europe during the bombing of german cities when either from the german perspective you got very unlucky or the allied bombing perspective you got very lucky you created the conditions that were known as a firestorm um what's the difference between a dresden or a hamburg firestorm and and the firebombings in japan because i'm not clear on it yeah um no i will i will preface this by saying that um i am not an expert on the fire bombing of president um my understanding is simply that the difference would be the scale of the first of all tokyo is a good deal larger and more densely populated than dresden is and two because the city is so much more flammable that you're going to get the fires is going to be a lot more intense and then the what i don't know but i strongly suspect as well that um uh that there were many many many

35:28 more v29s engaged over tokyo um then bombers engaged over i think the scale of the attack is bigger and then there's also these weird things that you know quite a um by by awful coincidence the night of the bombing campaign over tokyo um it's it's already a windy night so you know you as you were alluding to when you drop a lot of fire bombs you create this autumn this kind of um artificial wind system um this this uh firestorm which is a kind of rolling ball of fire which consumes everything in its path and so it naturally creates its own kind of um momentum and field of air rushing forward but if you've got a if it's a windy day it's going to be a lot worse well it just so happened to be a windy day that night in um in tokyo so it's like there's a lot of things going on but some combination of those factors i think makes uh makes tokyo even more horrific than dresden that's by the way saying a lot something

36:34 was not a walk in the park no hamburg either and those were a thousand bombers over hamburg i think crazy numbers so so something i learned in your book that i found fascinating and i wonder if you have an opinion as to why this might be but but you were talking about how you were trying to locate a museum or a memorial to the firebombing victims considering that it's probably the most uh destructive uh aerial raid in history and yet i think you had said you it was some non-descript building that looked like you'd come out of like a little medical facility why is there no extra attention paid to this on the japanese side of things um when one would look at this and just say the scale alone would seem to merit uh memorials or remembrances or or or more um conferences or whatnot on this sort of thing i mean it's a really good question i don't have a good answer um yeah the only real monument to that

37:31 night is this little private museum in a in a kind of you know small little office building i say it looks like a dentist office on a side street in east tokyo it's like so far from the museum to the most horrific night in the history of japan is nowhere near all the other museums in tokyo it's like i said it's a little um i think there is uh i mean maybe it's just a desire to move on to but they very i mean remember the japanese after the war gave bestowed one of the highest honors civilian honors that can be bestowed on a foreigner by the japanese government on curtis lemay ostensibly was for his help in rebuilding the japanese air force but think about it a guy orders a an attack on your capital city in which 100 000 people die under the most horrific circumstances imaginable and you turn around and 10 years later you're giving him the highest award that can be given to a foreigner in your country

38:40 that suggests to me a kind of willingness eagerness to put the war behind them i mean i just don't think there was any desire uh to dwell on that last six months of the conflict um you know it just wasn't i don't know i sort of and part of me part of me agrees with it i mean sometimes there's just things like where i did a podcast episode for my um podcast revisions history last season on the 911 memorial and i at the end of it was i have some real misgivings about that memorial i i think on some level it's inappropriate um so memorials are tricky things like this they're legitimate reasons not to memorialize perfect gift events you know i i think it's sort of up to the individual country or city or um so yeah that was their choice their choice was to move on you know as i was looking at um curtis lemay he reminded me of a lot of other wartime leaders of the sort that somebody might argue you know when

39:59 war happens and it gets really dirty and bloody these are the kind of men you need right the ones who will do whatever it takes but what's interesting is obviously people like that um you know you think of a george patton right but george patton dies right after the second world war is over so you don't have patton in charge of cold war policy right but you have um you have lemay in charge of strategic air command and all the people who are deciding how the next war right the third world war is going to be fought and uh i when we did the podcast on um on the early history of nuclear weapons i used a little bit of the x-com tapes you know the secret tapes that john f kennedy made during the deliberations over the cuban missile crisis that that only his brother knew were being made so it's a secret taping system where guys like lemay in conversation are being taped and lemay didn't even have a problem

40:51 taking a shot at jack kennedy's dad during the cuban missile crisis i mean who has the who has the guts to do that um is there a difference between having a guy like lemay who you need in wartime the way you might need a patent or any one of these other um people who might who might be different figures and might be seen differently in peacetime versus wartime i mean how much are we still living with the decisions and the systems and the assumptions and all those sorts of things that lemay in 20 years or something of of running the post second world war american um um air operations how much is is are we living with general lemay's uh attitudes and and what not today even with the legacy of his targeting and his attitudes uh really interesting question i i actually you know i i am i only know what i know you know i haven't anywhere near your knowledge and background no no don't play that game because

41:49 you're assuming i know more than i know no i will say this in the course of reporting this book i talk to many people who are uh currently in the air force quite not some of them quite i mean i had a long conversation with both the previous chief of staff the air force and the current chiefs after the air first um and then a number of air force historians and i have to say i was uh overwhelmed at the kind of moral sophistication of their and strategic sophistication of their thinking um we've come a long way from curtis may um these are people who you know lumay had a series of ideas that made him in peacetime to be quite problematic one was this idea of the primacy of the air force that he you know he's not really interested in the other services when he's running the strategic air command he thinks he's the show he thinks you can win vietnam from the air i mean you know i'm not a military person but i

42:53 know enough to know that that's nonsense you can't you can't win you could not win the vietnam war from the air right that's that's a textbook example of a war that cannot be run from the air and you know korea what what the air force does in korea i think within with it with the spirit of curtis the mayor that much in mind is appalling i mean they they pull the same trick in korea they napalm everything in sight um they reduce there's a moment in the korean war that where they run out of targets they have burned the ground everything that can be burned to the ground nothing's left right that's like and they thought they could win the korean war from the air and they couldn't so there's a kind of lemay takes his what he interprets as his success in the second world war and he thinks that it applies to all future conflicts and he's solely mistaken and i don't think the current leadership

43:53 of the air force um is in the grip of that illusion they are very conscious of the limitations of air power and very aware of their need to coordinate with the other branches in order to wage effective war so um i don't think the legacy of i think if anything it's the bomber mafia whose legacy kind of looms over the contemporary air force not curse the way i was just gonna go there and i was going to ask whether or not you thought that maybe the bomber mafia and people like it in other aerial uh uh theory groups if they weren't just ahead of their time and they were just waiting for the technology to catch up because in the vietnam war you use your uh you you have your first so-called smart bombs you know near the end of the war that are taking out bridges and whatnot and then of course you see what happens in the in the early gulf war type stuff i mean is this a case where we can finally almost hit

44:50 a pickle barrel from 30 000 feet and does that make the bomber mafia's assumptions um more apropos today than they were at the time yes so the bottom off here i mean they were just they were 50 years too early 60 years too early i mean now we really can't do what they dread they're doing in nashville air force base in the 1930s oh my i had a drinks one night when i was reporting my book uh in the backyard of the chief of staff of the old team staff of the air force at what's called the air house in fort myer just across the river from washington dc and all these top air force guys were there and they were talking about this very point and they were comparing um korea to vietnam to the gulf war to the present day and their point was like you know in the korean war or the second world war if you wanted to take a there's a row of houses along the street where the chairman of the joint chiefs lives and

45:51 the vice chairs of joint chiefs lives and the chief of staff at the airport so there's all these kind of hot military hotshots and they were like if you want to take out this row of houses in the second world war you would have come with i forgot you know a whole fleet of bombers because most of the bombs aren't going to hit it right you and you're going to have to level if you want to like take out this gathering in the backyard you're going to have to level the whole street because there's no way you can be sure you can just take that up and then they walk me through each war since then and each way you get better and better and better you need fewer and fewer bombers and then they said then today you know they could take out one of us just sitting around this little like you know sitting in the backyard and we wouldn't even know we wouldn't even hear the bomb coming like that's how good they're

46:41 not here now like they can take out a guy inside a room if they want um so yeah that's what the bomber and mafia dream dreamt up in 35 they were they were 60 years too early 70 years too early i was having i was having a conversation i didn't mean to interrupt you i'm sorry i was having a conversation with somebody we were talking about what made the first world war a kind of unique experience and it revolved around some of the same stuff because we were talking about the overriding uh experience that is so overwhelming when you read about it and so impossible to imagine of being under the kind of artillery fire that was common in the first world war and the guys said to me we're never going to see artillery fire like that again because it was a function of the lack of accuracy that you had to have so many guns trying to take out stuff he goes today you would have one gun and it would maybe miss once but it might not miss

47:31 once and then it would take out the target on the second hit you didn't need a thousand artillery pieces to neutralize something even in the second world war only the soviets were using the same number of pieces uh uh in in terms of trying to knock something out it was already the accuracy had already made first world war artillery numbers uh a moot point it was almost counterproductive at that point so let me ask let me ask this about the you know because i always feel so sorry for these guys who were ahead of their time or trying to take the moral high ground you know and figure out a way to make war less terrible what happened reputationally and career-wise to all these guys who curtis lemay sort of shoved aside in his in his desire to be more efficient and get the job done did those guys end their days in sort of obscurity or were they considered to be failures or what happened to the guy who chose the moral

48:20 high ground in the end well it's lemay who becomes first head of the strategic air command and then the chief of staff of the air force none of the bomber mafia you know keep rising in the ranks they're they're shunted aside haywood hansel who's a kind of i portrayed my book at the as really the kind of spiritual leader of the bomber mafia he his career is over you know lemay forces him out of the 21st bomber command in january of 45 and he goes back to a training facility in phoenix and then he's done spends the rest of his life showing up every now and again for seminars at the air force academy um and you can go down the list these guys did they did not have a good war you know to use that phrase that um they were they were the um they were the proponents of what was considered to be a failed strategy um so yeah they paid the price for this for being too early they weren't they were not held up

49:31 until today they were not held up as pioneers they were held up as they were considered to be values so i was gonna i was gonna ask you what those uh what those air force folk that you were having drinks with today who were going over the different wars and comparing and contrasting them what would did they have an opinion one way or the other on those guys on the bomber mafia guys and and and in other words has the long-term reputation uh been restored to some degree or or or are those guys i mean i guess i'm trying to figure out if i was at the get together with him i would say well what do you think of those guys did they give you any impressions i think they understand i think they have enormous respect for what the bomber mafia did i mean they planted the seed that that resulted in uh the kind of air power we have today right this emphasis on precision which is defined um air strategy for the last generation

50:26 is it's the residue of the bomber mafia the little kernel planted by the bomber mafia um back in the 1930s so they have enormous respect i think they're also you know i remember um uh when i was hanging out with all these air force guys they're you know they're obsessed with gps and there's a guy and i forgot his thing you probably know his name there's a guy who's considered to be the kind of father of modern gps who worked very very closely with the air force and all of these guys are like oh you gotta go talk to him you gotta thought you gotta do this thing on this guy you know the kind of reverence for somebody who finally gave them the technology that allowed for true precision um was i mean it was beautiful see you know like this idea this guy who they were talking about wasn't a military guy he was just uh he's like he was like a nerdy little techie guy off in middle of nowhere who broke the code and

51:30 figured out how to harness this particular technology for their purposes and they revered him so i i think and when i was chatting when i was at the air university talking to all these air historians ifr historians they absolutely um you know these they spoke of the bomber mafia like they had known them personally i mean that's how closely they had studied and how much they admired them you know it strikes me that one could say potentially that we're in a similar period now to uh the way things were before the first world war and the way things were before the second world war where the entire uh intellectual and philosophical framework for we'll just take the air force now because that's what we're talking about but you could say the same thing about uh the ground services or the naval services uh we're in a situation where there has not been a war fought between the major powers in a very long time we've had multiple

52:32 generations of weapon systems come and go since the last time those weapon systems were used against people of of similar capabilities i wonder if many of the things that are taken as gospel today would be seen are going to be are going to be shown to be failed experiments or dead ends philosophically speaking when when the u.s is god forbid but when the us is fighting um powers of of like capabilities or similar or close to like you know you fight a china you fight a russia you fight a russia and china together maybe you find out that some of the things that were working so well in an iraq situation or a syria situation or nicaragua situation with manuel noriega um don't work as well when there are counter measures um that's not a question that's just an observation so let me let me ask you we're running out of time here i'm curious what was your favorite aspect of the book that when that when you wrote it you've thought

53:25 about it several times since and you keep going back to is there anything in there that just keeps striking you um well actually before i ask a question i wanted to i wanted to respond to your comment because i think you're yeah comment it was no question sure no no it's really really really really on point i mean think about the application of artificial intelligence systems towards oh yeah i mean that's there is out there okay that's number one like you don't think that's gonna render an entire way of thinking about war obsolete overnight what if china builds in you know uh full-scale ai into their uh military systems you know no human in the loop ai you you throw all of your deterrence theory out the window at that point um so that would be yeah i think we are absolutely on the cusp of another kind of revolution like that um but answer what do i return to i returned to just tip it to the fact these guys had a

54:28 dream you know they're not in a profession that we think of as full of dreamers you don't think of military guys as being attached to some romantic notion um and it's useful to be reminded that in fact that happens all the time that that world is as full of people who um are willing to kind of um think boldly and imaginatively and creatively and courageously about the way they do what they do you know i i think it's a common and damaging and insulting this conception that military people are bloodthirsty and are kind of you know lack humanity on some level that that's why they're doing the job they do i think the opposite is true that that's a world that's filled with people who are as passionate about their kind of moral commitments as anyone else's as school teachers or as pastors or you know it's um they have just chosen to operate in a maybe they have because of those moral commitments

55:43 have chosen to operate in the world that they feel badly needs them right that was the thing about the bomber mafia they looked at the military world and they said they need us they need people who consider the kind of broader picture here and that's still true today that is still true today you know when you mention that i can't help but think of the whole civilian slash scientific apparatus that arose after the second world war it seemed like it didn't exist that these that these groups that would later become like to name just one like the rand group right um that those were only within military circles back before the second world war and then it became almost a giant um i mean today we have darpa and all those kind of things i mean to me that seems almost like the inheritors of these small group of theorists that were once upon a time um just part of the little military cabal does it seem like they're natural

56:38 inheritors to that yeah it's interesting you know it's funny it's like there's a kind of i think it's legitimate to say that there's a period in um modern warfare when the military is not home to the best and the brightest i mean you look at the british military leadership in the first world war some of the divorce previous that these are not genie they're not the geniuses aren't the generals there's some pretty des it's a pretty dissaltery group um the if you were if you were a brilliant young mind in england in 1914 you did not go into the army you went to oxford and you studied physics or whatever you did um and what happens is that world war ii in particular makes the military shape again for the for the intellectually curious and for the and then with in the post-war world you know organizations like rand it goes one step further and you you have legit geniuses who are joining you know the

57:44 kind of broader war effort um you know the rand guys are the smartest people in the room that's the whole point right that's it that's super interesting to me um that kind of revolution where and i think it's appropriate that um to find its mind some of the finest minds you know reside in the military world because this war is just about the hardest problem we have to tackle as a society what did fred kaplan call those people the wizards of armageddon right i love that book i read that book when i was reporting mine i was like oh my i couldn't i was like it was just a delight that broke all this great book just reading about those guys when they were kids and the you know the re the remembering the phone books and so i mean these guys they were crazy intelligence so how can people get their hands on this it's a little unusual so i read the pdf but this is an audio book right so there's two things there is you can

58:43 get the audiobook just by going to bombermafia.com and you can download it directly from my company which is called pushkin industries um there's also a print version um published by little brown that'll be available wherever books are available starting april 27th so i um both are wonderful experiences the audiobook is not a normal audiobook it is not me reading the book it is a fully produced so you know when second podcast when when we talk about curtis to may you hear curtis clement when we talk about hayward hansel you hear howard hansel when we talk about the bombing of tokyo you hear the bombing of tokyo i mean it's a full-on you know everyone i talk to you will hear their voice so it's a really uh quite a remarkable um if you're into audiobooks i would i would definitely recommend you take that route here what a fantastic way to approach it uh malcolm gladwell thank you so much for

59:38 coming on the program i wish you a ton of success with this latest book of yours uh it sucked me right in i had a great time reading it and it's as you pointed out one of those subjects that is truly worth a little contemplation on all of our parts because what's the old line from was it leon trotsky you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you yeah yeah no thank you so much and i have to say i should i'd be remiss if i did not say that um i am one of your biggest fans so this is a a thrill and a half to be invited on the i kind of couldn't believe it when i saw i was like wait a second i get to go i that's like that so i'm i'm over the moon so i'm thank you so much for inviting me what's up what's so strange is that to be a history podcaster and to have colleagues who are history podcasters i i remember so well trying to explain to people what a podcast was and now now we have history

1:00:25 podcaster um colleagues so thank you so much for coming on the program your success is uh is exhilarating for the whole genre that was a lot of fun my thanks to malcolm gladwell for coming on the program you know he's he's one of the few people that could have offered to come on that would have made me talk about a second world war topic when that's all we've been talking about for a long time now but the book's great the bomber mafia um he writes if you get the text version he's got a very clear style and i kind of noticed he writes like he speaks which for me made the story that much more engrossing knowing what i know now though i would have downloaded the audiobook version and you should too cause with the natural sound and the speeches i mean that's the way to go be like his podcast right you want to do that there's a reason it's so popular so thanks to malcolm gladwell for coming on

1:01:15 the show uh as far as we go we're still working on it folks that's all i can do all i can ever say we're still working on it it's going to be a long one though i can tell you that i can tell already um and we'll maybe try to get some more interview shows out there's something out in the interim like this um the interview shows are easy uh the ones that we want to do sometimes to mix in with them are like mini hardcore history shows and i find that i end up stopping work on the main show if i do that so i know you'd all rather have me get the big show out so i'm working on that we'll see about setting up some more interviews thank you for your patience your support and um you know everything else always so grateful i'll hopefully talk to you soon

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP13 Gladwell and the Bomber Mafia"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Malcolm Gladwell (Guest).

What is "EP13 Gladwell and the Bomber Mafia" about?

The content explores the intersection of history and storytelling as the host engages with Malcolm Gladwell, discussing his latest work, which delves into World War II and its cultural implications. The conversation emphasizes the significance of narrative in understanding historical events and highlights Gladwell's unique approach to sharing these stories through various mediums.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

10 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including World War II, Malcolm Gladwell, Curtis LeMay, B-29 Superfortress, Norden Bombsight, Hiroshima. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP13 Gladwell and the Bomber Mafia"?

The episode runs 1 h 2 min; the transcript is about 10,853 words in 61 timestamped sections.

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